POLITICS
Mr Maclennan's alarming symptoms of post electoral tristesse
NOEL MALCOLM
Aliance voters are already painfully familiar with the 'Cleopatra's Nose' theory of history. In March 1982 opinion polls put the Alliance equal first with Labour at 33 per cent. That was the month of Roy Jenkins's extraordinary victory at Hill- head. But it was also the month when Argentina invaded the Falklands. By the time Port Stanley was recaptured, the Tories had risen to 46 per cent in the polls and the Alliance had sunk to 24. The `experimental plane' launched by Mr Jenk- ins had been blown off course by a cross- wind of history which no one could ever have been expected to foresee.
Roy Jenkins's fears were that the plane would 'finish up a few fields from the end of the runway'. In his worst dreams he cannot have imagined the fate which now seems to be overtaking his creation. Hav- ing disappeared into the clouds for a while, it is re-emerging in the form of what is known in the arms trade as a MIRV: a Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicle. Even Brian Hanrahan would have difficul- ty now in counting them all back in.
Something more than bad luck is needed to explain this sorry state of affairs. To Cleopatra's Nose we must also add Mac- lennan's Foot. Some of the Alliance MPs, if entrusted with the task of negotiating a merger, would have contented themselves with drafting a constitution; constitution- drafting is what Mr Maclennan is good at, and from the SDP point of view he made a substantial success of it. The new party simply did not need a new policy statement — or rather, it needed a straightforward repetition of the policies in last year's manifesto. That does not mean that those policies cannot be changed; but having designed an elaborate piece of machinery for policy-making and policy-changing, the mergerites had an obvious duty to wait until they were empowered to turn the starting-handle and set it in motion.
In Mr Maclennan's eyes, these dictates of duty and common sense were over-ruled by the most pressing need of all: the need to trump Dr Owen. His calculation here was uncannily inaccurate. If he had stuck to the 1987 manifesto he would always have been able to taunt Dr Owen with the charge of inconsistency: the Doctor would look foolish denouncing those policies when he had himself commended them to the nation less than a year ago.
But Mr Maclennan was carried away by a combination of post-electoral tristesse and his own improbable brand of mach- ismo. 'It will not do', he told the SDP Assembly in September, 'to dust down the manifesto and represent it as a new credo for a new party. . . . Its priorities were obscure and its focus blurred.' When last week's abortive policy statement hit the headlines, Mr Maclennan must have been praying for all the obscurity he could get. Instead of winning over the Owenites, this document simply woke up those dozy Liberals who were still under the impress- ion that the merger would be a takeover. And now critics on both sides can argue, maliciously but plausibly, that whatever the mergerites now say is merely an attempt to conceal their 'hidden agenda'. The replacement document, issued this week, is positively craven in its desire not to offend. On the future existence of Trident it observes that 'the new party will need to decide how to reconcile these changing realities with the manifesto com- mitment to maintain our capability in the sense of freezing our capacity'. On the alleviation of poverty it proposes 'to ask the achievers and the fortunate to face the choices which they will have to make if they are to will the means as well as the end'. Not content with papering over the cracks, the authors of this statement have helpfully drawn little arrows all over the paper to point out where the cracks are.
The faults of the previous policy state- ment were in fact very minor ones though it took major political ineptitude on the part of Steel and Maclennan to let them pass. In some cases the fault was simply one of presentation. To talk openly of abolishing universal child benefit, for ex- ample, may have been politically foolish; but Alliance manifestos in the last two elections have talked of introducing a combined tax and benefit system, which comes in effect to precisely the same thing.
If the Liberal MPs who rejected this statement had merely attacked it for its presentational failings and electoral liabili- ties, less damage would have been done in the long run. But instead they reached for their political philosophies, denouncing it as a 'sub-Thatcherite' betrayal of Liberal principles. This is unfortunate, because they do not in fact possess a coherent set of Liberal principles, and have not possessed one for at least 50 years. They have been sub-Conservative and sub-Labour for a long time — and none the worse for that. The Liberalism of Beveridge and the wel- fare state had precious little to do with 19th-century Liberalism, and the philoso- phy of Peter HaM had even less. In the 1970s, oddly enough, it was David Steel who came closest to the old Liberal tradi- tion when he railed against government interference and the suppression of free enterprise. 'All that I am saying', he told the Liberal Assembly in 1976, 'adds up to a plea for less government control, regula- tion and restraint.' If Mrs Thatcher's ideol- ogy has been sub-Steelite all this time, nobody seems to have minded.
The Liberals are doing themselves a disservice by drawing imaginary maps of political principles on which they inhabit some sort of clearly defined plateau of high theory. The soggy middle ground, of which they speak so dismissively, is in fact the area to which large numbers of sub-Labour and sub-Conservative voters would flock, if only they thought that the middle party could actually win an election. And there is good reason for the middle ground to have a sub-Conservative tinge to it: the Liberals have so hypnotised themselves with talk about the 'anti-Thatcher majority' that they have lost sight of the obvious fact that the anti-Kinnock majority is even larger.
But before people start flocking to the middle ground, they have to be sure that they will find at least a few political leaders there who are capable of running the proverbial whelk-stall. That was part of the SDP's appeal in the heady days of 1981 and 1982. Now only Dr Owen has survived with his competence — and his pride — intact; if he regains the majority of his party he may eventually recoup its political losses, but it will be a very long haul. And there is something about his posture of non-juror, Old Believer loyalism which sits ill with the rhetoric of centre party politics over the last seven years. The most important ele- ment of the Alliance's appeal in 1981 was that it was doing something new. This was not just gilt on the gingerbread — it was an essential part of the recipe. There is a famous cartoon, I think from the New Yorker, which shows an advertising tycoon leaning across his desk to bellow at a nervous copy-writer: "New" is an old word. I want a new word.' Even if he wins back his party, Dr Owen will find that it is presented by the electorate with an equally impossible demand.
Previous page
