Political Commentary

The Nuffield Way

By ALAN

WATKINS frHE Nuffield election books, like London I Transport, are much used and much abused. They are impossible not to criticise, yet im- possible to do without. There they stand on the study shelves in their chaste blue bindings, valuable records of what happened which grow more valuable as the years go by. And the sixth and latest study* (which incidentally has a red binding) is no exception.

Towards the end of his revised Anatomy of Britain Todayt Mr. Anthony Sampson criticises the British `love of antiquity' which leads `young undergraduates [to] prefer the rich and cosy irrelevance of All Souls to the modern purpose of Nuffield.' Judging, however, by Dr. Butler and Dr. King's effort, the college cannot be starved either of money or of recruits. For one thing, the book is longer than any of its pre- decessors in the series. For another, just under half of it consists of chapters by extra con- tributors. There are pieces by Mr. William Andrews, Mr. A. J. Beith, Mr. Bernard Donoughue, Dr. Martin Harrison, Mr. Kenneth Morgan, Mr. Peter Nettl and Miss Dilys Hill (jointly), Dr. Richard Rose, Mr. A. W. Singham, Mr. Michael Steed and Mr. J. F. Wright. (If I have gratuitously deprived any of these of their hard-earned doctorates, I apologise.)

No one wants to blight a young psephologist's career at its outset, but—it must be said—the results might have been happier if some of these separate chapters had been written by Dr. Butler and Dr. King themselves, or not written at all (for there is some repetition). Mr. Beith, for example, does not seem completely at home in his chapter on the press. The Evening Standard was not, as Mr. Beith says it was, established by Lord Beaverbrook (though he was of course its most gifted proprietor); the Eastern Daily Press is a Norwich, not an Ipswich, paper: and Mr. Chapman Pincher was given his Granada award not for a scoop on the Corbett report but for stories on the Wynne-Lonsdale exchange and on the affairs of Ferranti. Furthermore, it is not customary to refer to a lead headline as a `heading.' In themselves admittedly these are small criticisms, but they are not quibbles: they cast doubts on the entire chapter.

Nor is Mr. Beith alone. In his chapter on immi- gration, Mr. Singham writes that in 1964 Labour 'were under pressure to modify their outright opposition to the Act [of 1962].' But in fact the Labour Party had already modified their oppo- sition. They had done so in 1963, when the Expiring Laws (Continuance) Bill came up for discussion and the Shadow Cabinet, against the wishes of Mr. Harold Wilson, decided that some form of control was necessary.

And Mr. Singham is not alone either. Dr. Rose has a chapter entitled `Pre-election Public Rela- tions and Advertising.' I say 'entitled' because as it turns out the chapter contains nothing what- ever about political public relations, that is to say about the relations between the parties and the journalists. A footnote explains that `the motives, methods and consequences of political public relations will be explored in much greater detail in a book now under preparation by the * THE BRITISH GENERAL ELECTION OF 1964. By D. E. Butler and Anthony King. (Macmillan, 45s.) t Hodder and Stoughton, 42s.

author'; so perhaps Dr. Rose is holding his fire. As far as political advertising is concerned, however, he declares that in 1963-4 the Con- servatives spent £992,000. Now this figure is not presented humbly as an estimate. It is the total at the bottom of a column of six separate items. It purports to be completely accurate. It is nothing of the kind. No one can complain if a writer on politics, particularly the finance of politics, from time to time goes wrong. But if figures are presented with all the apparatus of scholarship and certitude one is entitled to expect the figures to be right.

In addition, there must be some doubt as to how far the sections on individual constituencies justify themselves. Mostly they neither illuminate nor entertain. Mr. Donoughue, it is true, does tell us something of the Liberal effort, or lack of it, at Finchley, and Mr. Morgan discusses social change in Swansea West: but this is ex- ceptional. Here, I realise, I may be motivated by feelings of trade union solidarity. Reporting in individual constituencies is or should be a task for skilled professionals, not for Dr. Butler's favourite young academics.

This reflection brings me to the first and better part of the book, the part which is the work of Dr. Butler and Dr. King alone. It is no secret that in the past there has been a good deal of ill-feeling between psephologists (of whom Dr. Butler is the patron saint) on the one hand and working political journalists on the other. Doubt- less there were faults on both sides. Dr. Butler once complained on television that the journal- ists did not tell him what he wanted to know; some journalists said privately that they did not see why they were under any obligation to pro- . vide Dr. Butler with free material for his articles. It is important to realise that this controversy did not arise from a natural antipathy between the academic and the less rarefied approaches to politics. On the contrary—and this is natur- ally only one side of the story—the conflict arose because the psephologists were increasingly in- vading the journalists' fields of press and television and giving an academic gloss to con-

'There's a man forcing unsolicited opinions on me.' • elusions which were essentially tentative and sometimes instinctive.

In the first half of this book, however, there are signs of a change in attitude by the psepholo- gists. They have changed not by becoming more donnish but by becoming less so. From time to time Dr. Butler and Dr. King admit, and it is a valuable admission, that they simply do not know:

Survey research . . . will in due course pro- vide answers to some of the questions; others— dealing with 'might-have-beens' and with the precise electoral impact of specific events—are simply unanswerable. At the end of our labours, we arc left with a sense of the complexity of human affairs.

Or take, again, this perceptive passage: It was suggested that the possession of con- sumer durables conduced almost automatically to Conservatism in voting; alternatively, the proportional decline in the manual working force was cited as evidence that Labour's voting strength, too, would inevitably diminish. What- ever the final outcome of the next election, it was clear by mid-1962 that these arguments did much less than justice to the full complexity of electoral behaviour. The economic and social trends postulated by the analyses continued; the political trends did not.

This point is made in an interesting chapter on social conditions and the climate of opinion, which is followed by an equally interesting sec- tion on the making of party strategy. Here Dr. Butler and Dr. King write almost as if they were journalists; and one sometimes suspects that their contacts on the Labour side were more forthcoming than on the Conservative. The authors seem to have overestimated the influence of Mr. Peter Shore and the ubiquitous Dr. Mark Abrams at Transport House, and underestimated the efficiency of the Conservative publicity machine, which is described as 'oddly old- fashioned.' This does not correspond-to my own impression, and does less than justice to the skills of Mr. George Hutchinson, then Conserva- tive chief of publicity, now managing director of the Spectator.

Nor is it only in content that this book is more broadminded than its predecessors. The style has changed also. It is much livelier; at times, indeed, positively pop. Dr. Butler and Dr. King are now, like some other political writers one can think of, availing themselves freely the ser- vices of that invaluable band of senior Con- servative officials, senior colleagues, Labour insiders, Cabinet ministers and leading back- benchers, all astonishingly well-informed, all happily anonymous and all ready to oblige with a snappy quote at a moment's notice.

It would be too much to say, however, that the old Nuffield habits have died completely. They have not. The opinion polls are still treated with a wholly excessive reverence. And there is still a reluctance to make a straightforward in- quiry. For instance, discussing the Campaign for Democratic Socialism's efforts to get their men into Parliament, Dr. Butler and Dr. King write that `it is not possible to discover how much credit rests with CDS and how much to the ordinarily random processes of selection.' On balance,' they conclude judiciously, 'the suc- cess ... may have been limited.' But there is a very simple method of discovering the credit which rests with CDS. It is to have a few words with, say, Mr. William Rodgers or Mr. Roy Hattersley. Has Dr. Butler given up coming to Westminster? Has Nullield College no telephone? But examples of academic verbiage are much rarer than they used to be. The Nuffield way is changing.

On, Nuffield, on!