Pouring oil on placid waters

POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH

When. Mr Heath deplored the electorate's apparent apathy and disillusionment with politicians, which he saw as one of the most dangerous legacies of. a Labour government, he was speaking before the.Walthamstow result. Now, with his eyes on Gorton, Leicester and Acton, he may find reason to rejoice in this same apathy. Although the proportion of Labour voters in 1966 who voted Tory in the Walthamstow by-election-5 per cent accord- ing to Gallup—is nearly enough to return a Conservative government on its own, if re- peated nationally, it would not have begun to scratch the surface in a Labour stronghold like Walthamstow without the massive array of abstainers: more than one in three of Labour's 1966 voters decided to stay at home in 1967. By contrast, only 3 per cent of Tory voters in 1966 abstained, according to the same poll, pub- lished in the Daily Telegraph, while virtually none—at any rate less than thirty individuals— voted Labour.

All of which suggests that Mr Heath's best tactics throughout the next twelve months, while this splendid bloody-mindedness lasts, would be to pat it on the head and retire into the background as a thoroughly disillusioned leader of the opposition. One may doubt whether his abrasive temperament would allow him to play the role for much longer than that —and nobody, however dedicated, is likely to lead an opposition party into a general elec- tion on the ticket 'don't vote unless you really feel you have to; we're both pretty ghastly''— but certainly no one has yet noticed any marked propensity from the opposition front bench to whip us up to fever pitch.

At Huddersfield on Friday, Mr Heath spoke of his 'determination to turn the weapons of modern management techniques on the prob- lems of modern government,' and said: 'We welcome unreservedly the new tools of administration and decision-making which advanced technology has placed in the hands of government. A Conservative government will use them to the full.' These and many scores of similar quotations from the leader might be hailed as classical examples of how to pour oil on placid waters, if one did not suspect a more sinister motive behind them. It may well be true that a substantial number of Mr Heath's supporters, if they had given any thought to these new tools and weapons which he threatens to use, would be positively appalled by them, That is not the point; the real objection to these sentiments is not based on the ground of heresy but on the far more cogent ground of tactical error.

We had technology rammed down our throats by Mr Wilson during the 1964 election, and have listened to him on the subject ever since. To say that it is his own particular baby, and that Mr Heath should try to produce a better one, would merely be discouraging. The fact is that Mr Wilson produced this baby after much huffing and bouncing up and down in the white heat of the technological revolution, and nqw' he is saddled with it. Popular disillusion- Mbnt and cynicism is not confined to the Aticians who make false promises; it also extends to the promises they make. Before Mr Wilson is finished with it, technology will have become a very dirty word. Yet here comes

Technological Ted puffing along behind with a good steam-age metaphor for everything: 'In a free society political argument is at one and the same time the mechanism of choice, the channel of dissent and the piston of progress.'

The usefulness of `me-tooism' in capturing the floating voter should not be under- estimated, but its limitations should also be recognised. It only applies in the rarefied middle ground of the political spectrum, and only at- tracts that minority of voters who are potential vote-switchers. Much academic analysis now questions the idea of a 'floating voter' as some sensitive undecided creature in the middle of the political spectrum. swayed one way by a balanced proposal to decrease income tax, another way by a promise to increase old age pensions, one way by the splendid war record and local eminence of the Tory candidate, another by the dimple on the chin of the Liberal. Dr John Bonham, the electoral researcher, believes that vote switching is nearly always the product of an antipathy, rather than of a preference for the policies of a second party, and this is borne out by Dr Henry Durant of the Gallup Poll. Both doctors see the true floating vote in that considerable part of the electorate—nearly a third—which is liable to al:tain from voting when it feels like it.

It goes without saying that abstentions, on balance, favour the Tory side. If the turn-out at elections were 100 per cent, and enforceable by law, as it is in Australia, the Conservatives would be reduced to a permanent minority party, like the Republicans in America. One wonders why Labour's activists have not been pressing for this, as an electoral reform. At the bottom of the electoral heap, unstirred by any rousing calls to the new age, lie four million voters who can be relied upon not to vote at any election. It is estimated that at each general election about a million leave this sector while another million join it. Anything which effec- tively stirs up the heap threatens to bring this inert mass to the surface, and while in theory its political inclinations are unfathomable, in practice one does not need much intuition to know that they are predominantly Labour.

The tactical error in any excessive display of `me-tooism' at the present moment lies partly in its danger to party morale. Nothing is more important to an opposition than that its party activists should be kept on the boil, and the opportunities for useful internal debate are never better than when there is little inclination on the part of the public to listen to it. At general elections the cold, responsible voice of `me-tooism' may reassure the waverer without risking many abstentions from the right, but at other times it is a wet blanket. So its

limitations at least justify looking at an alternative course of action, which is to do nothing whatever in any direction, at any rate as far as the voters are concerned.

About half the electorate claims to see no significant difference between the parties,

although nearly everybody retains a firm

preference. It is hardly likely that any further display of 'me-tooism' will increase this pro-

portion. It is a feature of Labour's more apathetic followers that they scarcely notice the opposition at all. Of course, anybody who can be persuaded to switch his vote is worth two who can be encouraged to abstain, but both the effort and the risk involved are much greater. Least of all, at the moment, do the voters wish to hear intelligent, credible, carefully argued alternative policies. Mr Enoch Powell, speaking at Gloucester on Saturday, drew attention lin a different context) to the way in which human beings, like animals, can be reduced to helpless imbecility without any use of force, simply by subjecting them to a barrage of contradictory and confusing signals and instructions. When the time comes for the nation to make .a choice, I cannot believe—and this is an act of faith more than a hunch—that a state of help- less imbecility will be the one most favourable to the Conservatives.

The danger of keeping mum for a long time is that people will forget you exist. So long as Mr Wilson has to stimulate enthusiasm in his own party by expressing contempt for the opposition, there is no danger of this. Dr Bon- ham develops his theory that vote switching is invariably the expression of an antipathy to show that a very large proportion of all voting merely registers dissent from its alternatives. If so—and he supports his arguments With the most dazzling array of facts and psephological erudition—then it must follow that the less of an alternative you show, the less it becomes necessary to dissent from it. This, in the present climate, undoubtedly means silence rather than emulation.

Mr Heath is fully justified in drawing atten- tion to the waves of apathy and disillusionment which afflict the political scene. But the way for him to ride them is under water, holding his nose. It could be (who knows?) that despite these occasional technological bubbles he is not doing anything else.

The plain truth about the Brain Drain now appears to be that we are producing mote scientists and engineers than we need, yet nowhere among the Government committee's twenty-two proposals can I see the suggestion that we should produce fewer.

If we can't use as many scientists as we pro- duce at present, the argument runs, we must invent uses for them, as if there were some intrinsic merit in the employment of scientists which transcends any usefulness they might possess. Government-financed projects, need- less to say, are the suggested cure. If ever an admission of commercial uselessness was needed, this is it, but the suggestion that they should be lured back into the already glutted market by offers of directorships is surely the most ridiculous of all.

The advantage of filling this already over- crowded island with unwanted scientists is held by the Ministry of Technology's report to be self-evident. How sad that no one in the com- mittee could have added a twenty-third pro- posal—that less of the nation's available talent —and the taxpayers' money—should be wasted on science, and more devoted to the useful fields of poetry, languages and boxing.