THE ELECTION
WHY I SHALL VOTE LABOUR
Mr Kinnock's personality is the only one he can trust
I WAS recently served in Collets bookshop by a young man sporting a badge with the legend 'Glad to be Gay'. I was rather surprised to find myself both offended and disturbed. Halfway down Charing Cross Road, I realised that what had upset me was the idea of wearing a slogan which was essentially an advertisment for yourself. When someone wears a CND badge, it is not primarily to argue that their own life should be spared from a nuclear explosion. They are arguing on behalf of others, or indeed, as they would say, on behalf of all mankind. This seems to me a noble thing. But to wear a badge whose chief purpose is to plead your own special case seems, by contrast, distasteful. It is as if I went round with a pin saying 'Proud to be a Play- wright'.
It is in this light that I see Mrs Thatcher. She is, as her teams of journalistic galley- slaves never tire of telling us, a crusader. Her crusade, however, is exclusively on behalf of herself, and those who share her peculiar temperament and ideas. There is a half-decent case to be made that when she first came into office not all her instincts were authoritarian. There was a froth of libertarian rhetoric. She seemed unable to decide whether people should be free, or whether they should only be free in order more to resemble her. She is now much mocked for her apparently unconscious use of the word 'we', but I believe wrongly. She does not literally believe herself to be Queen. Anyone who has listened to her for the last eight years knows exactly who 'we' now are. 'We' are everyone who thinks like us. And 'we' are, to all intents and pur- poses, the only people who matter.
I hardly need say that I dislike this arrogance, and I long for the days when politicians professed some ostensible con- cern for other people. Is he one of us?' may be a fair question in a gay bath-house, but I think it unseemly from a British Prime Minister. There is something des- perately shabby about her regime because she has twice been given power by an electorate which wanted to convince itself of something which, deep down, it knew not to be true. Most people do know that self-interest is not coincident with national interest. They know that greed should not be the sole or principal motor of a Western economy. They suspect that it is wrong to try and boast your way out of historical decline. Mrs Thatcher tells us an alluring lie. She claims that if we direct all our resources towards our own self- improvement, the lot of others will some- how be mystically improved. The evidence of this falsehood is all around us, in our rotten cities and our stinking streets, in our overworked hospitals and our unruly schools. Yet we go on buying a dream far more irresponsible than any offered by the most demented leftist. She tells us that we may, without guilt, spend our lives Out For Number One.
Friends practised in realpolitik tell me that I waste my time worrying about the moral shortcomings of governments and it is to the practical effects of their policies that I should direct my attention. Politics, they insist, is a necessarily corrupt profes- sion and an incoming Labour administra- tion would, they add, soon get in as deep. But it is from a sense of intellectual outrage that I shall vote against the Tories. I believe them to lack the character to tell the truth. I have spent long enough being taken for a Charlie. I am tired of sitting at home and being insulted by some card- sharp in a flash suit who tells me that the Government has no power to curb unem- ployment, or that crime is not related to social deprivation. I am tired of the weasel- speech which attributes all economic suc- cess to 'our policies' and all economic disaster to `world recession'. The man on the television knows as well as his audience that the Government, faced with a choice, deliberately allowed unemployment to climb unchecked in order to control infla- tion. Yet he lacks the courage to say in public what he would openly admit in his club. From this first, central, governing lie have flowed all the other, increasingly careless lies — about the Belgrano, about Westland, and about the unemployment figures themselves. Now in her response to Peter Wright, Mrs Thatcher implies not only that she will not tell us the truth, but that we have no business to ask for it. She tells us that by ignoring reality, she may make it go away.
You will see that I am much influenced by what is deprecatingly called 'personal- ity' since, like most voters, I regard it as important in politics as I do in life. I judge politicians by asking myself whether I would wish to work in a theatre of which they were general manager. I therefore cannot vote for the SDP since its leader has the air of a man who having first tasted the heady satisfactions of betrayal intends to go on indulging himself for the rest of his life. I will happily vote for Neil Kinnock since I believe him to be trustworthy and responsible. He has a sense of personal honour. He seems without the disfiguring cynicism which elsewhere marks British politics. I can see all his shortcomings. I have watched him lose the attention and sympathy of even the friendliest audience by his artless longwindedness. Nor am I convinced of the argument that the di- visiveness of the Labour Party is invariably a tribute to its vitality. But I like both the man and his policies. He wishes, as most sensible people do, to make some con- tribution towards dismantling the cold war. He wants, as soon as possible, to correct the increasing imbalance between what we give to the rich and the poor, the North and the South, the sick and the well, and he is beginning to show signs of knowing how to use institutions to effect these ends. He believes that England should be some- thing other than a military colony of the US. There is in him and his colleagues an altruism which I find appealing. I cannot help it. I know it is out of fashion, but I believe in a funny way that is part of its present recommendation. Time has never frozen before in politics, and I do not believe it is about to now.
Left raving incoherently about a thousand-year Reich — presumably with the worst moments from the Eighties playing like a looped video into eternity Mrs Thatcher seems to me more and more irrelevant to the life of the country. What impresses me is not her domination of the pOlitical scene, but how quickly I suspect she will vanish from it. At one time no serious political conversation was possible in Delhi without reference to Mrs Ghandi, and yet six months after her assassination, the very mention of her name brought an embarrassed silence, as if people could barely recall her. Mrs Thatcher will de- materialise just as quickly, leaving nothing but the memory of a funny accent and an obscure sense of shame. When it will happen, or how, I have no idea. But I will fire my own little electoral popgun in three weeks' time, and so I think will quite a lot of patriots.
David Hare is Associate Director of the National Theatre.
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