Political commentary

What do the voters want?

Ferdinand Mount

At about this stage, you may be wanting to know why this is the most important General Election since the second world war. Or you may not. But it is customary in this line of business to explain why other General Elections, crucial though they may have seemed at the time, now look like the merest pimples or kopjes on the relief map of history. This, as Mr David Coleman and Mr Ron Pickering are inclined to say, has to be the Big One.

In breaking precedent, I don't mean to downgrade the General Election of 1979. While its consequences may be slightly less momentous than those of 1945 and 1951, it is clearly much more important than the elections of 1955 and 1966. But what this election is unmistakably is Different. The ground of argument has changed. This time the great question is not really: what is the Labour Party like — dominated by the far Left or still basically social-democratic? Nor is it even: would the Tories be able to deal with the trade unions? The question is what sort of people the voters are. The , underlying argument is about the nature of the electorate, not about the composition of the political elites competing for our votes.

Mrs Thatcher over and over again presents us to ourselves as impatient, enterprising, energetic people held back by taxes and bureaucrats from realising our potential. Contrary to appearances, she claims, we are not bloody-minded or unco-operative; we are simply frustrated. Whatever else may be artificial or politic about her, this is not. She believes as passionately as — no, it really is hard to think of a parallel in modern British politics — she is dedicated to the belief that the British are impatient to be free.

The Left disagrees but for tactical reasons has to disagree in a new way. For only a handful of nutters still seriously believe in their heart of hearts that more intervention and state control would make us all richer. The comparison between the statecontrolled economies of the East and the free economies of West Germany and the United States is embarrassing but unavoidable. But the Labour Party remains by tradition and constitution the party of state intervention. Nationalisation and socialist planning still have to be justified. And because the justification can no longer be economic, it has now to be exclusively social and moral.

And the justification is that we are too sluggish to profit by freedom. Labour's underlying argument is not that low taxes and private enterprise cannot make some nations better off; it is that they wouldn't do us any good. The Labour Party finds itself united in the belief that we must be rescued from ourselves. Our jobs must be saved from our own suicidal torpor. Our industries must be protected against the unfair competition of nasty, hard-working foreigners. The new salvation — the latest sucker from the old Methodist roots — is not salvation from hard-faced mineowners or world slumps, but salvation from our own inertia. Wherever the Prime Minister goes on his gruelling travels, he begins by reminding his audience how the Labour government has pumped millions of public money into moribund local factories. And he goes on to attack the Tories' cruel deception of offering people the prospect of lower taxes and home ownership — rather in the manner of whoever it was thought sexual intercourse was 'much too good' for the lower classes.

Mr Bruce Milian, the Scottish Secretary, describes the sale of council houses as 'a monumental irrelevance for the vast majority of people in Scotland.' But go down to Clydebank past the Marathon Yard — which he is so proud of keeping open — and the council houses strike you as the nub of the matter.

On the river side, you pass mile on mile of rusting gates leading to derelict sheds with broken windows; a couple of pawnshops; the rent collector's office; and the pubs with their windows painted to keep the wet world out. On the other side of the road, mile on mile of post-war council estates, rendered and whitewashed, some bleak and tenemental but all decent and habitable. The council tenancy is your one asset in a godforsaken place; but it also ties you to that place.

And it takes a couple of vulgar hustlers like Peter Walker and Michael Heseltine to understand what none of the high-minded sentimentalists seem able to grasp, viz, that places like Clydeside — and Tyneside, and Merseyside — will never hum again with genuine life so long as they are inhabited by a captive population. One way or another, the council tenancy has to be made convertible; and the quickest way is to give the tenant the right to buy it, even at a fudged token price.

This sentimentality spreads far beyond the bounds of the Labour Party. Tories of the gentlemanly sort and kindly foreigners like Mr Bernard Nossiter of the Washington Post believe that Britain enjoys a kind of semi-socialist harmony, of a rather down-at-heel sort, perhaps, but providing its own satisfactions.

We are the new Spaniards, preyed on by a bloated bureaucracy, corrupted by an inflated currency, lulled into sloth by postimperial delusions, but none the less preserving in our ancient courtesies something precious. Nothing short of a civil war will shake us up and transform us into gogetters.

Now if we were people like that, no doubt the modern Labour Party would suit us very nicely; and Mr Callaghan would be just the ticket for the Escorial. But this picture of the British people suffers from grave internal contradictions. For the very same critics who complain of the sloth which is supposed to be in some way endemic in the British character complain of other things too. On the Left, they complain of profiteering shopkeepers and ruthless speculators and self-employed building workers on the Lump undercutting honest trade unionists and lorry-drivers greedy for overtime and strike-breaking cowboys who will do anything for a few quid. And on the Right, the critics complain of the working classes building bungalows and marinas and golf courses and jamming the loneliest mountains and lake-shores with their noise and petrol fumes, in-filling unspoilt villages with their rubbishy houses and filling up unspoilt minds with their rubbishy tastes. In other words, what is complained of here is the appalling greed and energy of the British lower orders, not their sloth.

Britain was and is part of the individualist, industrial heartland of north-western Europe. All our neighbours —even those on the Celtic and Latin fringes — have responded with enthusiasm to the stimulus of a free economy. To suppose that we are the only exception, and that we have some historically engrained and ineradicable mahana mentality is perverse and sentimental.

And it is as a result of this sentimental aristocratic attitude that so many socialists and paternalists alike have consistentlY underestimated the resentment felt by each fresh group of people brought into the income tax net by inflation. The grimmest statistics for Labour are that while in 1939 there were only 4 million income tax payer! and in 1959 18 million, now there are 2) million of us. Stoppages from the pay packet have overtaken the weather as the great conversational grievance; and complaints about government waste and scrounging off the welfare state have grown at a matching pace.

It has been the constant refrain in these columns that income tax would be the keY to this general election; and that is why the Tories have always looked as if they would win comfortably, because one thing the Conservative Party does genuinely care about is income tax and the Labour Party and the Liberals and the Scotnats don t. They may say now and then that they would like to reduce taxes if they could, because they know it would be popular. But theY don't care in their gut, like the Tories do. And that is why I guess the Tories will have a majority of 50 in the next House of Commons and the number of Liberal and Scotnat MPs will be halved, because on the whole the British people are anxious to get on. Now there's a prediction for you.