Onward, Onward
By BERNARD LEVIN
IP it is possible to have a digression before actually start- ing, I digress. Have you ever noticed that while others may wax and wane, come and go, veer and tack, Mr. Butler never, never, never lets us down? No sooner was 'the ink dry on last week's Spectator editorial pro- phesying that he would shortly be seen passing the buck for the decision to prosecute Lord Russell and his fellow-members of the Committee of 100 (or rather, na sooner did it become apparent that the decision bade fair to turn out a first-class blunder) than the Home Office was putting out a statement on his behalf disclaiming all responsibility for the prosecu- tions. And at the weekend, as the preparations and counter-preparations for the demo went on, he kept his immaculate form by declaring from his home in Essex that he was ready to come to London if it should prove necessary. Perhaps he meant by that that he was, selfless as ever, ready to take over the Government if the squatters should so far get out of hand as to lynch the Prime•Minister. (It'll be more if they attack the Chapel,' said Mr. Sniggs. 'Oh, please God, make them atfack the Chapel.') If Mr. Butler did not exist, nothing could be done about it; it would be impossible to invent him.
If the Liberal Party did not exist, on the other hand, it would be perfectly possible to invent it, or at any rate to reconstruct it ex pede Herculem from the fragments we have. And since the frag- ments are currently on view at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh (a building rather more like a mausoleum than a museum), it is perhaps worth spending a moment applying Dr. Weiner's cele- brated fluorine test to see if it is possible to determine whether the pieces really do show that human life was here, or whether they are no more than the fossilised fragments of a Dodo.
Last year, there was no problem. There the thing was, walking and talking half an hour after its head was cut off. They had won a seat at a general election (they had also lost one), and had come second to the Tories in by-election after by-election; the Labour Party was in com- plete disarray (and only a fortnight later was to fall into greater disarray than ever); the coun- try was clearly in urgent need of an Opposition; the sun was shining at Eastbourne; the horrors of the previous conference at Torquay were forgotten; and it seemed only a matter of time before Mr. Grimond would be off to the Palace. Yet now, their oriflamme might be mistaken for that of the merry men of Trafalgar Square: For God's sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
Truly, in the midst of life we are in death. But one short year, and the little more and how much more it is!
Were we all then deceived? By no means: the fact is, in the short term Liberal fortunes must inevitably be brighter or dimmer according to the light generated by the Labour Party. It was not just that the success of the wreckers at Scarborough, suggesting as it did that the Labour Party had lost for ever all hopes of seriously challenging the Tories in its current condition, led us to the conclusion that some form of Labour-Liberal alliance was essential; there was more than the harsh pressure of historical neces- sity to sustain our belief that it might happen. Not only did the Labour Party (the sane part of it, anyway) need the Liberals; it really looked for a moment as if a marriage might eventually be arranged, and with the blessing of at any rate some of the electorate on the happy couple. Some form of fundamental reshaping was, it seemed, necessary if the radical, twentieth-cen- tury, non-paralysed Left was ever again to offer a viable challenge to Conservative ascendancy.
And for a time it did look possible. If Mr. Gaitskell had not managed, over the year, to pluck this flower safety from this nettle danger, if the prospect facing the LaboUr Party at Black- pool (0 God! 0 Blackpool!) were to be another dose of the Scarborough mixture, only twice as strong from having matured for another year, if its resemblance to Fred Karno's Army were to become even more pronounced, if the still 'in- evitable split were to be brought nearer and the path of the fissure shifted farther to the Right —if, in short, the country were to be faced with a choice between continuing to vote Tory and voting for a party which thought along the same lines (if you can call it thought) as Mr. Cousins, why, then, the prospects for a regrouping on the Left would be almost as bright as the necessity.
Nous avons change tout cola. Long ago, Mr. Gaitskell covered the last number on his Bingo card and shuffled, a shy smile on his face, to the paying-out window to collect his winnings. The Scarborough decisions will be reversed with a monolithic majority, and even though there may be (it is by no means certain) a vote against the Polaris bases (for the Left is presumably not going to be caught napping at Blackpool as it was at Portsmouth and find itself unable to vote against Polaris without voting simultaneously in favour of a resolution for which it cannot com- mand a majority), Mr. Gaitskell will count it a world well lost for love.
But there is more in all this than all that. Mr. Gaitskell's re-established ascendancy, though technically it has come about because a small number of large unions have switched their votes from one side to the other of the unilateralist divide, can in fact be traced to far more deep- seated causes. Some of these are very broad, like the realisation that the Conservatives might not be quite so permanently secure as had been supposed; some were narrow, like the disap- pointment Michael Foot's House of Commons failure generated among those who thought that, once back at Westminster, he would provide the standard-bearer the Left so badly lacked; some were in between, like the astonishing record of success (based, as I said some months ago, on the old-fashioned virtues of hard work) achieved by the Campaign for Democratic Socialism, which has now found its counterpart in an extra- ordinarily sensible document put out by a group of Young Socialists called 'Counterblast' (surely the first time the Labour Party has been threatened with a sensible youth section since it began). But what with these and other reasons, the fact is that Mr. Gaitskell is firmly back in con- trol (apart from anything else, the about-turn supports his view that conference need not be taken too seriously when it comes to framing policy), and that by a subtle process of political osmosis he is now in a position to push out the frontiers of his victory still farther. In other words, he may, if all goes well, be able now to build, on the foundation of a united party with a discredited Left wing, that modern, radical organisation that alone can hope seriously to challenge the Tories in any circumstances short of a really appalling depression.
And where does that leave the Liberals? At first sight, far up the Caledonian Canal without a paddle. If the Labour Party can do it on its own, why should it need the support of the Liberals? But this is to go a little too fast, as indeed many a Labour dreamer, busy construct- ing Cabinets, has gone already. It is very doubt- ful whether the Labour Party, even in its much healthier post-Blackpool state, will be in any position to contemplate displacing the Tories for a very long time, if ever. The share which Mr. Grimond could hope to command in a radical regrouping must be smaller than it momentarily appeared last year; but in the long run--perhaps a very long run, but a finite run none the less-- it must take place. Not only will the historical necessity (if I forget thee, 0 Professor Popper, may my right hand forget her cunning) of avoiding perpetual one-party government press towards such a reshaping; it will become in- creasingly apparent that less and less divides the moderates of both parties, and that more and more electors might welcome such a re-align- ment. In his extremely interesting book The Stagnant Society (Penguin, 3s. 6d.), Mr. Michael Shanks sums up succinctly: . . . the trouble is that the process of bam- boozling the Left has been much too subtle for the general public to appreciate—especially as the Left have loud voices and the Con- servatives have always been willing to lend them a few foghorns. . . . The public . . • suspects that it is they who are being bam- boozled. . . .
Sooner or later, therefore. it seems inevitable that the uneasy coalition of the Labour Party is bound to fall apart--especially now that the Right has plainly decided that it no longer pays to try to appease the Left. If---or rather when--the split takes place there can be a re- alignment of political forces to correspond to the economic and social realities . . . the bulk of the Labour Party is basically moderate in its attitude, and the thoroughgoing socialists are in fact a minority group [still more true. I may say, of Labour voters].
The best development, therefore, would be for the socialist minority to split off . . of their own volition or be ejected. . . Freed from its more doctrinaire elements, the Party would then be in a strong position to reach an electoral alliance with the Liberals in which the Labour Party could be the dominant partner . . . though the internal agonies which the Labour Party is likely to go through before the final breach will no doubt be extremely painful and probably protracted.
Superficially, the need for such a development has receded with Mr. Gaitskell's victory. But under the surface it is no less urgent. Who speaks first?
Previous page
