The mythical Liberal vote
Ian Gilmour
The Common Welfare Jo Grimond (Maurice Temple Smith £7.50) At present the most absorbing political question about the Liberal Party seems to be where its vote is going to end up at the next election. Thus we are given lists of seats in which the Liberal vote in 1974 was larger than the Labour majority, and we are told the number that will go to the Conservatives if the Liberal vote declines by any given percentage. And until very recently we were regaled with stories about the importance which Mr Callaghan attached to helping Mr Steel and to bolstering the Liberal vote. (Whatever happened to the meeting at which Mr Callaghan was going to tell Mr Steel about the date of the General Election?) All this is of course largely unreal, and giving the Liberal Party a bloated sense of importance. In the sense that the words are used by many commentators 'the Liberal vote' does not exist. There is, admittedly, a hard core of people who vote Liberal at every election. But most of those who support the Liberals at any one election do so for reasons very different from those which cause voters to support Labour or the Conservatives. Broadly, they vote Liberal because they cannot bring themselves to support either of the main parties; or because they have become more sympathetic to the other main party than to the one they previously supported, but feel it would be disloyal to cross over. So they use the Liberal Party as a convenient temporary stopping place and as an alternative to either abstaining or voting for some more eccentric candidate. In consequence the Liberal vote is in continual flux. At no two General Elections (unless they are in the same year) is it composed of remotely the same people. An opinion poll some twelve months ago disclosed that about half of those who voted Liberal in 1974 had forgotten they had done so. That is what one would expect. The Liberal Party is like a railway junction where people wait while changing trains; and Didcot for all its virtues is not exactly memorable.
What seems to be a Liberal vote is therefore to a large extent independent of the Lib eral Party. Currently this must be a source of particular comfort to David Steel. Because of it, his selling of the Liberal Parliamentary vote so cheaply to Mr Callaghan will not exact quite the electoral retribution that is generally expected. Certainly some con siderable price will have to be paid for the Lib-Lab Pact and certainly the Liberals will poll many fewer votes than four years ago. But that would to some extent have hap pened, even if Mr Steel had played his cards more sensibly: the Liberals always gain at an election following a Conservative Parliament and lose at an election following a Labour Parliament.
Mr Steel has merely sharply steepened that decline. And, because there is 'no damned merit' about the Liberal vote, for every two or three 1974 Liberal voters who have already deserted the Liberal Party there will probably be one new 1979 Liberal voter, who will vote Liberal for reasons quite extraneous to anything that Mr Steel says or does. The Liberal vote of 1974 has already disappeared, and the Liberal vote of 1979 has not yet come fully into view. Hence in its search for votes the Conservative Party in the constituencies should seek to convert all the uncommitted, among whom must now be numbered many who have in the past always supported Labour, and should not pay much attention to the largely mythical Liberal vote.
Indeed anybody who reads Jo Grimond's excellent new book The Common Welfare and did not know it was by easily the most distinguished living Liberal would expect its author to vote Conservative next time. So far as I can see, there is nothing in it with which any sensible Conservative would strongly disagree and a great deal in it which any Conservative would warmly applaud. But Mr Grimond is not concerned with votes. He is looking to the future of Britain. His book is non-partisan and profound. He wishes to turn the country away from collectivism, centralisation and state control, and towards freedom, a market economy and community concern. Mr Grimond wants a welfare society not a welfare state. He greatly prefers the 'invisible hand' discerned by Adam Smith as beneficently guiding a free economy to the dead hand of bureaucrats and trade union barons gradually wrecking an increasingly controlled one. At the same time he is firm that it is 'as essential to reassert the notion of the common good, with all the obligations which go with it, as it is to assist individual liberty and the voluntary character of our acceptance of the common good and the rule of law'. And while the free market is essential both for a free political system and a prosperous economy, its benefits must be more widely spread. Mr Grimond's special enemy is bureaucracy. The bureaucrats at their worst have replaced the landlords and tyrannical employers as the incubus people feel upon their backs', and even at their best 'they fail to promote self-respect'. He regards the large public sector of the economy as a grave disadvantage. He believes so called 'free col lective bargaining' to be neither free, collective nor a bargain. Finally he is strongly against a state monopoly of education or of medicine.
It is easier to pick out particular points in Mr Grimond's argument than to convey the general flavour and charm of The Common Welfare. To get those, thc whole of this persuasive and readable book should be read. It only lacks Mr Grimond's normally abundant supply of wit and humour.
But enough has been said to indicate how uncomfortable Mr Grimond must have found the Lib-Lab Pact. The present-day Labour Party is opposed to everything that he stands for and it stands foreverything that he most vehemently opposes. To watch the Liberal Party propping up such a Labour Government, and to watch Mr Steel poodling for Mr Callaghan, and in the process doing great damage to his Party, must have called on all Mr Grimond's reserves of tolerance and must have made most other Liberals wish that he was still their leader.
Mr Grimond does not seem to me to have much changed his views since his previous books: The Liberal Future (1959) and The Liberal Challenge (1963). Perhaps there is a slightly greater emphasis on the virtues of the market than in his earlier books. But even in 1963 Mr Grimond quoted Milton Friedman with approval, and that was much less fashionable then than it is now. On the whole therefore he has been consistent.
True there was a time when Jo Grimond himself hoped for a realignment of the parties, believing that the Social Democrats would split from the hard Left and join up with the Liberals. But now the Social Democrats stand for nothing, and they have demonstrated that there is no excess by the Left which they will not tolerate provided of course that their jobs are safeguarded. As a result Mr Grimond no longer wants them. Indeed he is harsh about their hypocrisy, pointing out amongst other things that for Social Democrats equality 'is strictly for other people'. It is not he but the Labour Party who has changed. Unfortunately the Liberal Party has also changed.
While it is salutary after all the Liberal antics during the last few months and years to hear sanity and wisdom from at least one voice in the Liberal Party, even Mr Grimond can now do little to save it. At the next election the bewildered travellers at Didcot will be almost the only supporters of Mr Steel.
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