POLITICAL COMMENTARY
Surbiton shows the way
AUBERON WAUGH
God moves in a mysterious way his won- ders to perform. The day after the Times newspaper announced that, according to its Marplan survey, the Tory lead had been cut to 3.5 per cent it also chose to announce in most lurid detail the impending martyr- dom of Nigel 'Kill-Me-Quick' Fisher, the left-wing Conservative Member for Surbi- ton. He will be a martyr, we are told, to his decent, liberal ideals on race, immigra- tion and Rhodesia, and his martyrdom will be at the hands of the savage semi-articu- late roughnecks in his constituency. I do not know whether these savages intend to eat him afterwards, but I hope they will send me a ringside ticket in any case, because it so happens that a few months ago I called upon this same constituency association to take a second look at its Member.
This was in July, when Kill-Me-Quick's enthusiasm for Labour and Labour's poli- cies had led him to vote with the Labour Government on one of its most sensitive and controversial initiatives, namely the murder of two million friendly civilians in an attempt to force them into an associa- tion they manifestly wished to leave. More- over this action was against the express wishes of Sir Alec (God-be-praised) Douglas- Home, who, with typical bravery and de- cisiveness, had instructed his benches to demonstrate their absence of any opinion on the matter by abstaining. Perhaps Sir Alec, in his goodness, can forgive the fellow, but 'I cannot. An affront to Sir Alec is like striking a blind man, robbing a beggar, insulting the Queen, committing gross indecency in church. St Kill-Me-Quick has gone too far. Up and at him, my rascals.
But the Times's inquiries into the Surbi- ton Conservative Association prompt a more serious vein of reflection than the inquirers were prepared to indulge. Their concern was merely to canonise St Kill-Me- Quick and his neighbour, Sir George Sinclair, the milk-white cock of Dorking, who is similarly threatened, coupling them both with the name of Sir Anthony. Meyer, the amiable `right-wing' candidate for East Flint, whose treatment at the hands of the Esher Association I remarked at the time. There are nasty undercurrents in Surrey conservatism, the message goes, and the Tory party had better look to its image, or it will be taken over by Monday Club extremists.
This is not the moral which I choose to draw. As I pointed out some weeks ago, the Young Conservatives in certain areas are every bit as much politically motivated, and every bit as much well organised, as the Surrey roughnecks. All that has happen- ed is that, for the first time, Conservatives are beginning to take an interest in politics, and this is a development we should all wel- come. One day it may even spread to Conservative Members of Parliament. In the meantime, constituency associations have every right to sack members who are not to their liking, and even if the system produces some bizarre and repulsive re- cruits, at least it will represent a genuinely democratic movement.
Labour members seldom have these show- downs with their constituency associations for the good reason that they were chosen for their politics, and a left-wing associa- tion will generally chose a left-wing mem- ber. Conservative candidates, on the other hand, have traditionally been chosen for quite different qualities. If they could avoid wearing brown suede shoes and came from Eton it was assumed that they were pretty well all right ideologically and the next thing to decide was whether their wives would cut a dash at the Mothers' Union. Nobody bothered to inquire whether some unhappy experience as a fag might have produced dangerously left-wing or latent genocidal tendencies in the man.
But the important thing is that the Con- servative party is beginning to take an in- terest in politics. Members have always had the right to fight back, and a threat to stand as an independent can often be put to good effect as a last resort. Admittedly the better man does not always win, as when Nigel Nicolson was repudiated by Bournemouth East in favour of Mr John Cordle. Cordle must be laughing now, of course, because he was another of those who publicly insulted Sir Alec (God-be-praised) Douglas-Home by voting Labour on the genocide issue.
WAKE UP BOURNEMOUTH EAST!
Meanwhile, the Times's Marplan survey, along with the Daily Telegraph's Gallup and all the other polls, seems to suggest that very many voters intend to vote Labour after all. We shall know more after this week's by-elections, where the North Isling- ton Labour constituency party's antics may yet become a minor scandal—even if none of the voters there read the Sunday Times, as Mr O'Halloran claimed in a rare moment of garrulousness. Perhaps they feel that the Tory party has no souL This is not the moment to discuss possible consequences of another Labour victory. For the present we must embark on a serious discussion of electoral trends, and turn to the new book by David Butler and Donald Stokes, Political Change in Britain, published by Messrs Macmillan this week. Labour's claim to possess 'soul' is essentially the claim that Labour has always advanced and will con- tinue to advance the interests of the lower working class at the expense of the rest of the community. All that remains to be seen is what proportion of the working class identifies itself as a beneficiary of this process.
Doctors Butler and Stokes provide an enormous amount of fascinating informa- tion in this field, and the only shame seems to be that they draw all the wrong con- elusions. In an excellent chapter on 'Class and Change' they point out that social mobility, being preponderantly in an up. wards direction, is detrimental to Labour identifications, but then they go on to point out that social mobility itself is only a minor factor in the overall pattern of changing party allegiance, since it affects very few people and its influence is further diminished by the fact that workers who climb the social scale come overwhelmingly (in the proportion of two to one) from Con- servative working-class families. The real!) significant consideration, they say, is that Labour working-class families stay Labour' and that those children of Consenative working-class families who stay in the v,ork- ing class—the runts, if you like, in the litter —tend to join Labour. Hence, they argue, the working class is becoming more and more Labour and any non-working-class party is doomed.
All very well, so far as it goes. There is not nearly enough on the subject of the propensity to abstain (occasioned by a diminution of this class identification and almost entirely detrimental to Labour) and nothing that I saw on the influence of emigration (now running at 150,000 a year and preponderantly detrimental to Con- servatism). But the moral which I draw from the set of statements above concerns the political appeal of the two parties t the working class, and seems to me as plain as a pikestaff. When asked to account for working-class Conservatism, the two docto make the usual bleating noises about defer ence, and then go on to show that thi sentiment is in decline among younger voters, and so is Conservatism. But the startling fact is that although Conservative in the working class are outnumbered tw to one, their offspring outnumber Labou workers in attaining middle class status by another two to one, and this seems to point inescapably to a different conclusion: that unless all advancement in English society is determined by deference, Coo. servative voters of the working class are more intelligent, more able and more ambitious than their Labour counter- parts.
A further interesting discovery is that downwardly mobile Conservative %ow,- from middle to working class—are less likely to change allegiance to Labour tha upwardly mobile Labour voters are change to Conservatism. It follows th social mobility in either direction is det mental to Labour, and that a blurring abandonment of class identification positively fatal. Both these results a claimed for the Comprehensive Educati Bill to be presented this Parliament by wi Ted Short (back and sides) and oppo if that is the word, by Mrs Margo Thatcher.
So back to the soul. Whenever To wish to appeal to the working class, th press a button and up pops Lord Balm crying his• eyes out about the old age P sioners. But that is the exact opposite the true Conservative appeal to the worki class, which is based upon self-helpmansh even at the expense of social security not of old age pensions, at any rate supplementary benefit. Their contacts * the working class are so few and so representative that they have no idea * their real strength lies, and until they Doctor Butler and Doctor Stokes (s' your political correspondent's margin they will continue to see their working support drift and die.
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