Political commentary

Committees everywhere

Ferdinand Mount ,

Walking through St James's Square these. days, you will see a large green and white plastic sign over the doorway of Number Five. Below a fuzz of Arabic script, the sign says 'The People's Bureau of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya'. On each side, squeezed in at an angle as if to suggest the Revolution's bursting out, it says `No Democracy Without Popular Congresses' and, on the other side, 'Committees Every where'. , What a fearful slogan. Committees Everywhere – and its natural accompaniment Committees All The Time – would be a living nightmare. Indeed, it has in practice been a living nightmare. The omnicompetent, ubiquitous committee in permanent session is the instrument of every revolution in its first flush of enthusiasm. It is the 'Committees Everywhere' spirit which tries and sentences people in the dead of night.

Now this kind of danger may seem remote to us. Surely only politically underdeveloped countries fall victim to this illusion of Perpetual Participation. Very soon, reality drags power away back to bureaucratic and, if you're lucky, representative forms of government. The heady days of May are fleeting. If Committees Everywhere do linger on, they are fraudulent shells, controlled by Himself.

Yet the extraordinary thing is that, at this exact moment, Committees Everywhere is the loudest and most frequently heard slogan in Britain. On the Left of the Labour Party, Mr Benn and his friends never stop calling for the 'democracy of the committed.' I recall with delight the fat man from Salford who said at the Special Labour Party Conference: 'This postal vote is a load of rubbish. It supports passive democracy. I want active, involved democracy, discussive democracy' – or was it percussive democracy?

The New Statesman had an article recently by Mr Conrad Jameson, the pollster, arguing that political opinion polls were worthless because they reflected only the half-formed fancies of people who were too bone idle to mug up the subject.

Sensible people are well aware that this is nonsense. You don't earn yourself two votes just because you like going to political meetings. Everyone is to have the same share of political power, be he never so dim or apathetic.

And yet how much real difference is there between Mr Benn's 'harebrained' schemes and the 'sensible' schemes for participation subscribed to by the social democrats and the Liberals? For participation is the positive enthusiasm which jumps out of the pages of all the finest minds on the Labour Right. For Dr David Owen, Mr Giles Radice, Mr Evan Luard and many other social democrats, splitters and non-splitters alike, 'participation' in one guise or another is the answer which distinguishes them both from capitalist Tories and state socialists.

They may call it 'industrial democracy' or 'community socialism' or 'grassroots democracy', or 'socialism without the state', but the message is the same. By participating in 'the decision-making process', people will recover 'a sense of community'. They will feel less alienated; they will take charge of their lives; they will be happy.

Unfortunately, participators still have to face the objection first raised by Tony Crosland 25 years ago: . . . experience shows that only a small minority of the population wish to participate in this way. I repeat what I have often said; the majority prefer to lead a full family life and cultivate their gardens. And a good thing too, for if we believe in socialism as a means of increasing personal freedom and the range of choice, we do not necessarily want a busy bustling society in which everyone is politically active and fussing around in an interfering and responsible manner'.

The Apathetic Tendency to borrow the phrase of Dr Alan Watkins – has a large membership. All schemes for participation quickly run into its majestically inert weight. If participation is the most modern form of freedom, can it be right to have to force people to enjoy it?

Any form of participation which is not simply to provide fresh opportunities for interfering, nasty and often deranged activists to boss the rest of us must take full and equal account of the non-participators.

Crosland did not deny that we could and should have more chances to join in and be consulted; but what he explicitly and rightly denied was that participation could provide a central or sufficient answer to the working classes' lack of freedom. Alas, when you search for the answer which he did offer, you come to a rather mushy area; for Crosland still believed in The power of the State to enlarge opportunity.

Despite his tolerant, unbuttoned attitude to pleasure, he retained, I think, a certain prudishness about money, as do most social democrats today. Crosland deserved to be famous for welcoming the working classes' new enjoyment of motoring, decent food and foreign holidays.

Yet he took it for granted that the working classes should be allowed to spend their money only on the less essential things in life – not on schools, nor on health and only somewhat grudgingly on buying their own homes (indeed, he wanted to extend state control in housing by municipalising the private rented sector).

Indeed, it is precisely in this limitation on working-class freedom that his claim to be a socialist resides. That limitation is common to all of them: Shirley Williams and David Owen no less than Roy Hattersley and Giles Radice. The bedrock of the faith is to limit the power of the workers' purse. At the same time, a genuine belief in liberty compels most of them to say that, while they wish to discourage the growth of non-Statecontrolled medicine and education, they would not actually prohibit it. This naturally perpetuates •the present exaggerated power of the purse by which only the rich can opt out, because only the rich can pay twice.

Yet if persons of average income Can switch to a better car, why should they not be able to switch their children to a better school? Few home-owners would tolerate the standard of upkeep on most council estates, nor would most people patiently wait as long for the TV to be repaired as they wait for an operation on the Health.

Do ordinary people accept that the provision of health and education is somehow so morally different from the provision of cars and TV sets that it must not be tainted by money changing hands? I doubt it. Non-political people seem to have few neuroses about money. The Apathetic Tendency is not apathetic in the search for bargains; on the contraiy, everyone seems to brandish his or her market power quite vigorously when choosing a car or a sofa. The hideous truth is that many ordinary persons like shopping, where their money talks for them, and do not like political meetings, at which they may be out-argued and even silenced by the articulate and the bossy. The restriction of the market is particularly anti-democratic because the market is the one place in which everyone, however timid, can make his presence felt.

The social democrats have always been uneasily aware of this, as you can see from their frenzied efforts to prove that simple folk are the dupes of advertising. On anY rational calculation, J.K. Galbraith's argument that the wicked admen 'create wants' for things like electric toothbrushes is at best trivial; who created the want for Mozart, caviare and the bicycle? But the popularity of Galbraith's argument does indicate a deep-seated revulsion among social democrats against money as the root of all evil.

'Participation' is all that the workers are offered instead; participation, never con' trol. There are to be committees every where – tenants' committees, parents' committees, works committees, neighbourhood committees – never ownership, never con tract and payment, never the attributes of real control. Participation is a figleaf te cover the perpetuation of powerlessness which constitutes the socialism of social democrats. The Gang of Umpteen may be personally popular — but how genuinelY popular are their policies?