VIEWPOINT
Damn your principles!
GEORGE GALE
It has always been my presumption that Tories were serious about power, and if a man is in the business of politics, then to be serious about power is to want it, to seek it, to keep it. and if lost to find it again. The desire for office has traditionally been regarded within the Tory party as not only an admirable ambition but as an essential ambition for those aspiring to play the highest roles. The one element that the memoirs of Tory politicians have in com- mon is the quest for office. The whole ap- paratus of the Conservative and Unionist party; its associations, its central office, its regional nabobs, its agents, its press officers, its researchers, its women with their hats, its Ycs, its backwoodsmen and its advertis- ing experts, the entire baroque set-up, that is, exists to elect more than half the country's Members of Parliament from within its ranks. The purpose of the party is to rule the country.
Just as a man might go into the City with no other purpose but to make his for- tune, so might a man go into the Tory party to seek power. Just as men wishing to make money would leave a City where they could only lose it and seek their for- tunes elsewhere, so men seeking power would swiftly quit a Tory party which showed itself to be more interested in principles (say) than in the pursuit of office. To some, what I have just written will seem either nonsense or heresy. To others, historians in particular, it will seem like an unnecessarily long-winded statement of the obvious. It is to the first group that I ad- dress myself. Members of it like to quote Edmund Burke's definition of a political party as 'a body of men united for promo- ting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed'. Such people find in principle or in principles the main justi- fication for party and also that without which no party would stick together. There are sev- eral objections to Burke's definition, which is hardly surprising. An eighteenth century Irishman can scarce be expected to expound authoritative views on twentieth century British party politics. One objection is that If the definition were true, then it would be reasonable to expect the body of men so united to know what the particular principle was on which they were all agreed. Another objection is that the definition assumes that between the national interest (whatever that may be) and this elusive but particular prin- ciple there can be no conflict. A third objec- tion is that the definition makes no reference to the interests of the body of men as poli- ticians or as representatives of (or as ser- vants of) sectional interests. It is, in short, a thoroughly useless definition which, had t been coined by anyone but Burke, would long since have fallen into thoroughly justi- ed desuetude. That it is still knocking round is because it serves the purpose of hose who wish to make of the Tory party combination of men agreed upon principle ther than upon interest, and who wish that • urpose to seem respectably Tory. Since hl.ggtsh Burke is praised by all present ones, what better than this tag?
At this point some may argue that I am obliged to declare my own interest. I do not think I am so obliged. Nevertheless, I will do so. It is to improve the quality of political discussion. I wish this quality to be improved because I think that the more ignorant the political discussion the greater is the threat that we will be ignorantly governed. By ignorant governance I mean excessive governance. We will be governed too much as soon as we forget that our rulers are themselves ruled by the ambitious lust for power and as long as we remember that we were taught that to be principled is to possess a political virtue. I discern the necessity for governance; but the less I am governed, the better for me, and the less you are governed, the better for you, and the less he, she and they are governed, the better for them all. I am, of course, here making assertions. They flow from the knowledge of myself which tells me that I do not like being ordered, from my observa- tion of my fellow men which tells me that except for the sheep neither do they, and from the conclusions of twenty years' brooding upon the brutal acts of men.
Principles are no more than words, phrases, sentences, used by rulers to justify or excuse such of their orders as would not otherwise be obeyed or such of their arrangements as would otherwise not be tolerated. The whole of our living is un- fortunately riddled with principles. I do not for one moment suppose that we can sud- denly clear them out and have a bonfire of them. But I would propose that we stop searching for new ones or better ones and cease striving to equip every outfit in the country with a suitable set of them.
In particular, when we are fortunate enough to have as one of our two chief political parties the Conservative and Unionist party which, pace .Burke, is very far from being a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle on which they are all agreed, then we would do well to view with the greatest dismay and suspicion the foolish attempts by those who should know better to make the Tories fit Burke's otiose definition. I do not myself think the risk of their suc- ceeding to be great—the Tories' desire for office will see to that so long as the recogni- tion persists that political power in a system of representative government flows from an accommodation of interests rather than from an assertion of principles. However, now that many political commentators are en- visaging a Labour victory at the next elec- tion, the Tories are already being sirened.
The situation is heavy with irony. The Labour party has got where it now is, which is in power with a fat majority, through the necessary (and very healthy and desirable) abandonment of its principles. Hugh Gait- skell deserves, and is now being given, his full and due credit for this achievement in political education. For the Labour party to grow up, it had to dispose of its outward signs of puberty, the chief of which was, or went by the name of, Bevanism. Bevanism was essentially sucking your thumb. It looks ox in a pram, but it won't do for grown-ups. The Bevanites stuck their thumbs in their mouths and sucked hard and kidded themselves that socialism was coming out with their mothers' milk. They yearned for a distant fairy time when they were young and there were goodies and baddies and fairy queens and hideous villains and do-it-yourself kits of moral maxims, or principles, and when there was a once-noble body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle, like socialism, in which they were all agreed. And the Bevanites used to argue (and indeed some of them still do) that far better than to tamper with the principle of socialism would be to remain in opposition.
Nonsense, said Gaitskell, and nonsense says Wilson. They want power, they like power. they want to hang on to it and something called principle is not going to stop them. The Labour party has grown up. Fine. We have every right therefore to ex- pect to have our two great political parties competing for our votes in an unprincipled way and out of such healthy non-platonic competition we have every right to expect that the quality of our governance will improve, by which I mean its excesses will be diminished. But perhaps I am premature. Have we not a new Bevanism in our midst? Is not the Tory party, in its old age, de- scending into a second childhood? Is not the present attempt to construct out of the notions of one of its most singular modish and demagogish and Whiggish members a body of doctrine which is to be linked unto the Old Faith, an unseemly display of tom-fool thumb-sucking? The Tory party, and some of its best celebrants, would do well to recall continually that if it possesses any ancestral wisdom, that wis- dom is about getting jobs, or, to put it at its grandest, about looking after the interests of enough people for the party to win elections.
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