THE GREAT DEBATE (1)
The Conservative future
A STUDENT OF POLITICS
The party question to be decided is not so much whether the Common Market is enticing, but what a diet of Common Market and nothing much else will do to the Tory working-class vote (half the total Tory vote), the Tory women vote (also half the Tory vote), the " Provincial smallbusiness vote, and the lower middle class vote. To these people the Common Market, up to 1974 at least, can only mean pains, privations, VAT and boredom, and a greatly increased sense of the very insecurity which they have previously looked to the Tories to allay. The Common Market really means the end of the distinctive Heath programme of fiscal reconstruction, of attempts to achieve price stability, and so on. The work begun this last year may go on, but it will be in the shadow of far greater influences. The creative side of Toryism will simply lapse : the clear economic programme will be exchanged for the economic log-rolling and bureaucracy of Brussels.
Legislation will begin, let us remember, during the next winter, accompanied by phenomenal unemployment and phenomenal by-elections. The Tory party will be edgy, the Tory press more divided not on Europe but on party strategy about Europe. There will be the short Bill (of accession) and the long Bill putting our house in order to meet Brussels requirements. The short Bill will produce at least some Tory malcontents, who cannot thereafter realistically be expected to show the prodigious loyalty in the lobbies needed to steer the long Bill through. The thought of the long Bill itself is horrifying. It will be in no way Tory: indeed Tories do not even now quite realise what it will contain. It will be extremely difficult to amend or modify the legislation as it goes through as one would normally do, because the House will really be ratifying rather than legislating. It will in practice prove impossible to get it across that this is a package deal in which the good and the bad must be taken together. Ministers will have to get up and meet perfectly sensible specific objections with a blank' No.' Ministers will appear, or can easily he made to appear, as unyielding upholders of French policies and interests.
The bulk of amending legislation will excite a storm of bright ideas and superior comments from the press, and its value may not at all points be easy to make clear to constituents. It will be death by a thousand cuts. It will make everyone forget the sense of a Tory 'new start' achieved this year. The Industrial Rela tions Bill will be as if it had never been. The Tory backbencher will be demoralised by having to steamroller through an agreement between Whitehall and Brussels which does them political damage as the impetus and sense of elation gained at Luxembourg is dissipated in a fog of difficult and extremely unfamiliar detail.
Apart from these obvious electoral effects, there are certain things which ought to concern the Tory party about what it is doing in taking us into the EEC. The standard argument is that we are escaping from isolation. This misses the point. The important thing is not getting into the EEC but getting into the power structure of the EEC. They are two very different things. We could well get inside the EEC and find ourselves at least from time to time, and perhaps even semi-permanently, outside its power structure. If this happened, we should be more, not less, isolated than before. It is not an answer to say that the French and Germans are quite happy with their position inside the EEC. Of course they are. They invented it to suit their own needs, and they run it. The Franco-German alliance may well go on running it.
In all this the sensible starting point for the Tory party is to take with a pinch of salt the Foreign Office belief that they can master-mind things, and instead to assume that the tendency of the French and Germans to remain the ruling group in the EEC will be very strong. It is quite sensible for us to join a European alliance; it is not sensible for us to join a European grouping basically run by an alliance of which we are not members. We must sort out which of these courses we are in fact being invited to pursue.
It is supposed to be impertinent to criticise the economic case for entry. Criticisms are brushed aside with an airy statement that the economic effects just cannot be predicted. This is somehow supposed to be reassuring. On any view, however, one can at least find grounds for saying that the economic arguments are perturbing.
As regards tariffs, what matters to Britain in the end is not access in principle, through the Treaty of Rome, but access in practice, through competitiveness. Entry into the EEC reduces our competitiveness in world markets outside the EEC (through loss of preference and the inflationary effects on our price level); it strikes seriously at our competitiveness in our home market; and only marginally increases our competitiveness, except in a few cases, in the EEC market, if the EEC tariff as it will be after 1972 is taken into account. (A firm which cannot overleap post-Kennedy round EEC tariffs from a low cost base outside the EEC will not be able to cope with defending its domestic market when inside the EEC, and subject to increased costs in the form of CAT, CET, CAP etc).
The only way in fact, to be really sure that entry produces a very visible export boom by 1975 will be to devalue at the start of 1973. But it is not clear that the Tory party is prepared to explain without a blush in 1973 that this was one of the preconditions of entry which somehow no one mentioned in 1971. Devaluation will suggest to the public that it was tricked into entry : which is dangerous, because it is what it is already inclined to believe. Worse still, devaluation will require a deflation of home demand accompanied by price rises and the Tories will enter the election run-up period on a programme of austerity. All governments since 1951 have gone into their general elections on an economic upswing. This one may not. Indeed, its majority may give way at a time not ,of its own choosing, and during a regime of austerity.
The greatest dangers facing the party are however not economic or even simple electoral mistakes. They are that it will lose its role. The problem of the moment is that Mr Heath wants to stress the managerial role of the Tory party at the expense of its representative function. Moreover, he wants its managerial style to embody the hopes and commitments of certain metropolitan elites, especially high finance, quality journalism, and certain intellectual circles (among whom must be included the Foreign Office). These people have quite enough power anyway, do not especially want or need a political party, and would probably on the whole prefer to see Mr Heath as a Kennedy-style leader of a party like the US Democrats rather than of anything we in Britain would understand as Tory. This is the audience that Mr Heath is making up to when he talks of going into the EEC for the sake of world peace and world poverty. It was a mixture of elevated business and vague internationalism that made Mr Gaitskell such a bad party leader. Mr Heath is hardly likely to be able to lead the country from a position that came over cold from a Labour leader.
Since the war the Tories have had a secure place in politics, despite inevitable temporary reverses, because the electorate believed they stood for British interests, class harmony, lower taxation, and less bureaucracy. The electorate wants these things and it does not want the values and assumptions of a metropolitan elite. Mr Wilson has already tried to outdo the Conservative party on class harmony by doing nothing either to assist trade union reform or to oppose it. He will resist the gross bureaucracy of the Value Added Tax, as will the Nabarros of this world, and he may well be able to break the public idea that Toryism means cheaper government. Above all, he may succeed in stealing the most important of Tory clothes by appearing more genuinely than in the past to be the leader of the party of the nation.
Some Conservatives suppose that the Common Market problem can be disposed of in October after three months of enthusiastic propaganda and a favourable party vote. Nothing could be further from the truth. Once the parliamentary Conservative party puts its hand to the wheel, it will be lumbered with the problem until the next election. Before MPs commit themselves to creating a state of public enthusiasm on behalf of a project which will furnish no ground for sustained enthusiasm during the present Parliament, they must ask themselves what they expect to be saying to the electorate in 1975, or whenever earlier the election may come.
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