Political Commentary
How socialist is Labour?
Patrick Cosgrave
It is hard to tell which arouses greater Tory indignation—Lord Stansgate's open declaration of intent to nationalise everything in sight, or Mr Wilson's clear determination to suppress Lord Stansgate, his works and pomps, in the run-up to a possible general election. 1, personally, am disappointed by whoever's judgement it was to forego a Panorama confrontation between Lord Stansgate and Mr Michael Heseltine, albeit in the foem of two separate seven-minute films each directed by the gentleman concerned. 1 am disappointed because it was clearly a Labour decision; and any Labour politician or political adviser who did not see that Lord Stansgate would have the pants — not to mention the fancy underpants — off Mr Heseltine before the first minute of his own seven had elapsed was a fool, and pusillanimous to boot. Lord Stansgate was, after all, once a junior BBC producer.
For — and let there be no mistake about it — Lord Stansgate is a most formidable performer. He lacks, it is true, all sense of humour about himself. He has a Nixonian sense of self-righteousness, according to which nothing he or his family does can ever be wrong: his pleasant and pleasantly rich wife may cruise the Greek islands; he can give the most elaborate dinner parties at home and be amazed when Mr Harold Lever, rather than snatch a crusty breakfast sandwich at the office, prefers to bring with him a Fortnum's hamper; he can tell friends — this is to open old wounds — that he will out-manoeuvre Mr Harold Wilson at a Labour Party conference, be smashed by that old master, and still retain his self-esteem unimpaired. And he ... but I have already described him as the Lord George Gordon of the Labour Party. The question is — how socialist is he, and how socialist the party of which he is a member and a senior minister?
The first thing to grasp about Lord Stansgate is that he is an extraordinarily ruce man—no snide comment is implied by those italics. (That is one of the reasons why he would have, metaphorically, divested Mr Heseltine of his garments.) His manners are impeccable, and his courtesy infinite. Serious people of the left and the right alike have had no fault to find with his personal honour; he was once a friend of Mr Enoch Powell, and Mr Eric Heffer now finds it possible to work with him. Mr Lever, indeed, found him a more agreeable superior minister than he did Mr Roy Jenkins. Then he is, of course, traduced. That list, for example, of firms to be nationalised was born, not in the brain of Lord Stansgate, but in that of Mr Harold Wilson. And that fact brings us to this question of how socialist is the Labour Party today.
The short answer is that nobody knows. The definition of a party's conservatism or socialism in our polity is normally defined by comparison with the activity of the other party; and the other party nowadays offers little by way of a solid comparison. Certainly the present Labour Government seems ready to institutionalise philistinism; Mr Healey's wealth tax will not merely encourage but enforce the export, legal or illegal, of British-owned works of art, but the precedent was set by a Conservative government which introduced museum charges, and was so determined in its folly that it was prepared for retrospective legislation to abolish the legal sanctity of wills supposedly guaranteeing the public free right of access to certain established collections.
Certainly, if we are to judge the quality of a party's socialism by the measure of its willingness to encourage the intervention of the state in our affairs, either by subvention or rule, I would have to return to the dreadful judgement of Mr Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times that the Conservative manifesto for the last election was the most collectivist of the three.
There are, however, serious and concerned and self-knowing men standing behind Lord Stansgate. In the main they are not socialists in the Marxist sense, but syndicalists. They want, that is, not the re-ordering of power in society according to some theoretical model, but the re-distribution of power in Britain according to historical experience. They are British Labour men, and trade union men, not continental theorists, and for this reason are despised by the young left, and the theoreticians of the leftist papers increasingly flourished at us at tube stations, as much as they are feared by the middle class. To be sure, they have a certain amount of socialist theory about them — belief in a class war is one of their characteristics — but such appurtenances are less important, far less important, than the fact that they want to alter the balance of power in British society. There is, of course, a class war going on in Britain at the moment. At a deeper level there is, however, a struggle about the character and definition of British society. Serious men of the left — and I am thinking now of men whom I admire and respect — realise this and are convinced — wrongly in my view — that the structure of society may be changed without any change in its character, notably in its political character, and in its political characteristics, such as government by parliament, freedom of speech and of the press, the solidity and permanence of institutions, and some degree of reverence for what is. In all this seething discussion, Lord Stansgate is no less a front man than was Mr Heath.
Now, in nearly all Labour divisions before this one the radicals endured two considerable disadvantages. First, they were not loved by the trade union leaders. In 1952 Arthur Deakin, the then most formidable of union bosses, not onlY swung his committed card votes for the parliamentary Labour leadership and against the radical left but denounced the Bevanites "those within the party who set up a caucuS' who failed "to realise that the ordinary rank and file party member or trade unionist has no time for their disregard of those principles and loyalties to which our government has held so strongly through the whole course of its existence."
That division is abolished, for the parliamentary left and the unions are hand in glove(Deakin's lie about attitudes was thrown back in his teeth when six of the seven constituency elected seats on the National Executive were won by Bevanites.) Second, the Labour left have always been handicapped by their own acceptance of the idea that they are not national, not generally popular: as early as 1950 Bevanites were telling Attlee — or admitting to him — that they would prefer an election on clear lines in which Labour was defeated than the compromises anent staying in office; and they have been dubbed impractical ever since. Now, however, the Labour left has a national cause. Nobody should underestimate their commitment to ending the present British association with the Common Market, or their conviction that their aspiration in this respect is that of most British citizens. All Labour taxation policies may go awry; all Lord Stansgate's nationalisation plans may be proven folly; the whole business of British politics maY be — as I have argued — about a redistribution of power within society rather than about different doctrines. But, if I am even remotely right about the identity of the two major parties being defined in relation to one another, the left have this over the Tories — that they are prepared to submit their judgement to the people, leaving It to them to decide whether membership of the EEC is right or not. From the Conservative benches nobody reasonable would expect that ready repudiation of a European commitment which marked Mr Wilson's change of front 'after his defeat of 1970: Mr Heath is too deePlY and honestly pledged. But we might ask for at least an acquiescent grunt in favour of a
refer endum.
Not so: a terrible opposition prevails. It is as though Sir John Simon, arch-appeaser of the 'thirties, were still in government and observ-. ing as he did then, "The question of war and peace is not one on which the opinion of the uninstructed should be invited." The unin: structed are the people; on the technicalities oht their entitlement to a voice, which lies beneat all this talk of socialism and conservatism, shall write next week
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