Scarborough
The Tories Gather
By BERNARD LEVIN
At first sight, after all—at second, third and fourth sights for that matter—the Tories are sit- ting as pretty as can be, and likely to continue doing so for any length of time one cares to think of. Whatever happens to the Labour Party, and whether or not it, or some part of it, allies itself with the Liberal Party (or some part of that: it is always on the cards that Lady Violet and Sir Andrew MacFadyean will lead a walk- out if Mr. Gaitskell should appear over the horizon bearing down upon Mr. Grimond), it is unlikely to offer a serious electoral challenge to the Conservatives (in the absence of large-scale catastrophe like a war or a slump) within the remaining lifetime of anybody old enough to remember being held up at a window to watch the funeral procession of King Edward VII. I do not know what Mr. Macmillan—who does not, my readers will be astonished to learn, regularly favour me with his confidence—is going to say during such passages of his concluding address to the Conference as are audible above the crunch of League of Empire Loyalist bones, but I should be surprised if it does not include a number of peers at the condition and prospects of Her Majesty's Opposition or Oppositions.
Nor do I see anything against this. Voices are already being raised to urge that Mr. Macmillan either should not, or in fact will not (the distinc- tion is not always made clear), say anything to embarrass the Labour Party, or at any rate Mr. Gaitskell. It would be, they say, in bad taste. If somebody could point to any previous occasion on which Mr. Macmillan has refrained from a course of action because it was in bad taste, there would be more strength in the argument, but I think I would still be unimpressed by it. After all, Mr. Macmillan is Leader of the Conserva- tive Party as well as Prime Minister, and many is the typewriter ribbon that I have worn out demonstrating that he is the first first, and the second second. To Mr. Macmillan and the Tory Party, keeping the Labour Party out of office in perpetuity is not just fun, though it certainly is that; and it is not just a way of ensuring that their friends and suppor.ters come to no economic harm, though it certainly is that too. It is a patriotic duty, conceived in the belief that the Labour Party's assumption of office would do to the whole nation harm that might well be irrepar- able—to its economic well-being, to its inter- national standing, to its defensive capacity. They are very probably right; and even if they are not, they undoubtedly believe they are, and it would be unreasonable to expect them not to act on that belief. The Conservatives are now faced with a situation in which the Labour Party—their only serious challengers for many years past—may be utterly destroyed; is it seriously suggested that because in assisting such destruction they will be destroying Mr. Gaitskell as well as Mr. Cousins they should therefore refrain?
To expect the Tories to call off the hunt at the very moment that the dogs' fangs are about to sink into the fox's hindquarters (if that is what happens at hunts) would be to expect too much of human nature. The Opposition is demoralised, discredited, divided; the Govern- ment can do anything it likes.
And yet there they are on our cover, floating out to sea. It should be remembered, to begin with, that only fifteen years ago the very same boot was on the other foot. Then, the Labour Party, whose inevitably fissiparous nature had not then become apparent, had a majority of 186; they could have brought in a Bill to hang the Kaiser if they had wanted to, and got it passed. They were, they told us, the masters then. And now the waves have washed their footprints from the sand. What conspired to bring the Labour Party from its position of seemingly un- challengeable eminence (for remember that the Tories were a broken and dispirited crew in 1945, their machine rusted beyond repair, their ideas scorned, their leader rejected) was—apart from their internal dissensions—a combination of their opponents' astonishing (and, on the Labour side, disregarded) revival and the pressure of events. The terms of trade, the damage and dislocation caused to our industry by the war, the rapidly deteriorating international situation, the impossi- bility of keeping the national effort at a level anything like that of the war—all these things combined to produce the recurrent crises, the disappointments, the seemingly avoidable hard- ship, that sapped Labour's strength and eventu- ally brought them down. It took, it will be re- called, less than five years; for by 1950 the writing was not so much on the wall as in the sky. From what seemed like eternal triumph, in which Labour Party people would tell you en- thusiastically that there would never again be a Tory Government in Britain, to what seems now rather more like a situation in which there will never be any other kind of government.
Nevertheless, the remorseless pressure of events may yet prove the complacent Tories' undoing. Before the last election there were two principal question-marks hanging over the Tory pro- gramme,: one was the domestic economic situa- tion, and the other was Africa. Had they got the economy right, and had they got Africa right? As far as one could see, they had the economy taped, and indeed that was largely why the elec- torate put them back into power with an in- creased majority. Also as far as one could see, they had Africa wrong, and indeed that was largely why I voted against them, they should worry. Now what? Now, they seem to have Africa right. Mr. Lennox.-Boyd has gone, and with him the policies that led to the rejection of the Devlin Report and to the acceptance of the Kenya Government's Hola communique about the contaminated water. Mr. Macmillan was quick to spurn Sir Roy Welensky's embrace when Sir Roy attempted to line him up alongside the Federal Government against the Monckton Commission, and the chances are that the Gov- ernment will get Central Africa right too.
Where the Tories are going howlingly wrong. it seems to me, is in Europe and in the concomi- tant economic questions posed for this country. And their wrongness is the traditional Tory wrongness. Europe is a far-off continent of which we know nothing, and the electorate is unlikely to be interested in its economic organisation. So we can safely go our own way.
But we cannot. The speed with which the doors of Europe are being shut on us, and the speed with which the economic temperature will fall when they are, is the most alarming cloud on the political horizon, and what makes it the more alarming is that nobody in the Government seems to be alarmed about it. The effects on our economy of European integration without Britain are literally incalculable; incalculable not because there are too many unknown factors but because they are too vast to calculate. What has happened to the Lancashire cotton industry' what is happening to the coal industry, are 35 nothing compared to the tidal wave that will hit our economy when Europe really gets down t° the hitting. The true parallel is the shipping in dustry : the Government still dare not publish the DSIR report on the subject, and may never do so, for its criticism of the shipbuilders is 50 strong that there would be an almighty storm But the main point the report makes is that the, shipbuilding industry is simply out of date, an entirely unable to compete with the rest of the world. (And it is in the face of such a devastating indictment that the Government now proposes to lend Cunards £18 million to build a new Queen! I sometimes wonder whether anybody the Treasury is sane.) But inability to compete is roughly the state of British industry as a vis-a-vis a united Europe. And there is no sign o g from this Government that it is willing to d anything about equipping Britain to meet a ch'i l lenge which would never have been made if I,. had only had the sense to take Britain into Europe in the first place. The mills of economics grind slowly, but thel 0 grind small enough to turn Mr. Macmillan into dust. If Britain, ten years from now, faces econ; mic ruin from the European challenge, it will ca little comfort to the Tory Party to say that Africa is set on a peaceful course, that the rent prohle,..e has been solved, that there is a washing-maer,e in every garage. And if their majority over It, Lab.-Libs. is by then 500, it will vanish overnight when the country comes to realise how it his been betrayed. It is in the light of this progn°)to that I picture the Tories floating sedately. out ibiley the North Sea, fiddling happily away as t do so.
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