Political commentary
The old country
Ferdinand Mount
Ideas whose time has come and gone don't usually receive decent burial. They are left to rust in the sand where they ran aground. The bones of the gun-crews whiten in their. turrets. The surviving tanks regroup and rumble on without a backward glance. There are few great histories of lost Bills and abandoned reforms. Historians — and journalists too —like to splash in the wave of the future.
What faces us now is clear enough; a gruelling struggle between two determined parties which will last all the way through and beyond the next general election. Brighton and Blackpool have demonstrated thumpingly that both Labour and the Tories have a solid, organised will to win. We are back in the old country. The decamping of Peter Hain and Jimmy Reid to the Labour Party and the support given to the Tories by Reg Prentice, Woodrow Wyatt and Paul Johnson are only the most conspicuous evidence of the familiar bipolar process at work.
Many political animals are as yet unwilling fully to recognise this return to the two-party system. You still hear chatter about coalitions, proportional representation, regional assemblies, bills of rights, federalism, devolution. These remain possibilities, but the evidence tugs harder and harder away from these novel prospects to suggest that the old two-party tank battle will again dominate British politics for the foreseeable future —which, as we now know, is an annoyingly short time.
The Liberals look done for and done in. David Steel drew comfort at Brighton from the fact that at a similar stage in 1972 (less than two years before the next election) his party rode as low in the polls as they do now. But he cannot realistically expect that next year or even the year after he will be facing a Labour leadership quite as• discredited as Sir Harold Wilson's was in 1974 or a Tory Party as deeply bemused and low-spirited. And if the Liberals have run out of puff, the Scottish Nationalists no longer appear quite so certain a threat as they did. For under the present electoral system there is not only a 'take-off point at which any increase in Scotnat votes wins seats at an accelerating rate, there is also a 'tailspin' point at which they begin to shed MPs equally fast. With more than 35 per cent of the vote, they could be close to winning a majority of Scotland's seventy-one seats. In October 1974, they won 30.4 per cent and eleven seats. At present, the latest System Three opinion poll gives them rather less — 28 per cent — although they have gone higher this summer. If they sink below 25 per cent, their parliamentary group might well be wiped out. That is unlikely, but although Scotnats have recently tended to do better at general elections than in between them, it seems almost as unlikely that they will go high enough above 30 per cent to produce a dramatic increase in the number of their MPs.
If present trends continue therefore — an impudent but not intolerable assumption — then the two major parties will share over 85 per cent of the UK vote and over 600 of the 635 seats (as they did at all post-war elections, except in 1974), thus not only increasing the chances of one side or the other securing an overall majority but also diminishing the popular authority of the minor parties.
If that does happen, many of those reforms which we were told were so imperative, so rationally irresistible these past three years would all at once seem secondary and tangential. In its annual report for 1919-20, the Proportional Representation Society wrote `P.R. is now treated as a serious reform, the ultimate adoption of which is not in doubt'. This optimism was by no means feckless. Birkenhead and Balfour were keen PR supporters. The Labour Party, the Liberals, the 1LP and the TUC were all for it. Churchill was said to be sympathetic. Only Bonar Law stuck out noticeably against it. Over the next four years PR bills were regularly introduced but made only modest progress. The Liberals continued to be in favour of PR, but Labour began to tumble to the fact that they were on the up and that the existing system was their best bet. And the Tories were gorged by their huge majority in the 1924 election. The PR movement ran into the sand. And by 1928 the Times correspondent was able to comment after a perfunctory debate on the subject, 'the remarkable feature of the debate was that a question which was a very live issue a few years ago appeared to have become largely academic.' Within two years, though, it popped up again as a result of a hung Parliament. This time a Bill for the introduction of the alternative vote was brought in as a price for Liberal support of the government and actually passed the Commons before being mangled by the Lords.
The Cabinet decided to send it back to the Lords again in its original form, but, revealingly, Ramsay MacDonald made no effort to pass it before going to the country whose verdict relieved him from the necessity of continuing with the Bill. Once more deprived of the impetus of a hung Parliament, PR was left to rust in the sand. In David Butler's The Electoral System in Britain 1918-51, even the gentle sage of Nuf field is a trifle acid: `So perished a Bill whose parentage was obscure and whose life had been chequered and inglorious. It had few sincere friends and many enemies, some avowed and some secret. It seemed to bring out the worst in all who dealt with it, whether they supported or opposed it. One cannot believe that even had so dubious a Bill become an Act, it would have long survived.'
That verdict might well stand for several of the constitutional changes now proposed —which is not to say they won't become law but only to keep the government in office and not as a genuine response to overwhelming public pressure for reform. The coming session of Parliament is indeed to be almost entirely taken up with devolution and elections to the European Parliament, both issues of minimal concern to most people in Britain (and that includes Scotland). In fact, nearly the only person with a real appetite for this sort of stuff seems to be Mr Heath — whose speech On Europe at Blackpool was of stupendous insensitivity. Not only do most people in and out of the Tory Party see no reason why they should 'put Europe first', as he urges; they see no reason why they should put Europe higher than say seventeenth. Once again, one is struck by the resemblance between Mr Heath and Sir Harold in their predilection for grand schemes of radical reform and their reluctance to get down to brass tacks.
It is precisely this application to the immediate, the pressing and the popular concern that make Mr Callaghan and Mrs Thatcher such formidable party politicians. Both their party conference speeches were successes of a kind quite outside the reach of their predecessors. They managed both to speak their party's own language and to make it sound like the language of the people. Mrs Thatcher in particular strode over the common ground with the determined confidence of a Ramblers Association veteran establishing a right of way.
You often hear it said that Britain is in rather better shape at the moment because of the financial discipline imposed by the IMF. What is less often pointed out is that both the major parties have regained a measure of popular authority and internal self-confidence which has restored some credit to the political as well as to the monetary system. This recapture of morale is plain to see within the Tory Party: the names of Workington, Walsall North, Ashfield and Stechford are told like rosary beads to invoke the protection of the Blessed Margaret and her angels in marble, the Tory working-class. Mrs Thatcher directly and unashamedly responds to the popular mood and concentrates her atten tion upon popular concerns such as law and order and literacy. So does the Prime Minis ter, who has by these means managed at least temporarily to muffle the indisputible decline and leftward drift of the Labour Party — without providing any kind of answer to either.
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