POLITICAL COMMENTARY

Labour's election strategy

AUBERON WAUGH

It was an unfortunate coincidence of timing that Mr Wilson's first election address, with its keynote that The Labour government is proud of its achievements' should have been overshadowed by the fulfilment of what will certainly be remembered as its crowning—indeed only—achievement in foreign affairs: the final collapse of half- starved Biafra. However, the human con- sequences of the fact that the Parliamentary Labour party was prepared to carry to its logical conclusion Mr Stewart's strong desire to preserve the unity of the Nigerian Federa- tion need not concern us here. So far as the domestic political scene is involved, Biafra's death agony merely succeeded in stealing the headlines from Mr Wilson's im- portant speech at Swansea, which was not at all the effect desired.

Never mind. As the New Statesman pointed out last week, the incident should teach all these nig-nogs not to get fancy ideas about self-determination. A British Labour government knows what's best for them. The important thing now is to win the election for Labour, and see what Labour can do for the British. So far as the Swansea speech gives any clue to his election strategy, Mr Wilson would seem to be proposing three lines of attack : the 'positive' side of Labour's achievements, that is, the general increase in spending on the social services plus the general increase in standard of liv- ing; promises for the future, including some sort of two-year National Plan; finally, good old-fashioned swipes at the Conservatives, stressing the 'negative' aspects of Mr Heath's alternative.

This then, will be his ostensible platform. So far as the first is concerned its only significance is that from now on the Government propaganda machine will be concerned to convince people that they are having a good time, instead of-convincing them that they are making tremendous sacrifices. The third will derive its strength from what is called the 'leadership' issue. Labour strategists are probably wrong when they imagine that Mr Wilson's reputation is capable of reinstatement, but they are surely right when they point out how the lack of enthusiasm among Tories for Mr Heath has communicated itself to the elec- torate at large. On the other hand leadership is not what decides pre-election and election swings. These are decided far more by the trend of unemployment, wages and prices in the months concerned. Sir Alec Douglas-Home never managed to convince

the electorate at large that he possessed those qualities of leadership which some Tories claimed to discern, but the 1964 election campaign brought a six per cent swing back to the Government—purely, it is now thought, on the strength of the election boom.

And it is here, of course, that Labour's real strategy is to be found. Essentially, it is exactly the same as Labour strategy in 1966 and Tory strategy in 1964. When Mr Heath, in 1966, went round denouncing - the magic formula '9: 5: , he though that he was demonstrating the economic fallacies behind Labour's record, whereby wages had risen by nine per cent, prices by five per cent and productivity by only one per cent.

In fact he was pronouncing his own party's election epitaph. And now, once again, wages are going to be allowed to shoot up.

Transport House is preparing itself for an election in the third week of October.

Strategists there were dismayed by persistent press rumours of a snap election in May, until enquiries traced their source, which was in Downing Street. Mr Wilson has always remembered the way Sir Alec's coy indecisiveness over the 1964 election led labour to spend all its money before the campaign started. He also has a horror of appearing to be without options, but there is no chance that either the wages explosion or Mr Jenkins's miraculous Budget will have brought about a sufficient recovery for Labour to win in May, and if he delays the Election until next March he will be faced with the unpopularity of decimalisa- tion of the currency.

Mr Wilson could not have better demonstrated the way in which the election will be fought on the secret, economic front than when he produced his ostensible 'Two Year Plan'. Election promises nowadays are not so much likely to be disbelieved as totally ignored. In America, I have been told, television sets have been equipped with a device which automatically switches off during advertisements. Voters nowadays res- pond in exactly the same way to election promises, which might explain, as I suggested earlier, the impunity with which Mr Heath promises military support to any Sheikh or Tunku he meets on his travels. But the fact that Mr Wilson bothers to produce a new set of election promises shows the unim- portance of the talking match in his election strategy. The great two-year plan is designed to give the party something to say while events on the economic front bring Labour into a winning position.

The Prime Minister's other wiles are sub- ject to constant change. He once hoped that the Heath-Powell split could be put to Labour's advantage in the same way that the Gaitskell-Bevan split was widely thought to have put paid to Labour's chances in . the 'fifties—although, of course, it was principally the boom which finished them. Unfortunately, however, he soon dis- covered that any mention of Mr Powell had the opposite effect, enormously increasing Tory popularity among tradi- tional Labour supporters. Moreover, the Tories are not prepared to go to war with each other in quite the same way that Labour were, even if this reluctance means that they are lumbered with Mr Heath. As second best, the Prime Minister even tried to cook up a massive split among the Tories of Surbiton, as if the situation there revealed the inherent contradictions in modern Conservatism, divided between brutal skinheads and sensible progressives like N. Fisher. Again, unfortunately for him, practically nobody 'in the country except your political correspondent has any interest in what happens to Mr Fisher, whose relev- ance to the election campaign will in fact be peripheral. Essentially, it will be Mr Jenkins's election, and Mr Jenkins's econo- mic strategy which wins or loses it. So far as Mr Wilson's noises are concerned it would appear that they will differ very little from those of 1964, concen- trating on thirteen wasted years of Tory misrule: 'Our opponents will of course, exploit every one of these problems for campaigning purposes. Problems they utterly failed to solve in all their years of office, problems of whose existence they Seemed totally unaware' Which sounded wonderful in 1964, frOm an opposition leader, but sounded strangely petulant last Saturday, in 1970, from a Prime Minister in his sixth year of office.

Mr Jenkins's election strategy seems no different from that of Mr Callaghan in 1966 or Mr Maudling in 1964—or Mr Amory in 1959, for that matter. He hopes to exempt some two to three million workers from paying income tax in his Budget, as well as helping newly-weds with house mortgages. Both these measures would be surprisingly cheap, for surprisingly large electoral gains.

But the main election winner will be on the wages front, and it remains to be seen whether or not this will have caused sufficient inflation between now and the Budget to frighten the Treasury into retreating from the other two proposals. It also remains to be seen whether or not Mr Jenkins will allow Mr Wilson to talk him into prolonging the pre-election boom if autumn has not brought quite the expected ,Labour recovery—with a strong balance of payments at the same time.

Mr Jenkins has the perfectly respectable ambition to go down in history as the Chancellor who won the election for Labour —with a strong balance of payments at the same time. Perhaps he can do it, perhaps he can't. But a study of what happened in 1964 should convince him that any extension of the election boom after October can do nothing but harm his reputation, whatever the result. Since 1964 Mr Maudling and his friends have decided that they were engaged in a new and ingenious economic experiment, attempting to accelerate out of economic difficulties, like spending one's way out of bankruptcy. But the hard truth remains that Mr Maudling's reputation has never been quite the same since—despite the enormous benefit which accrued to Sir Alec Douglas- Home in simpler Tory minds.

Even if the Tories had won in October 1964—with a tiny and probably unworkable majority, with honest Sir Alec all cock-a- hoop for his second term, and with a deficit of £750 million to work off—Mr Maudling would have received very little credit, only blame. So Mr Jenkins might at least think twice before extending the inflationary wage scramble into 1971. If he does, at least one of our political leaders will have learned one lesson—not that there aren't quite a few left for them to learn.