POLITICS
The simplicity of not getting more than you bargained for
FE RDINAND MOUNT
Who's got the big Mo? That, we are told, is always the question in American elections. Momentum is all. A candidate who is not moving forward is pronounced dead. Traditionally, we have scorned this frantic approach as unseemly. British vo- ters are supposed to lack the herd instinct. Yet three-party politics and non-stop opin- ion polling have unmistakably made momentum matter; tactical voting depends upon it. You have to know which way things are going in order to cast a vote effectively.
And there is no doubt that the first few days of this campaign went Labour's way. They appeared to be gaining in the opinion polls. There was daylight showing between them and the Alliance in third place. And Mr Kinnock got through the launching of his manifesto without embarrassment. Did this show the true Machiavellian brilliance of his visit to Washington? By him and Mr Healey making such fools of themselves, did they hope to depress their standing so low that they had nowhere to go but up in the campaign?
Well, perhaps they are not yet quite as crafty as that. But the Labour Party's acquisition of even a modicum of low cunning does make a remarkable scene change. There you see the shadow cabinet arrayed in a semi-circle with red roses in their buttonholes in the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, with Mr Kinnock out front talking about a Britain Strong and Free. We might be at a meeting of the St George's League. The gigantic red rose sprouting above them has lost its earlier tasteful pallor, redolent of a toiletries advertisement, and taken on the menacing scarlet and salmon pink variegations of one of those roses bred by colour-blind fanatics — a hybrid, say, of Ena Harkness and Elizabeth of Glamis. And there in the midst of this floribund scene (`Stan Orme' — a strong-scented, full-petalled rambler with blush centre; 'Roy Hattersley' — a tenacious climber impervious to blackspot, needs rich mulch), we hear Mr Kinnock in full flow, placed well forward of them, at a raised lectern, vaguely suggestive of some affluent hot-gospeller with his mixed choir behind him, ready to leap into action while the preacher goes off to change his shirt. The seats are comfortable, the lighting tolerable; one's attention may wander as the Labour leader loses himself in some strange pseudo-economic rhapsody about `improving the velocity of production'. But, and I cannot exaggerate what a change this is, the occasion is neither embarrassing nor unpleasant. The prospect of a Labour government is in that sense measurably less frightening than it was in 1983.
True, the policies have not changed all that much. Their spending plans are still grotesquely unrealistic; their answer to every serious problem — employment, housing, education — is still more state regulation and squeezing out of private effort; they are still committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament. But the rough edges have been rubbed away. Labour would not kick out the American nuclear missiles; they would merely shepherd them towards the exit. And ah, the delicacy, the impu- dent vagueness with which the more sensi- tive topics are handled. 'We shall extend social ownership by a variety of means as set out in Labour's detailed proposals.' You don't wish to be bothered with all those boring old masculine details, do you? For this is the new feminised Labour Party which devoted a whole Leader's press conference to a Ministry for Women, and Well Woman clinics. In terms of low politics, I think Mr Kinnock has made a brilliant job of producing a manifesto which binds his own interest groups feminists, black ranters, CND — more tightly to his bosom, while not off-putting the other 95 per cent of the electorate.
By comparison, the Alliance programme seemed a little tepid and familiar. One descended that wonderful elliptical stair- case to the basement of the National Liberal Club to find the double act of the two Davids being performed as competent- ly as ever but without much fresh material. The other parties have caught up and ordered some of those soft furnishings which used to be exclusive Alliance prop- erty — conservation and the countryside, better burglar alarms, acid rain. Even the Conservatives have cottoned onto cervical cancer.
But as David Steel has pointed out, the Alliance tends to come with a late run. In the first two weeks of the 1983 campaign, they appeared to make little or no impress- ion — so much so that Mr Steel summoned them all to Ettrick Bridge where some kind of coup to unseat Roy Jenkins as SDP leader was meditated. It was only in the last week of the campaign that the Alliance seemed to add that six to eight per cent of support which gave it such a thrilling final result.
By comparison, the Conservatives have come out of their corner looking pretty fresh, rather smarmy but certainly full of bounce. In a remarkable role reversal, they were able to claim that, after eight years in power, it was they who had the new ideas to liberate the working class. Mrs Thatcher has finally swallowed the slogan 'power to the people', which she once thought too socialistic, even in its promise to undo socialism, since 'the people' was itself a demeaning term. This column is too pre- judiced to judge fairly of the political impact of the proposals to allow schools to opt out of their LEAs and council tenants to wriggle free of their councils. I have argued them so often here and elsewhere and been so often told how impractical they are, how they would be exploited by articulate agitators, how in any case the workers won't appreciate such freedom and so on, that I now feel inclined merely to sit back and watch. One can see how to write the Labour candidate's speech: `bringing back the 11-plus . . . divisive . . . all right for the leafy suburbs . . . abandon- ing the inner cities.' All the same, I don't think that line really works. It is hard to oppose cost-free opportunities.
Labour's best lines remain unemploy- ment and Mrs Thatcher. On balance, the Prime Minister is now as much an asset to her party as she was still a liability this time last year. But in the other half of the balance, there remain quite a number of people who, if they vote Conservative, it will be despite rather than because of her. After having spoken of 'going on and on' she then backtracked during the manifesto launch and on the radio afterwards, and did go some way to neutralise 'the Prime Minister for life' gibe, but it is still the opposition's favourite weapon. Mrs Thatcher's bossy personality was much in evidence at the launch: 'Now then, Nor- man, why aren't you saying all this?' But I'm sure George could put it all much better,' and then correcting Mr Younger's wording. Yet as much as this grates on some people's nerves, it reminds others of the simplicity of voting Conservative. You know what you are asking for and what you will get. And 'vote for the unknown' is not what Mr Tadpole would have called 'a good cry'.
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