Political Commentary
The new extremism?
Patrick Cosgrave
The cloud on the horizon which is no bigger than a man's hand is one of the clicMs both of fiction and of politico-philosophical commentary. Yet, after the events of last week when, in Newham, violent folk threw things at the Home Secretary and tried to shout down Mr Reg Prentice, I recalled most vividly the mindless assaults of the chic on Lord Brook, when he was Home Secretary, and on Lord Home, when he was Prime Minister. Lord Brook was assailed weekly and in the most spiteful fashion on television, and Lord Home was physically attacked more than once during the 1964 general election campaign. I would be far indeed from suggesting that anybody like Mr Roy Jenkins or Mr Reg Prentice approved of the attacks on Lord Home, and they may even have had a reservation or two about the trendy television guying of Lord Brook. But the fact of the matter is that any departure from a total commitment to reason in political argument, whether it is verbal — as it was in the TV programme That was the week that was — or physical — as it was in the discharge of missiles at Lord Home in 1964, or at Mr Jenkins at Newham the other night — leads inevitably to greater and greater excesses of violence, both verbal and physical. In my own view — and it cannot be more than partial — Mr Jenkins and Mr Prentice suffered at Newham the inevitable consequences of a failure of all good men and true to defend Lord Brook against the mindless assaults of the pseudo-intellectual children of TWTWTW ( now re-incarnated in a rag called Private Eye), and Lord Home against the young Socialists who followed him around in 1964.
Mr Edward Heath is credited with one very good, and wholly spontaneous, joke, one which carried within itself that grain of real truth which is essential to all good jokes. Somebody threw an egg at Mr Harold Wilson in the 1970 campaign. It was suggested that this was not a casual or unpremeditated act merely, but part of some sort of campaign against the Prime Minister. That suggestion, argued Mr Heath, rested on the supposition that, all over the country, people were going around with eggs in their pockets, hoping to find an opportunity of throwing one at the Prime Minister. He joked more truly than he knew. For the fact of the matter is that there has, in the last ten years, been both a growing and widely organised conspiracy to overthrow the institutions and mores of this country, using the instruments of ridicule, humiliation and violence and a much more generalised and hysterical purely anarchic, revolt of under-trained and under-disciplined people, mainly youngsters, against authority in any form. And, quite separately from these two phenomena, there is the activity of a relatively small, but highly dedicated group of systematic left-wing revolutionaries who threw Mr Prentice out at Newham and Mr Eddie Griffiths at Brightside. All three groups work together, sometimes formally and sometimes informally, in a more or less uneasy alliance.
Eggs appeared much earlier: Lord Home, leaving a meeting at Ashton-under-Lyne in
1964,was assailed by the same instrument. Now, there is one curious difference between the coverage of what happened to Lord Home, at one end of our chronological scale, and what happened to Mr Jenkins at the other. Journalists and Labour politicians alike told us in 1964 that, deeply though they sympathised with Lord Home as a victim of rowdies, the incidents of that campaign, of which he was victim, might be judged quite reasonably to have undermined his authority, since they showed he could not cope with difficult crowds. On Friday of last week there was no press disposition to say that Mr Jenkins and Mr Prentice were proven incompetent as political leaders because they were assaulted and shouted down — rather, in shocked tones, the press explicitly and implicitly urged us to rally to the side of-these good gentlemen, assailed as they were by the forces of unreason.
As I hive said before, and as most commentators have deliberately refused to recognise, there is no material distinction whatever between Mr Prentice and those who have dismissed him from the Labour candidacy. As Mrs Shirley Williams pointed out at the Newham meeting Mr Prentice has never once failed wholly and completely to support the terms of the 1970 Labour manifesto — the most extreme document ever put before the British public by a major political party — and he has, as she put it, "ruthlessly" enforced its exceptionally extreme educational provisions. The quarrel between Mr Prentice and his local management committee is not, therefore, one of principle — as was the quarrel between Mr Dick Taverne and the Lincoln Labour Party — but of personalities. Mr Prentice was , an ;`in" person and Mr Tony Kelly an "out". The boot is now on the other foot and Mr Prentice, with the aid of an uncritical press, is seeking to reverse that verdict.
For there is no evidence that those who disrupted Mr Prentice's meeting had anything whatever to do with those who withdrew from him his nomination as a Labour candidate. It was, of course, immensely convenient for Mr Jenkins and Mr Prentice alike to be able to lump in those who intrigued against the Minister for Overseas Development in his constituency management committee with those who offered violence to Ministers of the Crown in a hall in East London. But the two are separate: the mindless violent who disrupted the meeting are enemies of all order saved that of the crazed totalitarianism they wish to impose; but the people who took Mr Prentice down from his pedestal are of a like ideological nature to their victim; the man who devoted all his time when Secretary of Education to destroying everything independent in the British schools system, and who was philistine enough to suggest that the great universities should sell off their treasures to pay for a method of education (so-called) imposed on them by his doctrinaire government. The crude qnd brutal truth is that such as Mr Jenkins and A.-Prentice have begun to bleat only when they are under attack, and when they have begun to fear for their office: how outraged was Mr Jenkins, or Mr Prentice, when Lord Home was under fire?
The uncritical acceptance on the part of most of the press or precisely that confusion between enemies which Mr Jenkins and Mr Prentice wanted to create is, of course, understandable. For the great body of the press (one exception has been the Daily Telegraph) has for some time been arguing for a coalescence, or coalition,of all those of whatever party whom fashion adjudges moderate. The truth of what fashion says has never been too deeply plumbed, for very few people can readily face what they see when a stone is turned over. Yet — to make a party political point, though an obvious one — a genuinely objective moderate would note at least one thing about the current British political scene. Both of the major parties are divided both on issues and on personalities. But only in the Labour Party is there either an achieved success on the part of extremists, or the possibility of extremists achieving success. One can — and here worried press commentary is accurate in its concern — visualise numbers of Labour constituencies being taken over by Trotskyites or International Socialists: it is a living possibility, and the local machinery of the Labour Party would have no obvious means of resistance. It is inconceivable that any Conservative constituency party, whether it is of the right or the left of the party, would be taken over by, say, the National Front.
If, therefore, the press and the other media are so deeply concerned about the extremism they imagine to be rife in the British body politic they need look no further, and simply offer their allegiance to the Conservative Party. If, on the other hand — and as I believe — the real distinction between Mr Prentice and Mr Jenkins and their serious as opposed to violent critics is one of style rather than substance; and if, as -I further believe, media coverage of the tribulations of both men is based not on any serious attempt. to distinguish between truth and untruth, but on an equal failure, over more than a decade to understand the significance of chuckling over, rather than attacking, mindless assaults on conscientious ministers, then we will continue to observe a flatulent adoration of the Home Secretary and the former Labour candidate for Newham, allied to a refusal to distinguish between the different character of the erwmies of order in Britain. Even Mr Bernarcl Levin, after all, worked for That was the week that was.
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