POLITICS
Battling it out on the playing fields of Eastbourne
NOEL MALCOLM
The teaching of moral values, said Mr Baker at last weekend's Young Conserva- tive conference, is the most fundamentally important part of education. (Loud cheers.) When it is neglected, society becomes disfigured by anti-social be- haviour and the lack of consideration for other people. (Applause.) At least, I think that's what he said. The Young Conservatives sitting just behind me in the gallery were having such a noisy conversation that it was rather difficult to catch everything the platform speakers were saying. The Young Conservative in front of me, who enjoyed a much better view of the platform with its prominent 'No Smoking' notices, had just lit his third cigarette; and the Young Conservative next to me was resting his rain-soaked shoes on the plush upholstery of the seat in front. For the first time in its history, perhaps, the membership of this move- ment is now genuinely representative of society at large.
If it is true that, as Denis Healey remarked several years ago, Mrs Thatcher has hijacked the Tory. Party from the landowners and handed it over to the estate agents, then it has certainly taken a long time for the party's youth movement to catch up. Perhaps this helps to show that young people are at heart the most con- servative and resistant to change of all. But change has finally overtaken them: the old mixture of student union apparatchiks, dopy public schoolboys and bossy girls from Roedean has given way to a new generation of student union apparatchiks and comprehensive-educated young en- trepreneurs. They are more interested in money-making than in match-making, and, most remarkable of all, they are actually interested in politics.
This year's conference was held in an invigorating atmosphere of rumours and accusations. The Heathite leadership of the movement was being challenged by a group of self-proclaimed `Thatcherites'. Many of the challengers had been mem- bers of the Federation of Conservative Students, the organisation which Mr Teb- bit abolished in 1986 after it had inflicted heavy damage on Conservative Central Office's nerves and Loughborough Uni- versity's wash-basins. Cries of `entryism' and 'Tory Militants' were in the air.
Central Office barred at least 20 'ex- tremist' delegates; journalists were ex- eluded from the two main social events of the weekend; and the security checks at the entrance to the conference hall were even more thorough than at the grown-ups' conference last October. (A new technique was used for checking that one's photo- graphic pass had not been forged. At least the teaching of technology in British schools cannot be as bad as everyone says, if our student gate-crashers are thought to be more ingenious in these matters than international terrorists.) There is something richly paradoxical about Mrs Thatcher's party machine mak- ing such strong efforts to protect the organisation which last year appointed Mr Heath as its honorary Life Patron. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that Central Office's anxieties have been rather cleverly enlisted on one side of an otherwise not very remarkable election campaign. It is true that the right-wing challengers are former members of the Federation of Conservative Students: so were almost all university students who were Young Con- servatives, since the FCS was simply the old Federation of University Conservative and Unionist Associations, which had been re-named for reasons of acronymic propri- ety. The most extreme ideologues, such as Mr Harry Phibbs, have already fallen by the wayside — though I think he should persevere, as there is surely a place for 'Mr Phibbs, the Politician' in God's little game of Happy Families.
Some of Mr Phibbs's friends are still very active among the Young Conservatives, although they have been disowned by the `Thatcherite' candidates. But comparisons with the Militant Tendency are so temp- tingly plausible that they are almost bound to be mistaken; they belong with the type of political judgment commonly found among BBC news editors, for whom 'ba- lance' means 'symmetry'. The members of Militant are Trotskyists, and their actions are governed by the fact that the Labour leadership is opposed to Trotsky's princi- ples. The noisy libertarians who came to power in the FCS, on the other hand, are more in the position of being plus royalistes que la refine, demanding that her radical principles be put into practice.
The role of such youthful extremists in the Conservative Party, therefore, is that of vociferous attention-seekers rather than quiet, conspirators. In the list of motions submitted (but not selected) for debate at the conference, the loudest contributions leap off the page: 'This Conference be- lieves that Britain must pull out of the EEC which has become the Socialist's dream of a centralised, bureaucratic Super-State.' `This Conference urges H.M. Government to abolish all Regional Aid.' This Confer- ence calls for the abolition of the socially- divisive Race Relations Industry. . . .' The application of ideology to the real world may be slap-dash and hamfisted in places; but that has always been youth's preroga- tive. And here and there, as with regional aid, the blows turn out to be bang on target.
To function as a more or less irrespons- ible ginger group is one of the roles which the youth movement of a political party can quite reasonably adopt. It is good for a party to be reminded from time to time of what some of its political principles might look like if they were stripped of practical- ity and compromise. Alternatively, a youth movement can become a sectional interest- group, campaigning on issues which direct- ly affect schoolchildren, young workers and students. If it does this, it is likely to differ from government policy on some crucial points, because the peculiar in- terests of students and young people (for example, where benefits and student grants are concerned) form part of the web of particularity in which pure, radical principles tend to get clogged, impeded and tarnished. Something of this sort may have helped to maintain the 'moderate' ascendancy in the Young Conservatives up till now.
The new young Thatcherites who are trying to take over the Young Conserva- tives seem to me to belong to neither of these varieties of youth politics. Their avowed aim is simply to turn the youth wing into a campaigning movement for the whole party which will concentrate on promoting the entire range of government policies. The emissaries from Mrs Thatch- er's private office who went down to interview them at Eastbourne will not have found anything very threatening about that. The only threat that they pose, in the long term, is to the whole idea of having a separate youth movement. If you are only going to campaign on behalf of the grown- ups, why not join them in the first place? There are many old party hands in the Labour and Liberal Parties who would say amen to that.
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