Political commentary
The bovine splendour of Mr Callaghan
Ferdinand Mount
Glasgow The Status Quo will be playing here next month, or rather the Status Qu — the 'o' has fallen off the sign outside the Apollo Centre. But the other Status Quo is here already — not a pop group but a collection of elderly men in specs huddled together on the cavernous stage behind an improvised barricade of red cardboard, as though taking refuge from the invited audience of Labour Party workers or from the huge chunks of plaster which have already disappeared from the mouldering mauve ceiling. Jim and Audrey enter to goodhumoured cheers. The occasion is billed as a Labour Party rally; it seems more like a Darby and Joan club. The Prime Minister speaks of a crusade. But the air is full of dust.
Don't risk it on 3 May, Mr Callaghan says, Labour will protect you against the Tories. Labour will save your job and thousands of other jobs. Only last week Bruce MilIan, the Scottish Secretary, saved 1100 jobs in the Marathon yard at Clydebank. We knew that. Sam Gooding, Chairman of the Labour Party in Scotland, already told us. And Charlie Drury, Chairman of the Scottish TUC, told us too. And Bruce himself modestly refers to this great exploit. What does it matter if the yard has not got a single order? We reject — and here Mr Callaghan is stern, almost Churchillian — the idea that something is worth doing only if you can make a profit out of it. We believe in saving jobs at Chrysler, at British Shipbuilders, at British Leyland, at British Steel. Ah what a sad litany of overmanning is there, what a sanctuary for lame ducks. And if the Tories got back. Jim says, Scotland — and everywhere else — would be an industrial desert. Sam says Scotland would be an industrial desert too.
Until you have heard these good grey men — well, fairly good grey men — one after the other talk of saving jobs as other men used to talk of saving souls, it is hard to appreciate fully how much the Labour Party has become a protection society, dedicated to preserving the status quo at public expense. The idea that the future might hold opportunities as well as risks never seems to cross their minds. This is preeminently Mr Callaghan's socialism.
And the Labour manifesto is Mr Callaghan's manifesto. This is the least overtly socialist election document since Gaitskell's day. It is a masterpiece of muffling, rather like a landscape wrapped by Christo. Only now and then are nasty craggy shapes to be glimpsed under the string and billows. There are no specific industries marked for nationalisation, except the ports. Even the planning agreements are not to be compulsory, quite. The House of Lords is to lose its delaying power but not its life. True, the wealth tax is given yet another airing, but the schemes for intervention are mostly for subsidising industries rather than for straightforwardly nationalising them. Callaghan's socialism brings not a sword but a truss for the soft underbelly of the economy. If Labour loses, the Left will claim that it was because the voters were never offered 'proper socialism'. On the other hand, if Labour wins, the manifesto would certainly licence a vast further expansion of state power. All the same, the Prime Minister has had his way as a Labour prime minister always can if he tries hard enough, even when his own national executive is heavily stacked against him.
Mr Callaghan was indeed powerless to shape the original drafts produced at the turn of the year by the party's home and international committees — which are both left-dominated, Tony Benn chairing the home side and Joan Lestor the international. So naturally the home draft included pledges — published by the Morning Star with luciferine delight — to nationalise large parts of British industry, including some banks, construction and road haulage firms, building land and, in the long term, farm-land, to abolish the House of Lords, to bring in a wealth tax and so on.
And the international committee carried by no less than 19 votes to 4 a passage threatening to pull Britain out of the Common Market unless 'fundamental reforms' are made. The Prime Minister abstained on this vote because it was so hopelessly lost.
But usually Mr Callaghan does not abstain. On the contrary, he votes often and hard against the Left. How very different from the home policy of our own dear Harold. Throughout his thirteen years as leader, Sir Harold adhered to a curious tradition invented by himself by which the Leader never votes in the National Executive Committee.. This lofty assumption of being above the battle was taken, quite rightly, for wetness. The Right was disheartened, the floaters muddled and the Left rampant. After a particularly disastrous meeting, Sir Harold would sometimes issue a peevish statement which would win WILSON FLAYS LEFT headlines but nothing more.
By contrast, Mr Callaghan himself lined up three moderate union leaders to denounce the nationalisation proposals in the Morning Star draft and smartly persuaded the full NEC to let a nine-man, government-controlled working party to produce a final version for the 'Clause Five Meeting' — so called because Clause Five of the party's constitution says that the manifesto is to be decided by a joint meeting of the executive and the Cabinet, in which the Right have always been in the majority. Not bad as a rearguard action. Mr Callaghan's style may be corrupting and devious, but it is also tenaciously conservative. When he fights, he stretches the old rules, instead of inventing new ones. He fiddled the parliamentary boundaries. He was ready to let Scotland go hang for the sake of Labour's Scottish seats. He ignored serious budget defeats. Any new editor of Dicey or Bagehot will need a fistful of asterisks to append as footnotes to each statement of constitutional principle — 'except in the Callaghan administration.' And yet Mr Callaghan remains the Establishment candidate. Provosts of ancient colleges, West End barbers and tailors, high Tory stockbrokers and low Labour aldermen all still love Jim. Even Mr Peregrine Worsthorne prostiates himself before Mr Callaghan's bovine splendour. Here is a chap with bottom, a man with a stake in the country, the stake in question being planted in good Sussex farmland' Gravitas, dignitas, soliditas — this was the most Roman nobbler of them all.
All the same, there is a genuine side to Mr Callaghan's conservatism. The longer he clung to office, the more thoroughly he discredited the pretensions of politics and deflated the popular expectations of government. Between 1959 and 1975, politicians, civil servants and quango men had increasinglY persuaded themselves that there was n° problem which could not be solved by niol,c laws, more public money and more public institutions. These expectations expanded, regardless of the alleged political colour °I the Prime Minister. By the end of his term, Mr Callaghan had, expressed his doubts about almost every fat) of the Sixties — industrial mergers, progressive educational methods, long-tern forecasts, even socialist planning. Never, was there such a prolonged exhibitiofl. o' conservative scepticism. This exhibition came about partly because the government lost its Commons majority half-vvaY through and had to accommodate the Liberals, partly because Britain was broke and had to accommodate the IMF. but partlY also because of the pessimistic, melancholY streak in the Prime Minister's character.
These have been years of shabby decline under a shabby government. The consolation is that nowadays we are all sceptics about the capacities of governments. This Labour manifesto's claims for government intervention and socialist planning have already been discredited — by a Labour Prime Minister. In 1970, the notion that government was overblown and incapable was too new, too easy to deride. Selsdon Man was a pushover. If Finchley Woman turns out to be a tougher proposition, we — and she — will have cause to be grateful to the scepticism of Mr Callaghan.
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