Political commentary

Smoothness is all

Ferdinand Mount

At about half-past three on Monday afternoon, a great wave of smoothness wafted up to me. Its precise composition was hard to analyse: certainly not Old Spice, Bay Rum possibly, perhaps even Honey and Flowers, certainly a cupful of emollient phrases — 'with the greatest respect', 'I thank the Hon Gentleman for his kind words', 'the Hon Gentleman is an old friend' — that sort of thing. Looking down, you could see Mr Francis Pym, the popular new Leader of the House enjoying a joke with the affable Mr Kenneth Baker, the newly promoted Minister of State at the Department of Industry and the last of the Heath men to be forgiven, both with that slicked-down hair like a wet runway which every Tory minister used to have.

There too, was Mr Peter Walker explaining the beauties of merging the White Fish Authority and the Herring Industry Board into the Sea Fish Authority. Quite like old times, in fact. And if Sir Keith Joseph was still alongside them, even about him these days there is a touch of velvet, slightly crushed.

In short, a certain smoothness has set in. The machine, if it is not too laughable to describe the operations of any government as a machine, may in future be. expected to operate with rather less clang and hiss, perhaps even fewer leaks and splutters. Alas, it is usually those very leaks and splutters which indicate that serious argument is going on about serious problems.

The Prime Minister's own incautious complaints about leaks and disloyalty suggest that smoothness is what she is after. She seems to he begining to succumb to the dangerous occupational obsession of Prime Ministers: that what matters most is for a government to be smooth-running and hermetically sealed — as silent as the Rolls-Royce with only the tick of the electoral clock audible. A pity, because her greatest virtue to date has been her awkwardness — her refusal to take `up a point' for an answer, her insistence on asking civil servants exactly why instead of just accepting 'our judgment is that we have got it about right, Prime Minister.'

But it is important to understand now what to worry about. Wishful thinking in the Sunday papers has it that the government is gradually tiptoeing away from the fight against inflation. Little by little, they say,Ministers will redirect their time and your money towards 'saving jobs', so as to bring down the unemployment figures in time for the next election.

This view seems to me psychologically unsound, politically illogical and, above all,

absurdly provincial. Mrs Thatcher is committed, heart and soul to the defeat of inflation; she cannot switch Holy Grails in mid-quest; to pitch her next General Election on saving jobs would be as though Joan of Arc were to say, 'I'm afraid that getting rid of the English is not an available option at this moment in time, but we have made enormous progress in defeating brucellosis in Lorraine.'

The real danger to her survival continues to be the resurgence of inflation in 1982-3. That would mean that the whole business would have been in vain. The whole crew, wet and dry alike, would go down with the ship. To prevent lhis. there can be no question of a soft Budget this year or next. And every other Western government is in the same boat.

We should not pay too much attention to the misleading leaks from No. 10, no, sorry. the 'official guidance' that, to quote The Times's headline: 'Personal Tax Rates to Escape Budget Increase.' That's like saying: Public Flogging Not to Come Back. There was never any question of raising the actual rates. There was, and is, every possibility of not raising the personal tax allowances by enough to keep up with inflation and of slapping 50p on a bottle of whisky.

The retrenchment — through higher taxation, if not through lower public spending— has to go ahead; the reform, however, has got bogged down. We were to have had a radical Conservative government: so far we have merely had a Conservative one 'I couldn't get it through Cabinet', 'I was overruled'. Mrs Thatcher uses the frank admission of impotence as a weapon to mobilise support, but she manages to mobilise it only outside the Cabinet. The most remarkable feature of the majority Of this Cabinet is its obdurate resistance to even the theoretical consideration of genuine reform,

What is it that makes men like Mr Whitelaw. Sir Ian Gilmour and Lord Carrington such entrenched defenders of the status quo? One reason has already been suggested in this column: the imperialist's fear and distrust of the working class the belief that the natives can be held in check only by a cunning mixture of bribery and control. •

But there is. I think, another reason, allied to, but distinct from, the first. This 'is the belief that important reforms can be 'undertaken only as part of a national consensus. This is more creditable, in that it reflects a cautious and democratic spirit, but it has the unwelcome consequence of giving the Opposition a permanent veto. Debate is so much easier if you can argue that the Opposition — or some leading members of it — did or promised to do what you are doing: Mr Healey promised to reduce income tax and did cut government spending. and he sold some of the government's BP shares, To have this retort available imparts an inner confidence that you are operating within a legitimate area of reform..Smooth men need to be reassured that they are not acting like cranks.

What has stifled reform in this country is therefore the fossilisation of social democratic thought. For the past ten years, there has been little or no fresh terrain which could be described as all-party territory.

What would Tony Crosland have said? That is the unspoken Gilmour question. And the answer is all too often: we haven't much, idea because the question had not really come up at the time. In a fascinating collection of essays The Socialist Agenda: Crosland's Legacy (edited by David Lipsey and Dick Leonard, Cape £7.95), Crosland's friends and advisers try to guess , but have to admit. like Professor Ian Little, that 'The trade-offs were thus not yet very interesting. In the course of time he would have played it by ear as events unfolded,' A certain evasiveness is still in evidence. Nowhere, so far as I can see, do any of them refer to Crosland's single most famous statement that, for public spending — or local government spending in particular, for which he was responsible at the time — 'the party's over.'

But gradually new ideas are beginning to seep in. William Rodgers has argued that public spending may he intrinsically waste-, ful and that, instead, Socialists might concentrate on extending practical freedoms by increasing the real value of take-home pay. Colin Crouch, a former Chairman of the Fabian Society, entertains the possibility of giving parents real power over their children's schooling by introducing vouchers. The Crosland spirit — which consists essentially in noticing what people actually want — is more than a haze of old cigar smoke.

If it is to take practical form, though. there must be a new party.' Michael Foot's Labour Party is entirely closed to popular politics of this sort. The Tory squires cannot or will not move in a radical direction until they see `a. respectable body of opinion' offering a similar agenda from the other side of the House,

This has been the history of state control of the economy and the creation of the Welfare State over the past century; any large scale dismantling of those bureaucracies in the interests of enlarging the liberties of the working class is likely to need the same pre-conditions of consensus. From the start, Mrs Thatchee•s great difficulty is that she has been operating from far too narrow a political base.

It is not just millions of Labour voters who are waiting for Roy and Bill and Shirley and David. Half the Tory Cabinet is waiting too.