Political commentary

Winds of social change

Ferdinand Mount

Is Warrington merely a Torrington or Orpington, a high tide of discontent with the two big parties which will recede as the General Election approaches? Or is it Armageddington, a sea change in British Politics portending the end of the two-party System, or the end of Michael Foot or Margaret Thatcher? And what was the meaning of the Prime Minister's response in Monday's censure debate? Do her measures to deal with unemployment represent a once-for-all palliative or the beginning of a long erosion of Thatcherism? Define your terms to taste and you can argue either way.

don't think there is much worth saying except that Mrs Thatcher will be as Thatchelite as she can get away with being. She will respond to bad news reluctantly and seize on the faintest streak of dawn, true or false. But what is worth remarking on is that Whatever is happening inside the Conservative Government and Party is happening very slowly. The deviations so far are Modest undulations, not to be put in the U or S class.

By comparison, the pace of change in the Other parties is rattling. In the last fortnight, the Labour Party has voted not only to give Up the Bomb, but to get rid of the American bases and also committed itself to leaving the EEC within a year (these are NEC decisions, but Conference is bound to ratify them). The leadership has given up pretending to resist. The Left has given up Pretending not to be in control.

Equally dramatic — and less reported on IS the change that has come over the Social Democrats within the last couple of Months. In vulgar terms, they have moved towards the free market nearly as fast as the Labour Party has moved towards Moscow.

Curiously enough — and this, I think, has taken everyone by surprise — it is outside the Conservative Government that the revolt against the State has gathered pace in the Past couple of years. And what the Warrington result does mean or could be made to mean is that, for the first time, there is some chance of mobilising a permanent majority which is critical of State power. Now this is something quite new. Mr Roy Jenkins himself might readily say that he hadn't used the word Socialism for years. But he could make this confession from the notoriously well-padded security of Brussels. The views of the likely defectors in the Parliamentary Labour Party were either unclear or disheartening. It was not hard to Predict that a Social Democratic Party Would gather votes, but what exactly would the votes be for?

Bill Rodgers was heard to talk about giving the workers in Stockton-on-Tees what they really wanted. But until they left the Labour Party, most Social Democrats seemed to be unreconstructed Croslandites, believers in high public spending as the motor of social progress. In coming to terms with the Liberals, they looked more in sympathy with David Steel than with Jo Grimond.

But now they are talking a different language — except for Shirley Williams who takes longer to change. Since the formation of the SDP, its leaders have talked clearly and specifically about the 'social market', as if invoking the benison of Ludwig Erhard. Just as Enoch Powell used to talk glowingly about the market as the most wonderful computer ever known, so now David Owen extols the market as 'a continuous referendum' — though for some obscure reason he continues to describe himself as a socialist. John Horam, only a few months ago a Labour member for Gateshead, now calls himself 'a market economist' and gives speeches in the House of Commons that would bring tears to the eyes of Adam Smith or Arthur Seldon.

The rise of free-market feeling is not confined to the Social Democrats. Even in the murkier reaches of the Labour Party, weird echoes of market economics occasionally twang in the ears of the Caliban Tendency. A pamphlet from the party's Council Housing Working Group speaks eagerly of the huge growth in home ownership 'which Labour governments have been second to none in bringing about' (Oh come on, surely you knew that). Bizarrer still, the group — which includes such well-loved figures as Frank Allaun and 'Afghan Allan' Roberts, Labour MP for Bootle — speaks of 'Labour's own uncertainty and consequent lack of confidence' about public housing: 'what exactly is it for?' Well, if they don't know.

People, the Labour Party now tells us, want to rent but also want the freedoms associated with home ownership. They want 'a wider range of housing choice'. It's like being back in the Bow Group in the dear dead days when we all wore striped shirts.

There is no doubt about the source of these strange vibrations. They do not merely oscillate within the atmosphere shared by politicians and economists. They come in zinging in direct from the great Out There. Slowly but ineluctably, the pressure from the voters for power over and choice and independence in their own lives steals upon the clothiest political ear.

I think the master lesson here comes from one of Britain's most unforecast booms — the boom in private health insurance, now covering 7 per cent of the population and growing by more than 20 per cent a year, including more and more trade union members. Yet no government — certainly not this one — has particularly encouraged it. The tax concessions available are not handsome. Nor, whatever you may read in the papers, have standards in the National Health Service declined noticeably; I guess the contrary. It's just that people want quicker and more personal service.

Now already this appears to be taking pressure off the NHS. Hospital waiting lists are falling. The average London casualty department seems emptier, to me at least. The NHS now has surplus hospitals. Con trary to the old bogey of private competition creating 'two nations in health care', there is no reason why private supplementation should not make it easier for the NHS to raise standards.

The State seems to do least harm when it avoids standing in the way of popular demands but does not try to interpret and execute them on a national scale. That means removing legal barriers and public monopolies; it does not mean always creating a whole new structure to replace the old Morrisonian public corporation. The State's manner should be as recessive and unobtrusive as possible.

The reigning free-market answer to the low quality of State education is to scrap local authority ownership and control of all State schools and go over to vouchers for all parents. But it might be not only cheaper to run but also less unsettling and more genuinely popular if instead the State simply paid teachers' basic salaries in all local schools.

The council would no doubt own and run lots of schools as now, but virtually all parents would have the 'economic freedom' to choose other types of schools — for any additional fees at non-council schools would usually be no more than the equiva lent of a packet of cigarettes a day. If politicians are nervous of thereby subsidis ing Eton and Harrow, a proviso that two-thirds of the intake must be local children, if the school wanted to qualify to have its teachers even partially paid by the State, would soon dilute the class exclusiveness without lowering academic standards of most public schools.

As often as not, great social changes take place largely regardless of governments.

Despite the claims of politicians, the return of widespread home ownership to England (not yet to Scotland) after an interval of two or three centuries was one such. Will doctoring and schooling be the next?

If so, it will be the people themselves who help to raise the standards of the welfare state and to mitigate the agonising revenue raising problems which have bedevilled post-war British governments. And they will do so simply by reassuming individual responsibilities as and when they can afford it. Think of the annual bill for housing subsidies today if home ownership had stuck at its pre-war level.