Political commentary
Exploring Labour differences
Patrick Cosgrave
I have said before that I simply do not see that great divide between right and left in the Labour Party which others have claimed to observe. Rather do I see, on the whole, an organisation of socialists pretty doctrinaire within whatever part of the political spectrum attracts them, but broadly in agreement in their intention to build a socialist and unfree society. Some see the consequences of socialism for freedom much more clearly than others: Mr Eric Heffer and Mr Roy Jenkins — to take two very different men — believe, I am sure, that the kind of socialist society they 'wish to create would also be a free and humane one; others in their party regard freedom as neither here nor there. If pressed on the danger to it they generally mutter some claptrap or other about the definition of freedom, whereas, of course, that definition is as plain as the nose on your face. However, I do think that in discussing the essential, doctrinal unity of the Labour Party, and seeing its differences as being really no more than those between ins and outs, I feel I may have been underrating the depth and the consequences of those differences.
Let us take first the matter of style. A Britain ruled by, say, Mr Roy Jenkins would certainly enjoy a much 'more genteel style — and probably would be at least marginally a nicer place to live in — than a Britain ruled by Mr Ron Hayward. Mr Hayward, for one thing, is a humourless and narrow fanatic, while Mr Jenkins has a certain tawdry sense of grace, and a very definite, if somewhat pawky, sense of humour. In temperament Mr Hayward — or, for that matter, Mr Benn — is much more interested in doctrine than in style, and however evanescent this distinction may seem it is worth something. Mr Jenkins has bred
himself into the liberal tradition by-his reading and writing and one can imagine him, were he Prime Minister, turning up a fastidious nose at the wilder policy excesses of manifesto socialism.
But that, of course, is precisely what Mr Wilson has done — with far more success than Mr Jenkins, whose style would be actually offensive to many of his colleagues, especially those outside Parliament, could hope for. While the Prime Minister does not seek to ape the gentleman or the Whig grandee he has his own visceral feeling that politics is about manoeuvre, not policy or philosophy, and his nose wrinkles upwards just as markedly in the presence of the latest set of nationalisation proposals presented by Mr Benn as Mr Jenkins's does in the presence of a pint of bitter or a beer-stained tie.
Moreover, Mr Wilson, like his recently acquired allies such as Mr Healey and Mr Callaghan, is a great one for enjoying the restrictions — the restrictions, not the perks — of office. There is something of the masochist in all politicians, and every one of these three gets a good deal of satisfaction out of having to explain to less knowing, and more energetic, colleagues just why this or that programme or policy is impossible to implement ,just now because of — dark mutterings here — the constraints of the economic situation, andvarious facts about the national condition to which the speaker alone is privy. The sense of conspiracy and the love of secrecy, which is built in to the temperament of every socialist becomes, in a Labour minister,a childish delight in the supposedly arcane mysteries of government which the higher reaches of the Civil Service delight in purveying. Thus, quite rightly, the out-of-office left distrust their leaders in government most strongly, and immediately suspect them of treason. For the rest of us, of course, the unwillingness of Labour ministers to go the whole hog is at least a palliative, even if they are eating half of the pig.
However, there is no question but that the outs have, in the life of the present Labour government (and during the party's last period of opposition), gained extensive ground at the expense of the temperamental gradualists. Mr Hayward has massively, and unilaterally, extended the responsibilities of the General Secretary of the Party. Mrs Castle, aided by the young Turks she has brought into the DHSS, has with great success persuaded Mr Wilson to accept all the main targets of the left within the services over which she has charge. One cannot imagine Mr Wilson five years ago, if using the trick of a Royal Commission to get himself off the hooks of NHS problems, not managing to to get himself off all the hooks on which he was impaled and, under the guise of an agonising reappraisal, sliding away from the abolition of private practice. For tunately for him this time the left has no fundamental nor radical proposal for the complete reform of the Service, and wish only to vent their spite on those figures which bulk so large in their demonology, the doctors. Mr Wilson can thus throw them the bone of complete nationalisation of medicine while hiding his other difficulties under the cloak of a Commission, even before the left have seriously turned their minds to them. The manoeuvre should not, however, be allowed to conceal the extent of the shift to the left, symbolised by this particular persecution, Moreover, the thinness of the armour of pragmatism worn by Labour ministers should not be underestimated. So convinced is the Prime Minister in his own mind of the glamour and strength of government (how often are appeals to Labour dissidents couched, not 10 terms of saving any policy or philosophy, but in terms of saving the jobs of members of the Labour Party actually in office) that he feels confident in ignoring both the party conference and the National Executive, to the extent of rarely attending meetings of the latter. The Prime Minister who, in any event, seldom sees any major difference between policies, eall scarcely see that his ignoring of the pressures on his left has concealed from himself and his closest allies the extent to which he has, for the last five years, given way to them. It is because nobody in the Labour Cabinet has felt willing enough, or strong enough, at any moment IC the last five years to make a stand, whether 03 grounds of principle or pragmatism, against the demands of the left that I have insisted that there is no major rift within the party. The differences in temperament and style have run deep; and if Mr Wilson had been able to preside over a contented and successful party I have no doubt that the doctrinaire element in the present Government would have been much less marked. But, at every stage of the game the left, and especially the extra-Parliamentary activists, have always been able to gain some ground; and because nobody has been able to stand against them the ground they have gained over the period has beet) substantial indeed.
Mr Enoch Powell once observed that in n0 profession besides politics does personal experience so much account for the position a man takes up. Temperament is an essential part, perhaps the essential part, of the way anY man interprets his personal experiences. WhY, for example, does Mrs Margaret Thatcher or Mr Edward Heath become Conservative, while Major Attlee and Mr Harold Lever become socialists? The great strength of the temperament of the left is its state, as long as it is out of office, of permanent and mighty dissatisfaction. A divine dissatisfaction, one left-wing friend once said to me, agreeing with the observation; but this is surely a case of divinity being in the eye of the dissatisfied. Against it there has been in the Labour Party in recent years no comparable energy ranged, as there once was in Gaitskellis time.
A Labour Cabinet largely composed of so-called moderates agreed retrospectively to relieve what Mrs Thatcher has taken to calling the People's Republic of Clay Cross of the
tiresome consequences of breaking the law. And the man who, in. the 'fifties, did most to provide an intellectual structure for socialist pragmatism against doctrinaire Marxism, Mr Anthony Crosland, has long sold the pass, and
even found himself, as Minister responsible for housing, introducing legislation which actually reduced the amoung of housing available, in the service of a dogma. For all the noise generated by differences within the Labour Party the best the pragmatists (or moderates)
can or are willing to offer us is a slightly slower, a somewhat seedier decline into totalitarian
socialism than we would have to endure at the hands of the avowed left. The contraction of national horizons will be in no whit abated.
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