Political Commentary
The non-politics of the Liberal suburbs
Patrick Cosgrave
I was once party to a conversation at which Mr Teddy Taylor, the ebullient Tory MP for Glasgow, Cathcart, launched a savage attack on one or two aspects of Conservative policy. A more exalted member of the company, an admirer of Mr Taylor — and aware, moreover, of the very special constituency talents required for a Tory to keep the Cathcart electorate faithful — asked, teasingly, "But, Teddy, if you feel like that, how do you stand as a Tory in Cathcart?" "I have a motto," Mr Taylor replied, "Keep politics out, keep Taylor in." With just such a motto did Mr Cyril Smith sweep the Liberals to victory in Rochdale, and Mr Graham Tope in Sutton and Cheam.
What has been variously described as consumer politics, or community politics is, of course, not politics at all, as we have normally and recently understood them in this country. Most of us have always recognised that there are one or two remarkable members of Parliament who have held unlikely constituencies against the grain, against the apparent disparity between the character and interests of their party and the character and interests of their voting population — Mr Taylor is one such, Mr Reginald Paget another. But, embedded in our understanding of politics is the conviction that, come a general election, almost everybody votes a national ticket. And this, indeed, is one of the points on which traditionally minded students of politics, and the modern psephologists who have replaced our necromancy with theirs, are agreed. The great Dr Butler of Nuffield, for example — or perhaps one should say ex cathedra — has stated that no candidate can be worth more than five hundred votes, out of his own activity and personality. There is at least a possibility, for very good reasons, that this old wisdom will now have to be abandoned.
Most commentators have stressed that the Labour Party were the real victims of last weeks brace of by-elections: with that proposition I do not disagree, and I will return to it in a moment. They have also, to be fair, admitted that Rochdale and Sutton together are an unprecedented triumph for the modern Liberal Party. But they have emphasised above all that nothing, ultimately, came from the great Orpington victory and opined, therefore, that the next general election will see the same collapse of Liberal dreams as occurred during the general elections of 1964, 1966 and 1970. Such a judgement is based, of necessity, on a view of only one curve of activity, the purely party curve. The Orpington victory was based on consumer politics, on finding out local grievances, stressing them, and remedying them: at that time Orpington Man — the per sonification of the wounded suburban dweller — was invoked to explain Mr Lubbock's victory. When his revolution petered out the re-decline of the Liberal Party was noted, and our awareness of the growth of the consumer revolution in its relation to politics forgotten. Nonetheless, it is surely true that the last decade has seen not a decline in, but a steady and even rampant increase in, the discontent of the ordinary individual in the face of the obscurantism and inefficiency of government, both national and local.
Why, then, did Liberal success not continue to keep pace with this discontent? The reason is, I believe, so obvious as to appear trivial. Between 1964 — or, more properly, 1965, when Mr Heath became its leader — the Conservative Party underwent a tremendous revival, although admittedly often obscured by its continuing difficulties. Whereas one tired and one vigorous party offered their wares to the nation in 1964, the situation was reversed as between those two in 1970: then the Tories held out hope for a national revival. Without suggesting that they are now anything like wholly discredited — Uxbridge would disprove that — there is little doubt that that hope has not been fulfilled. At the same time the Labour Party has not renewed itself: it has been preoccupied with holding itself together. So the situation in 1972 is very much brighter for the Liberals than it was in 1963, because neither big party seems to contain or possess a national impulse; people tend, therefore, to lose their aspirations and fall back on their grievances; and current Liberal tactics are to feed on grievances.
I hasten to add that I do not despise local grievances, nor consider them to be unimportant: good government is about both national causes and local problems. Nor is my summary of what Liberalism today is about fair to such men as Mr Thorpe, or Mr Russell Johnson, who have thought carefully and long about national reconstruction. But the locality, the ward, the sectional problem, these are the things that preoccupy the new wave of Liberals, Mr Smith, Mr Hain, Mr Tope, Mr Steel.
It is difficult to say what is wrong with , the Labour Party just now. It is not just a matter of leadership, though a certain lackadaisical irresponsibility must be part of the make-up of any Leader who makes Mr Fred Peart senior defence spokesman and asks him to look after agriculture at the same time. It is not simply a matter of the division over Europe, for that division has deprived the Labour front bench of only one major spokesman — Mr Jenkins — and he is not seriously at issue with his colleagues on anything save that one issue of principle: that he sees it as an issue of principle and little more is demonstrated by his emergency return from the continent to vote with his colleagues against the immigration regulations that formed part of the Market package. Nor is it simply an issue — in spite of Mr Crosland's eloquent weekend plea — of careful policy planning, though Labour did themselves no good last July by their production of a policy document principally marked by its inchoate and extreme character. It may be a summation of all these things. My own feeling is that it is something at once simpler and odder — loss — perhaps only temporary — of the collective will to live and triumph.
It is unfashionable, but true, to say that the Labour Party is a far more historical, and historically minded, party than the Conservative. The Conservative — the party, now, not the philosophy — sense of history is based on sleight of hand, on conjuror's capacity to identify with the history of the nation. True, most conservative philosophers are more nationalistic and more nation-minded than philosophers of other breeds, and they tend, therefore, to join the Tories. But it is Labour that has true, if recent, historic& roots, and it is in danger of being trapped by them and strangled by them, because the epoch of history which created that party may well be passing. Labour Is founded on a sense of industrial and workers' grievance: it makes no matter that, objectively considered, the causes el those grievances may be considered still to exist; the fact is that people no longer feel them in the same way. They feel other grievances, and these the Liberals now also feel — and exploit. Those who are least imprisoned in the past of the Labour Party, like Mr Jenkins, look to a much narrower class and economic base than tie the victors of Rochdale and Sutton.
If Labour is in danger of losing i.ts collective will, the Tories are certainly le distress. I noted, not long ago, some sligh1, Changes in their metabolism — changes in aspiration and class — sufficient to cause apprehension among party managers. But they still retain remarkable vitality, as Uxbridge, again, demonstrated. Moreover, Unlike the Labour Party, they retain Vitality in their organisational structure, though it has not been much exploited of late. The fact of the matter is that in all those fields of community work and action Where the Liberals have been happily a-digging, it is the Tories who have the longest tradition of involvement, though they need now to spread a little more Widely than they have done in the past. These are non-doctrinal, non-political areas Of community service and identity, and armies of Tory workers — and particularly Tory women — have been active in them for generations. They were not, it must be said, active in Sutton and Cheam — it Used to be told that the former member, Sir Richard Sharpies, had to be shown his Way around when he arrived in his constituency. But the armies are there and, Once the party leadership realises their noportance, they can be called to action. If there is any pleasure to be gained from Potentially seismic changes in national Politics — and I, being intensely conservative, find little — it is in the confounding of such academic experts as br Butler and Professor Stokes, who were recently proclaiming the imminent arrival of Labour as the natural governing party; and who may shortly find themselves confronted with yet another generation in Which the incredible capacity for survival and victory of the Tories is demonstrated. The Liberals hope; Labour struggles; all Conservative Central Office has to do is Stop chattering and press the right button. Then Mr Taylor, the national politician Who resigned on the EEC, the local 1)Olitician who rules Cathcart, can be vindicated.
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