Political commentary

The end of Vulgar Pessimism

Ferdinand Mount

Armageddon was never like this. As a scenario for the end-of-civilisation-aswe-knowit the present situation lacks something. A rather bumbling Roman Catholic right-winger is elected president of the Engineering Union. The National Front sinks back into the effluent. It is the Scottish Nationalists who are apprehensive now as their support recedes from its beckoning peaks. And the House of Commons is engaged in a harmless, oldfashioned dispute about how much to knock off income tax.

The obvious lesson for Mr Callaghan from Monday night is that the Ulster Unionists are unlikely to prove reliable allies to stagger through next winter with.

But viewed from a longer perspective, the more interesting feature is not so much that Mr Callaghan shows no intention of resigning as that nobody ever expected him to. Even the Tory show of indignation is rather forced. True, the Prime Minister has not actually been denied supply as Mr Gough Whitlam effectively was, but his Budget has been rudely interfered with, to say the least. Yet neither the Liberals nor the Ulster Unionists are particularly eager to support the Tories on a vote of confidence just yet; and there is no great external pressure on them to do so. Whatever became of all that indignation about governments elected on minority votes?

Mr Callaghan's government is still unpopular, but his modest ambition to sit in Downing Street as long as he can while doing as little as possible doesn't seem to arouse much public outrage. Indeed, his sedentary posture represents Labour's best hope of winning the election. That a penny can be knocked off income tax with so few reverberations is a demonstration not of political chaos but of political stability.

The normalcy is unnerving. And to think how the pundits all used to chant ',things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.' Fhings, it appears, tend on the contrary to stick together. The centre holds with almost cloying tenacity. The most salient, startling, inescapable fact about Britain in the 1970s is not bad government, not intellectual inertia, not industrial decline or even the incompetence of the civil service (see page 13). All of these have been with us for decades and may be with us for some time yet. But the most remarkable thing shown by the experience of the past five years is the obstinate, deep-rooted stability of the British political system.

Yet an almost equally notable thing about the 1970s is the speed and zest with which so many of the few people in this country who like thinking about politics ditched the constitution. Scarman, Hailsham, Moss, Rogaly, Heath, Home, Blake, not to mention all the other wise and thoughtful men who sat on the Commission on Electoral Reform — all in their different styles and from their different perspectives were and are united in one belief: that the present structure of government by one party in the House of Commons and elected solely by our present simple method of 'first-past-the-pose will not do. There must be additional assemblies in Scotland, Wales and the English regions, there must be a written constitution and a Bill of Rights, there must be proportional representation — or some combination of any or all of these changes. The constitution is to blame for our plight. It is fatally open to manipulation by a determined minority. Progressive degeneration is inevitable. We are on the skids unless we alter our arrangements radically and without delay.

Mr Peter Jenkins, in a memorable Spectator review of Mr Robert Moss's The Collapse of Democracy, .dubbed this attitude reactionary chic. The nickname is, I think, not quite accurate. What the reformers are suffering from would be better described as panic chic. In a situation of danger and confusion, they looked for dramatic and radical measures. And by a simple confusion of ideas, they assumed that because the danger and confusion was exhibited in Parliament therefore the structure of Parliament must be to blame —which is not unlike hitting your head while running through a low doorway and blaming the doorway, possibly even kicking the woodwork to relieve your feelings.

Again and again, the reformers simply refuse to admit or fail to notice that constitutional arrangements are very often neutral. Their survival and success depends primarily on whether people are attached to them and willing to make them work. The

Weimar Republic had proportional representation so does present-day Italy. The fact that neither set-up turned out a dazzling success is a sad reflection, not on PR, but on the historical circumstances of Germany and Italy. Equally, the relatively trouble free operation of Stormont over much of its history is not a usable precedent for Scottish devolution; the Ulster Unionists wanted to make their provincial assembly within a United Kingdom work, the Scottish nationalists don't. If there is a universal lesson to be learnt, it is that institutions which command long-standing and wide spread popular support, however inconvenient, illogical and ramshackle they may

sometimes look, are not to be lightly cast away or twisted into unrecognisable form.

Legitimacy derives from familiarity as much as from rationality.

To justify these hazardous attempts to create fresh legitimate institutions, the reformers have to rely on a sweeping theory of doom. Miners' strikes, Clay Crosses and Pentonville Fives are not simply the result of miscalculations or bad luck; they are no mere snafus or salads. They are part of an emerging historical pattern. Here we sniff the smell of right-wing historicism, a famil: iar compound of gunpowder, damp khaki and old Spengler.

Conspiracies do exist. Nations do decline and go on declining. Constitutional reforms do influence political change and, where necessary, are best carried through in good time. Vulgar Pessimism does not disqualifY reasoned and hardwon pessimism just as Vulgar Marxism does not, on its own, disqualify Marx. And Vulgar Optimista would certainly be no improvement. Yet the vulgarities of Vulgar Pessimism must be pointed out: the selective use of evidence, the assumption that Czechoslavakia is in some useful sense like Chile which is like Portugal which is like Britain, the easY extrapolation of a couple of disasters into a historical process. And now is the moment to point out the vulgarity of Vulgar Pessimism, when the system is demonstrating that it still has the power to spring back approximately into place. For it is only now that we can begin to understand that any constitution which provides for political liberty must have the defects of its virtues: untidiness, unpredictability, corruptibility. Freedom which cannot be abused is On freedom. And 'civilised intolerance' is just as much a chimera when Mr Moss tries W define it as when Dr Marcuse tries to. The recent history of Greece, India, Spain and Portugal suggests, moreover, that freedonl may have somewhat greater powers or recovery than the Vulgar Pessimists thinE. Besides, anyone who justifies large-scal,e constitutional reform by a theory of dooml,s bound to impale himself on Worsthorne 5 Fork. I have named this ingenious device after the argument recently put forward bY Peregrine Worsthorne in answer to Lord, Hailsham's attack on 'elective dictatorship, The argument runs as follows: the present constitutional set-up allows minority goy' ernments to wield power out of all pror ortion to their numerical support. But if you alter the constitution so as t° prevent or at least to deter further radical change you only succeed If) entrenching socialism more deeply

because socialism is now the status qu°' "Elective dictatorship" is the onlY

hope of conservatism, since freedom novt' adays is a minority cause which can prosper, only when democracy is unrepresentative. On the other hand, if you argue that things aren't as bad as all that, then where is the need to effect major alterations in th,e constitution? Granted Mr Worsthorne premise, his conclusion is surely Counter-revolution no less than revolutin" needs maximum leverage.