Answering Utopia
By T. E. UTLEY How many of the Tory devout now assembled at Blackpool are secretly har- bouring the thought that nothing would do their faith more good than a spell of persecution? How many of them are allowing their minds to linger comfortingly on the proposition that in the long run there could be no better reply to Wilsonian Socialism than to return Wilson to power?
My guess and my hope is that the answer is, very few indeed. It is the nature of political parties to seek power; once that impulse has ceased to operate, they have ceased to perform the only function which renders their existence tolerable. A party which thus retired from the battleground of politics could have no reason- able expectation of being summoned back.
Nothing could be clearer than that the ulti- mate as well as the immediate future of the Tory Party will be determined in large measure by its demeanour at the next election. What is said and applauded at Blackpool will therefore have an importance quite independent of the results which it produces on the public opinion polls or even on next year's contest; on the most pessi- mistic calculation, the party must now choose the ground on which it is to be defeated, and this, as Bismarck held, is one of the most im- portant decisions a statesman ever has to make.
Furthermore, the delegates, who are by nature cheerful, have had a good deal recently to en- courage them. The public reaction to Mr. Wil- son's leap into the space age has clearly been a good deal more sceptical than that of the press. `Five new Ministries' makes an excellent head- line, but the public knows that there is no neces- sary equation between the number of a govern- ment's employees and the effectiveness of its policy, and in the popular mind Ministries are regarded as sources of qUestionnaires and. penalties rather than of energy. Speakers at Blackpool can count on a sympathetic reception for anything negative or derisive they have to say about Wilson's wonderland; they must also be shrewdly aware, however, that criticism of this kind will not win a general election. By an entirely logical law of the science of politics, a government which has governed for twelve years is required to show not that its opponents would govern worse than it has done but rather that it is itself capable of governing better than it has done.
Obviously, the worst fate which could attend the Blackpool conference is that delegates may be diverted from the task of establishing this by their overwhelming preoccupation with the question of who is to lead them. To that danger there is only one antidote, the trite but irre- sistible reflection that, short of absolute neces- sity, it would be premature to discuss the party leadership until the party had a rough idea of where it wanted to be led. Until Tuesday, Mr. Macmillan survived, rightly and inevitably, as the best available stand-in for Mr. Macmillan, and in that role he has now been succeeded by Mr. Butler for how long? Not until the Conservative Party has regained some sense of direction, not until certain crucial strategic decisions have been taken, will it be pos- sible to know who ideally should lead the Tories in the years that lie beyond a general election; equally, when the map has been charted, the question of who is to fill the role of guide will answer itself. The Prime Minister has been pre- served neither by the mediocrity of his com- petitors nor by any cinbarras de richesses which they may be thought to present but rather by the fact which on the eve of Blackpool was pathetically evident, that, apart from a general desire to improve its position, the Conservative Party has given virtually no thought to the question of what it wants to do in the future.
Here then is the challenge and opportunity. Though criticism is not enough, the first task, as yet almost wholly undischarged by the political commentators, is to explain precisely what is wrong with Mr. Wilson's recipe for Utopia. Here indeed there arc serious illusions to be dispelled, the chief of them being the assumption now widely made that Mr. Wilson is in some sense more moderate than his predecessors, that with supreme skill he has harnessed the enthusiasm of the left to a moderately conservative domestic policy. The fallacy arises from the view that there is something intrinsically radical about nationalisation which Mr. Wilson has aban- doned; in reality, he has exchanged the old- fashioned and relatively harmless socialist pre- occupation with the forms of industrial power for a far more dangerous obsession with its sub- stance. Mr. Attlee increased the power of the State over every facet of economic life without ever effectively using it; Mr. Wilson, knowing that all the necessary instruments of compulsion are to hand without recourse to anything at once so unpopular and irrelevant as public owner- ship, proposes to use the powers of the State without appearing to increase them. For the first time we arc presented as a serious political programme with the idea of complete and de- tailed public planning, with a notion of a society whose manifold activities will be directed from a single centre; by comparison with this thoroughgoing mechanised revolution, Attlee's socialism has about it the atmosphere of the vicarage drawing-room.
In purely philosophical terms, the Tories no doubt have a ready-made answer to Mr. Wilson. They also believe in a bigger and better future, but they hold that it can only be brought about by the spontaneous efforts of the people and that the most and the least that statesmanship can profitably attempt is to harness the in- terests and the instincts of individuals to the cause of the common good. The business of government is to provide opportunities and in- ducements, not to compel; what kind of a Britain will eventually emerge from all the com- peting trends by which now as always we are rent is a matter for destiny not government to decide; the State is there to guard against disaster, to liberate energy and to keep private avarice and ambition within the limits of ele- mentary social justice.
It is all splendid though familiar and, decorated with the gestures and vocabulary of Lord Hailsham, it still awakes a response in the most sluggish of Tory hearts.
Yet there is one formidable obstacle to this traditional apologia for Toryism: it appears to bear surprisingly little relation to anything which the Tory Government has done since it came to power.
If -its words. are to ring true, the leadership must somehow convey to its votaries an elemen- tary lesson in political science, a task not easy to accomplish in the unacademic atmosphere of a party conference. It muse show them that the Tory Government in the, last twelve years, like all governments, has had to work with the materials at its disposal, the chief ingredient in which has been a public opinion already half- socialist. A containing operation against the forces, of collectivism has been successfully con- ducted and some valuable ground won back: but the party has already announced that the pro- visional phase in its economic policy, when disaster was warded off from day to day, is over, and the electorate in consequence will now ex- pect some indication of what kind of institutional changes the Tories are prepared to make to enable Britain to depend less on her govern- ments and more on herself.
Does the party propose to resume the task of trying to convert the Welfare State from an in- discriminate dispenser of largesse into a sensitive instrument for giving help where it is needed? Has it any device for ensuring that greater edu- cational opportunities more widely spread are made compatible with the freedom of schools and universities? What does it mean to do to ex- tend the principle of property-owning from re- frigerators and houses to capital?
And all the time there will be powerful forces (some say in the leadership itself) pulling the other way—towards the far simpler course of beating Mr. Wilson at his own game, either by offering to build more universities and hospitals than he or of saying that ours will stand longer.
Between these answers to Wilsonian State- sponsored materialism there is in reality nO choice, for one is indeed not an answer at all, and if the electorate is to have planning it will prefer to have it at the hands of those who be- lieve in it.
No party programme will be born at Black- pool, but what must emerge by Saturday after- noon is a decisive assurance that the dominant theme of the Tory manifesto will not be the need to temper public planning with administrative prudence, but the need to fight it with the ideas of private opportunity and personal duty.
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