Parties against the people
Edward Pearce
A fallacy is haunting politics, the fallacy that the present government has a real chance of being re-elected. The notion of Labour as the 'new party of government' is fashionable in the press not beacuse of its apparent recovery in opinion polls, but by reason of a profound flaw within the Tory Party itself. The feeling is that although Labour can most certainly lose an election, and do so heavily, the Conservatives are constitutionally incapable of winning one.
Some 'moderates' are pessimistic about the capacity of the Tories ever to take the initiative, or to be much more than a sort of acquiescent sponge absorbing the main force of collectivist policies and tempering or attenuating them. This mood of 'It's no good, history is on the side of the Socialists and we must simply civilise our destiny by rolling with the punch' is not only spectacularly feeble, it ignores the fact that the metaphor favoured by the determinists of Socialism is not a boxer's punch but a railway train. Try rolling with the Locomotive of History sometime.
There are times — and last month's Conservative Party conference was one of them — when the party seemed to deserve the euthanasia envisaged for it. Dreadful encephalic toddlers from the Greater London Young Conservatives were 'demonstrating against unemployment' just as last year they let off coloured balloons in support of, or in protest against, something or other, about which they 'felt passionately'. No grown-up would want his funeral procession to pass within half a mile of such Puerility and such trashy insincerity. Then again the conference was the usual masterpiece of orchestration (incidentally the Central Office Mantovani who dreamed up Master Hague should be hung up by his thumbs for a week). But then what sort of Party lets itself be orchestrated? Unfortunately one with an excessive tendency to reverential obedience. The Tories with their tradition of democratic centralism could put through a programme which took the commanding heights of the economy into public ownership, instituted workers' control and directed capital. It would probably pass with no more than a whimper if it was presented to conference as the responsible programme which men of vision supported. Indeed if the Bexley vowelstrangler had stayed in office much longer, it might have actually done so. However, there is reason to think that the real spectre haunting politics today is of counter-revolution. Where ideas are concerned that has been apparent for some time. What after all is Mr Henley's present economic policy if not an application of Sir Keith Joseph's Preston speech? Are we not all monetarists now, the Government most of all? Is it not a point of common consent that capitalism is not only a more rational way of running an economy, but also a more civilised one? It is possible to find in the world capitalist countries which are short on personal liberties, but where are the countries which are in any serious sense Socialist and in any serious sense free? For the first time in decades those who believe in the private investment of capital and the maximisation of profits are entitled to feel that the intellectual and moral climate is friendly towards them. The necessity no longer exists for the sort of sham compassion grinding which the Tories always did so badly. There just is no need to begin sen tences any longer with those self exculpatory phrases about 'caring cornmuitities'. These were objectionable not because any of us evil capitalists and admir ers of capitalism are against compassion. Who, after all, among recent Ministers has truly cared more for the losers of society than Keith Joseph? The posture of wearing one's heart emblematically was dislikeable both by reason of its essential falseness and because it represented the defensive posture of a political party which had run out of convictions and was prepared to accom7 modate uncritically. Now there are those who would argue that a talent for finding the Whigs bathing and stealing their clothes has been one of the great strengths of Conservatism — a sort of self-sustaining intellectual larceny as it were. There is nothing wrong with that provided that one burgles the right premises. Taking over the notions of Manchester liberalism and abandoning agricultural protectionism for free trade was one thing; proving that one can legislate to make waste witiT, say, the grotesque local government reorganisation is quite another. One is reminded of Pope's strictures on the man who 'steals much, saves little, yet has nothing left.'
The Tories never did succeed in looking like the party of compassion. There is no reason why they should. The development which really cheers one does not derive from the academic argu ments; that battle after all has been won.
What impresses me is the readiness of people in the country to support policies which Mr Norman Atkinson would call 'extreme right-wing', that is to say reasonably sensible policies. The poll taken recently by Mr Robert Worcester of MORI for the Sunday Times has not yet percolated to all the political world, although on the strength of her Blackpool speech Mrs Thatcher seems to have been reading and rereading it. Arguably it is the single most important test of public opinion in the decade. It spells out what we suspected but never quite knew with certainty, that the Labour voter has a wide circle of dislikes among the official policies of the party and those ideas from the Tribune group which are about to become policy.
The message to Margaret Thatcher is pellucid. The working-class voter in this country may be confused about some things, but he is no socialist, no left-winger, not even somebody who would feel at home with the Tory Reform Group. What is most likely to persuade him to vote for the Conservatives is a hard hard line on educational standards, a promise not to nationalise anything even if it goes broke, an end to the abuse and diminution of the use of welfare provision.
He is a Labour voter, it would seem, more by reason of ancestral class feeling than any urge for redistribution. He is in fact neither a Marxist nor a Social Democrat but, residually and only just, 'Labour'.
The real problem facing the Conservatives in approaching this sort of voter is their lack of any convincing common touch. Whether they are face-grinding advocates of laissez-faire, or socially con scious public spenders, they will almost cer tainly have the voice and manner of the upper middle classes. The Conservatives have to this day an inexpungable `themness' about them and frankly are at their worst, their most spurious, when trying to rectify it. A public school boy in a T-shirt is a public school boy! The recently acquired habit of dropping christian names, sometimes in diminutive form, around the platform has about it the sort of nervous jocularity which one associates with a prison warder per suading the condemned man to a last game of dominoes. Nor will the problem be solved by hiring men with Midlands accents to put forward what is called 'a robust point of view as the ordinary chap sees it!'
What they really need to do is to be as nearly honest as a politician can be and to argue their case instead of trying to market it. Selective education, harsher punishment for criminals, council houses for sale to occupants, fewer civil servants, far fewer local government officials (the most despised men in the country) are simply a handful of the sort of policies which command general assent in this country. We have had decades of committee-forming, board-appointing, regulation-making and all those activities which are good for politicians and bad for everybody else. The entire notion of government is coming close to contempt because it has aspired to do too much.
Unlike Desdemona as lago imagined her, we must not have change, we must not. We have had change of one intrusive pettyfogging sort of another up to the eyebrows. Re-election to the point of perennial occupancy of Downing Street is promised to that politician who can guarantee people stability and certainty and who will have the courage to say so instead of wittering on about how much more radical than the other fellow he is. The truth is that the English people are what the Tory Party has not been for positive eons — conservative!
We might even treat ourselves to a little light reaction. Is there any reason why we should not have our numbers back, our old familiar well-loved and understood premetrication weights and measures? And our county boundaries? Could not Lady Howe be set to some useful work about the house?
In fact the natural human prejudices of the elector and the reasoned conclusions of Sir Keith Joseph go rather well together. He wants a minimal role for government in the economy, less given and less taken. The people in turn are, I should guess, at the furthest point from the mood of 'Why doesn't the Government do something about it?' If the Conservative Party as a whole will recognise the sea change which has taken place in recent years it is on double plush velvet, Something else emerges from the polls of Mr Worcester, who questioned Labour and Conservative voters separately. While Labour supporters expressed opinions which are more temperate than, or to the right of that party, Tory voters did not show a corresponding inclination inwards. The whole graph of British politics might best be expressed in terms of a parallelogram leaning to the right. The whole experience of the Heath years and earlier has been of the parties themselves doing the exact opposite, with Labour's leftward incline being copied a few spaces along the chart. If the performance of the parties so distorts the opinions which they exist to mirror, then the parties themselves have been out of touch with the electorate.
Now I do not share the low opinions which some fellow members of what Mr John Grigg has in these pages quite reasonably called the Tough Brigade have for Social Democrats. I have never known a politician I respected as much as ,Hugh Gaitskell. Nothing would please me more than to see a Labour Party loosed of the permanent Soviet delegation on its National Executive and freely committed to the humane and civilised things which Labour did stand for fifteen years ago. (As Boss Evans replaces the Emperor Jones, I have no very lively expectations.) However, it is not unthinkable, if the Conservatives went their natural way and won the huge response which is waiting for them should they find the nerve, that Labour might be drawn back to the politics of the human race. For that to be accomplished Mr Woodrow Wyatt's precondition must be met. Labour to be saved must be nailed into the ground at the next election. This is most likely to be done by the combination of populism and Josephine economics set out above. The Tories can save Social Democracy, provided that they have absolutely nothing to do with it themselves.
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