POLITICS
Mrs Thatcher needs more than Moonies in her broad church
NOEL MALCOLM
During Monday's poll tax debate, a young whippersnapper Tory MP (Mr Simon Burns) accused Mr Mates, the rebel leader, of being `disingenious'. Lexicog- raphers and pronunciation experts on the Labour benches roared with laughter; but only a few minutes earlier they had been jeering 'sycophant' at another Tory loyalist and pronouncing it `psychophant'.
It strikes me that `disingenious' and `psychophant' are both valuable additions to the English political vocabulary. `Sycophant' is too banal a term to apply to some of the young Thatcherite MPs who troop faithfully into the division lobby on every note and will not criticise the tiniest shred of government policy even in the most secluded of private conversations. Their loyalty is not to be explained in terms of the desire to be patted on the head, or even the desire to rise to the dizzy heights of a PPS or junior Whip in five years' time. No — the appeal of unswerving loyalism for them is that it relieves them of the obligation to think. They are Maggie's Moonies, lost souls who have found secur- ity at last in being told what to believe. Not sycophants, therefore, but psychophants.
Disingenious', on the other hand, sounds like a polite way of saying `dim'. There is a school of thought which says this Government has been cruelly calculating, deceptive and disingenuous in its introduc- tion of the major bundle of reforms which are now passing through Parliament. While claiming to be concerned only with sim- plifying and rationalising the complex sys- tems of taxation, housing, health care and so on (the argument runs), it has in fact been conducting a clever war of attrition against the lower classes, aimed at increas- ing all the inequalities in our society. This argument is not only unfair to the Govern- ment, which has been consistently open about its ideological purposes; it is also foolish, because it credits the Government with a degree of cunning which it does not possess. As Mrs Thatcher's administration sinks further each day into a morass of minor rebellions and moans about 'losers', it becomes increasingly obvious that it has brought its own troubles upon itself by being more than a little disingenious.
The Government's dimness is shown both by its failure to estimate the likely effect of its policies on the psychology of the nation at large, and by its clumsy way of dealing with the psychology of its own
MPs. Where the nation is concerned, this Government has ignored several elementary rules of thumb. One well- known rule states that the shouts of grati- tude from the gainers will never be as loud as the cries of recrimination from the losers. Since the gainers will not trumpet their own good fortune, the Government must do it for them. But if it defends these changes simply by referring to the fact that some people gain, rather than by explain- ing the reason why they do so, it will leave the argument at the balance-sheet level, where losers always seem to have the strongest case. For too long, the Conserva- tives have fostered the sort of populist purse-string politics which encourages peo- ple to judge the virtues of a government purely in terms of the number of extra pounds it 'gives' them. They have some explaining to catch up on — to both losers and gainers.
Another rule of thumb states that the virtues of major structural changes in a welfare system will never be as directly appreciated as any number of minor local changes. When a tangled web of special conditions and allowances is untangled and simplified, this can convey a real benefit to the claimants, who may have suffered in the past from the feeling that they were characters in a book written by Kafka and illustrated by Heath Robinson. But the happiness which can be caused by such structural reforms is tiny compared with the pleasure which could be given by adding a handful of further anomalous allowances. What price structural change, when you could have, say, a special feeding allowance for unemployed people's pets?
Yet another rule decrees that people will only react to financial changes when they actually happen, no matter how far in advance they have been warned about them. Both last month's Budget and this month's social security shake-up bring in valuable reforms; but the combination of the two creates an unfortunate chemical reaction. Details of the social security reforms have, of course, been available for the last three years; but availability is not the same as reality, and they only became real last week. A little contemplation of this point will strike more fear into the hearts of Tory MPs and they look forward to the phasing in of the poll tax during the run-up to the next general election.
Spare a thought, if you can, for the average, non-psychophantic, not very ideological, perhaps not even terribly bright Conservative MP. All he really wants is a quiet life, with the economy entrusted to a safe pair of hands, and with one or two popular measures to bang on about, such as council house sales and trade union reforms. His instinct, where awkward, trouble-causing issues such as higher education or the rates are con- cerned, is to let sleeping dogs lie. If the sleeping dog isn't broken, why mend it? He feels that his party's policies are being generated, not by him or his colleagues or their constituencies, but by clever young men in far-away think tanks and policy units of which he knows nothing. On the rare occasions when he dares to raise his voice against some aspect of government policy, each tentative disagreement is trea- ted as rank treason. Every known variety of arm-twisting is brought to bear on him, ranging from tea and sympathy with the Whips to whisky and antipathy with Mr Ridley.
In the abstract, the clever ideologists in the think tank have usually got it right. And if major reforms cannot be brought in with a majority of 101, when will they ever be achieved? The Government's fault lies not in sticking to its principles, but in treating every criticism as if it were an attack on the principles, rather than the details. Of course it is possible to oppose details while remaining loyal to principles — it is a distinction which only, a psychophant would fail to understand.
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