POLITICS
The Centre Forwards who refuse to kick off
CHARLES MOORE
0 n come the Conservative Centre Forwards. Rather subdued applause from the crowd, but they certainly look as if they mean business. There's lofty Ian Gilmour, with that legendary head that nods the ball into the net. There's the bulky reassurance of Geoffrey Rippon. And there's the cap- tain, Francis Pym, looking a little bit historical in those Stanley Matthews shorts, but still capable of some nifty teamwork . . . . The Centre Forwards all bunch round the ball. The whistle blows . . . . But what's this? They're all refusing to kick it. The game can't start.
Mr Pym has made it clear that he and his team are not campaigning for a change in the Conservative leadership. He says, a little cryptically, that: `. . . the party quite rightly admires Margaret Thatcher for her courage and her determination to get things right again.' The Centre Forwards support government policy on defence, trade unions and privatisation. They are not in favour of reflation. Mr Pym says that he is not a rebel, and his associates claim that he only became their leader reluctant- ly, 'dragged protesting to the chair'. On the other hand, the Centre Forwards talk boldly of organising some sort of whip with which not to oppose the Government, not to challenge the leadership etc. It is con- fusing.
It is true that all expressions of Tory dissent are rather carefully phrased. No direct attack is mounted on a leader until he or she is clearly too weak to survive. But there does seem to be something about Wet revolts which is particularly, well, wet. In the Heath years, several dissident Tories developed something which later became known as Thatcherism. No comparable post- or anti-Thatcherism is developing now. Although Centre Forwards make several complaints against the Govern- ment's economic policy, it really is more to do with nuance, tone, the matter of 'style'. It is more to do with whether Mrs Thatcher is music to your ears or chalk scratching down a blackboard, than whether you think she should borrow more money and mend a few sewers.
Of course, style does matter in politics, because, by making things comprehensible and attractive, it makes them possible. In the Falklands war, for example, Mr Pym was no doubt as keen on a British victory as the rest of us, but his manner was of someone expecting and therefore courting defeat; Mrs Thatcher's was of someone believing in and therefore gaining victory. But Mrs Thatcher's style may, all the same, mislead her critics, not to mention herself. She says so often that she is radical and inflexible that people believe her. She thinks, and they think, that she has brought a new language and set of concepts to politics.
Take one of these concepts. The Prime Minister says that she wants to create an `enterprise culture'. Her devotion to this form of culture arises from her view of British history over the past 150 years. In this view, Britain admires unproductive, bureaucratic habits and does not respect enterprise. This is because Britain is the victim of a class system which elevates snobbish social distinctions over real achievement. British institutions reflect this system and these old-fashioned obses- sions. The brightest and best of England's sons (and, now, daughters) have these beliefs inculcated at school and university. In order to retain social prestige, they take bureaucratic or arty or other parasitical jobs, and so the decline continues.
The 'enterprise culture' is the Thatcher answer to this problem. Children must be brought up to admire commerce and trained in skills relevant to it. Outdated habits and distinctions must be thrust aside. People on grouse moors, wearing old school ties (no shrinking from clichés here), must give way to people who are allowed to succeed 'on their merits'.
So says Mrs Thatcher. But so also said Harold Wilson and Edward Heath and even Alec Douglas-Home (if you do not believe me, look at the 1964 Conservative Manifesto). So said Anthony Sampson in his Anatomy of Britain, and so says every work of sociology and every American article on 'the British disease'. And in the light of these sayings every government for 20 years has introduced its reforms. Old school ties lie in ribbons; grouse moors stand untenanted, or owned by men whose foreign passports disqualify them from Offices of Profit under the Crown, and yet, according to Mrs Thatcher, the enterprise culture still does not exist. She expresses, unaltered, the consensus of the age.
It is almost perfect rubbish. If class is the problem, how is it that the class-ridden Britain of 150 years ago led the world in trade, manufacture and scientific know- ledge? If education is the difficulty, how is it that generations of men trained on nothing but Euclid, Virgil and the Autho- rised Version of the Bible managed to create an 'enterprise culture' of a strength which the world had never seen? If old- fashioned institutions are the dead weight, why do ancient schools, universities, hos- pitals maintain so much higher standards than the creations of the 1960s? Why do old buildings stay popular and stay up. while new buildings, if we are lucky, fall down? What one notices in modern Britain is not the lack of innovation, but the failure of innovation.
Searching for an explanation for the process which the Sampsonite anatomists misdescribe, one comes upon the word which they find so unmentionable — gov- ernment. At a time when government knew precise limits, enterprise was little damaged even if the prime minister, fes- tooned in old school ties, never left the grouse moor. At a time when government consumes half the nation's productive capacity, not even the most thrillingly technocratic prime minister can make en- terprise seem very attractive. The reason why so many talented people avoid careers in industry is not because they lack 'enter- prise culture', it is because they are enter- prising enough to work out where their best material interests lie.
Now it is true that Mrs Thatcher has frequently identified government as an enemy of much that she admires. In this she differs slightly from her predecessors. But the last six years have not been ones of notable government retreat. The 'condi- tions for enterprise' of which she often speaks are very much what they were in 1979 — unfavourable. Faced with this, Mrs Thatcher has turned to exhortation, prefer- ring 'enterprise culture' to enterprise itself. And when she talks of this culture, it is of something which 'we' must bring about, a moral and political crusade conducted by government. I see little in that which distinguishes her radically from Mr Pym and his Centre Forwards. It is largely a difference about how noisy one wants to be about it, a question, if you like, of style.
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