The Election

Be of good cheer!

Colin Welch

'Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide In the strife of truth and falsehood for the good or evil side.'

The stirring words of Lowell — no, no not Robert, but the great and good James Russell — come to my mind at every

election. They thus present difficulties. If only 'once to every man and nation', why

then at every election? It is a virtue of a pro-

perly functioning democracy that it offers not one moment for decision but many, one after another. You got it wrong last time or this; you can get it right this time or next. Opportunity for amendment, for second thoughts, is supposed to recur. Again, Lowell speaks unequivocally of truth and falsehood, good and evil. Does he not over- simplify? Perhaps he does; perhaps he did at- the time of writing. Mrs Thatcher truth' and goodness? Mr Foot, or Messrs Jenkins and Steel, falsehood and evil? Even my suburban majors gag at such crude charac- terisation.

This conceded, may I point to what is not absurd in Lowell's lines? First, it is not true that democracy always gives time and opportunity for amendment and correction of error. It may give them again and again, so that we take them for granted. Yet sud- denly, sooner or later, without warning, it may confront us with a choice which, if we choose wrongly, will steal from us the chance to make good our mistake and even to choose freely again.

It may be difficult to recognise this mo- ment of choice when it comes. Some of us make fools of ourselves by crying 'wolf!' at every parish council election; others, like many Germans perhaps in 1933, take the wolf for a lapdog even when it is foaming in the house. The choice may not be clearly presented to us. The Labour Party in this election campaign has threatened many freedoms — indeed, all the freedoms I can readily think of — but only in the name of other freedoms designed to seem far more extensive, 'positive', 'participatory' and ac- cessible to all. The snag is that the freedoms to be taken away are real and existing while those to supersede and replace them, though often promised, have never existed on this earth, and wise men have offered good reasons why they never can. We in our turn would thus be faced with eggs galore broken but no omelette, our solid pudding filched and the promised pie still in the sky.

Nor is it necessary even to threaten freedoms to endanger or extinguish them. Mere incapacity, perversity, profligacy, carelessness, broken promises, shattered hopes and false dogmas, bringing in their train inflation, want, joblessness and na-

tional bankruptcy, can without specific evil intent create a state of affairs in which freedoms may seem luxuries, talk of them pure dilettantism, the case for their sup- pression to deal with the emergency unanswerable (though it never is). All these grim possibilities the Labour Left has repeatedly by implication offered. At past elections, however, it was possible to hope that the Labour moderates and the interna- tional brokers' men would intervene in due course to prevent disaster. Labour govern- ments are usually not slow to get into an unholy mess. This has given the moderates their traditional chance to rat and renege, with shameless bad faith, on whatever silly promises produced the mess and to govern thereafter not well, liberally or skilfully with the grain, for that is not in their nature, but with a dull, stupid and op- pressive sub-competence which, though at- tractive neither to Left or Right, serves to preserve something from the wreck. They have thus left behind them a situation still open to correction and amendment, not easy but possible — yes, even in 1979.

But before this election the Left had seiz- ed control of Labour, the moderates had by their feeble concessions forfeited all credibility and, whether victorious or not, Labour is at least for a time to be dom- inated intellectually and' numerically by Marxists, i.e., by catastrophists who regard catastrophe as the midwife of the hideous society they desire. Give them power, and all the quicker would come the mess, to be greeted this time not by the usual surprise, alarm, resentment and search for scape- goats, the usual abrupt halts and sullen shuffling withdrawals, but rather with glee as a welcome stage on the road to full socialism, i.e., to the extinction of liberty and the end of British history as hitherto understood and revered.

It is always wise to treat every election as if Lowell were right, as if we had but one moment to decide, and this is it. Never was it more imperative than at this election, a real Lowell election if you like, when the wrong decision might clearly be our last in freedom.

I am having trouble with my tenses. This is because I am writing before the election to be read, if at all, by some who have not yet done their electoral stuff and others who have. When Irish women got the vote one old lady, asked on a tram if she had voted, replied, 'Indeed I have, and it was lovely.' Like our swiftly moving British depressions, the Spectator inundates dif- ferent regions at different times, some on polling day, some later. Some of you will have known the Irish lady's supreme haP- epxinpesersie, noetehers will be looking forward to the My guess must be that you have achiev- . ed, or are about to achieve (or have failed or are about to fail or prevent) Mrs That- cher's return with a handsome majoritY, perhaps even the landslide she requested. If you are pleased, should this satisfaction me tempered with dire misgivings, as many id dithering 'moderate' persons have sug- gested it should? I think not. My message is, be of good cheer! First, if my guess is right, you have Pot where rMe a it r xhi es ltosnkgesl taonnd bt uarcnke di in the ht he ek cup p. bGooasrj for you! Secondly, forget all that Alliance guff about a Thatcher landslide meaning chaos and old night, with universal dark- ness burying all. If you have not inadver: tently destroyed the Social Democratic hall of it (and it is a big 'if, I agree), you may in fact have done the Alliance a tremendously good turn, as I'm sure in their hearts they know well — at least in the hearts of those who have got back. They couldn't he] be eg.; pected during the campaign to order t own supporters to give Maggie a good ma: jority. They might not have had etiong.r; MPs left to reap the reward. But Cecil Parkinson has said what they could not' that Tories and Alliance do share a corn smtiotuntoedb.jective, the destruction or emascula- tion of the Labour Party as at present con- My next guess is that as a result of defeat Labour will either vigorously reform itself' so that it becomes again something which Social Social Democrats (or even the deca .s liberals of today) could join or rejoitig without shame, or that more of its survivi quasi-respectable members will defectent.o_ the Alliance, leaving behind a bitter, rest tti.. ful and pretty hopeless Marxist rump, toss producing one way or another an oPPrris_'. tion tolerable to many if not exactlfy tothesee What's wrong with either o

developments? If you helped to another ortre or other about, well done!

Possible misgivings remain• Will Mrs Thatcher, backed and vindicated by big nmoawj ogroityb,erfsreeerkd?awt liallssthferosamckala w

all restra

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surround herself with yes-men, bomb Russia, proudly flourish secret manifestoes designed to destroy the unions and the welfare state and to hit the old, the sick, the disabled, the unemployed and the kiddies for six? I think not. People who have not yet discerned the cautious moderation which underlies her rhapsodic rhetoric cannot be very discern- Ing. No conceivable changes in her cabinet could reduce it to yes-men. Those members most likely to go are distinguished less for articulate, persuasive, well-argued and prin- cipled dissent than for a sort of obstinate, surreptitious, even sly obstructionism, which defends the discredited more by im- plication and innuendo than by reasoned debate. Nor are those members who are Ilk* to remain (or to be newly recruited) yes-men. They disagree with each other on many issues, with her too: no conformity is enforced. Whatever you may think of Mr Tebbit, say, or Sir Geoffrey Howe, they are not yes-men but their own men. Mrs Thatcher's own character is imper-

ious and dominating, certain in Mr Healey's spotted judgment to produce a one-woman dictatorship. He has failed to notice what she is imperious and dominating about, which is the resolute maintenance and enlargement of freedom, the vigorous defence of the open society against its enemies. It should be a matter for con- gratulation and reassurance rather than mumbled misgivings that parliamentary democracy can still from time to time pro- duce and send to the top decisive and forceful characters of this sort. Is it serious- ly to be argued that freedom and the rule of law are best guarded and enhanced by dwarfs and defeatists cowards and com- promisers, place-men and procrastinators, by those who always prefer a deal — any deal — to a fight — any fight, by all those re- soundingly denounced by Alan Clark in a letter to the Sunday Telegraph? I'm sure not.

If my guesses are right, we can count ourselves lucky. We have even deserved to be!