POLITICS
The Tory Party succumbs to one of its periodical fits of morality
NOEL MALCOLM
onference-going can be a wearisome business, especially when you have to go to all of them. It is bad enough that the seaside towns, the hotels and the confer- ence halls come to resemble one another more and more closely; but this year the same seems to be happening with the parties themselves.
The SDP wants a 'social market', which means not the buying and selling of futures in dinner parties but the combination of a regulated market economy and a redis- tributive welfare system. The SLDP wants the same thing, though it tries to find other phrases for it. The Labour Party wants to combine economic efficiency with social justice; in other words, a market economy limited by regulation, redistribution and welfare. And the mood of the Tory Party this week seems to be that a market economy, on its own, is not enough: it needs to be supplemented by welfare, redistribution and regulation.
What on earth has got into them all? Is it too much television, or not enough class war, or can it be that they have actually woken up to the fact that the real world in which we all live (in this country), and will continue to live throughout the foreseeable future, consists of a market economy sup- plemented by regulation, redistribution and welfare? Reality has not shaken the ideologues out of their reveries up till now, so why should it suddenly start tipping them all out of their beds onto the soggy centre ground. The answer in the case of Labour is simple: expediency. In the case of the Tories it looks rather more like guilt. At least you know where you are with some- one who acts out of expediency: you may not want to lend him your money, but most of the time you understand what he is doing and why. When someone starts acting out of guilt he becomes much less predictable and reliable.
These thoughts were first prompted by Mr Heseltine's speech to the Tory Reform Group on Tuesday. When he appealed to them to be 'hard-headed but not hard- hearted', 1 asked myself whether any poli- tical party in world history had ever con- sciously chosen to be both hard-hearted and soft-headed. The wonder of it is not that a politician should use a platitude, but that this particular platitude, at this par- ticular time, should be greeted by a Tory audience as if it were a draught of cold water offered to a dying man in a desert. When, however, he announced that the Government would have an extra £150 billion to spend by the end of the century, and that we should therefore start deciding now how to spend it, the audience's approval was less surprising. Everyone, just everyone, likes spending other peo- ple's money.
All generalisations about 'the mood of the party' must be nebulous, but still I am tempted to say that the Conservative Party is showing signs now of losing its ideologic- al nerve. They have all got tired of being told that Thatcherism is the guiding phi- losophy of football hooliganism, or insider dealing, or child abuse, or the lager cul- ture. And they felt stung by the unex- pectedly strong public approval which Mr Kinnock earned with his description of Thatcherism as `No sisterhood, no brother- hood. No neighbourhood. No such thing as society: No number other than one. No person other than me' (to which my memory has automatically added, as if to complete the quotation, `no arts; no let- ters; no society; and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short').
The principal achievement of the Thatcher years so far, this conference seems to believe, has been to make the country rich; now the Government can salve its conscience at long last by spending the money. Mrs Thatcher herself streng- thens this argument every time she reminds the Labour Party, justifiably, that if they were in power there would be less money available for welfare spending. The formu- la is a simple one, therefore: nine years of morally neutral improvements to the eco- nomy, followed by a sudden orgy of morality.
I call this a failure of ideological nerve because it means dropping all the old claims about the moral value of economic Thatcherism. Getting the state (or the trade unions) off people's backs, according to Thatcherism Mark I, was not just a way of loosening up the economy and increas- ing GNP; it was a moral crusade, waged under the banners of liberty, individuality, responsibility and choice. Are we now meant to believe that it was just a round- about way of footing the bill for a few more health visitors and probation officers?
Mrs Thatcher's original vision was at least coherent. As she saw it, the with- drawal of state action from the lives of individuals would leave the practical busi- ness of morality more and more up to the people themselves. Her famous remark, `there is no such thing as society', meant in its original context that people should think of their own moral responsibilities as human beings, instead of waiting for some monolithic abstraction to come and do their moral chores for them.
This position has its merits, but it is ill-equipped to respond to calk for govern- ment action on the morality front. Faced with such calls, this government responds in two different ways. One starts from the old assumption that governments act most morally when they spend money — not Only on welfare, but also 'on grandiose Heseltinian 'initiatives', such as the current expenditure of £3 billion on the inner cities. The high priest of administrative Heseltinism is Lord Young. 'Others bring me problems', said Mrs Thatcher, 'but David brings me solutions.' She forgot to add that whereas the other ministers' problems are free, Lord Young's solutions cost at least a billion pounds a throw.
The other way of taking action on the morality front is more sinister: instead of throwing money at the problems, it throws laws at them. .Here the assumption is that there can be nothing wrong with a law so long as it is intended to bring about a morally desirable state of affairs. Local laws against drinking in public, for exam- ple, are being actively encouraged. The last time I was told not to drink in public was in eastern Turkey during Ramadan. A strict Islamic society is a classic example of a system in which law and morality haye merged together; but I am not stitie that it would be popular in Britain. A fringe meeting listed in the Conference Hand- book has set me thinking, however: 'Union of Muslim Organisations. Speaker: Doug- las Hurd. Soft drinks provided.' The wholesale introduction of Koranic law would solve many of Hurd's problems; and I can think of nothing better calculated to jolt the British public out of one of its periodical fits of morality.
Previous page
