QUESTIONING THE CONSENSUS

Mr Wilson's Fourth Republic

By NIGEL LAWSON

'TT is obvious that the Conservative party has 'completely lost effective political initiative. Thus Mr Angus Maude began his notorious article in the SPECTATOR nearly six months ago. with somewhat unfortunate consequences. Yet it was true then, and it is true now. Perhaps that isn't really so surprising. An Opposition, it will be claimed, can only take the initiative when the public is ready for it, and it is well established that the average voter is not going to start taking notice of the Opposition until the Government's policies begin to hurt him in his pocket. And that hasn't happened .. . yet. In any case, does it really matter? The next election is some four years ahead, and in that time anything can hap- pen. The Labour party, after all, was in a far worse shape in September 1960, when Hugh Gaitskell pledged to 'fight, fight and fight again to save the party we love'; yet within a year it was in a position in which, according to the polls, it would have won a snap general election.

All the same, the ineffectiveness of the official opposition is a curious phenomenon at the present time. For, to echo Mr Maude, it is equally obvious that the Government has com- pletely lost effective political initiative. As a leading article in the New York Times put it a few days ago, 'Harold Wilson has not taken im- portant or new decisions. He gives the impres- sion of floundering.' The latest Gallup Poll. pub- lished in the Daily Telegraph a week ago, showed an eleven-point drop since May in the popularity of Mr Wilson. Yet there was little joy in this for Mr Heath: his popularity, too. suffered a precisely similar eleven-point fall. And of one thing we can be sure: if the political initiative has slipped through the fingers of both the two main parties, the beneficiary has not been the Liberals, whose leader, the normally sensible Mr Grimond. in warning of the fleshpots of Ascot, succeeded in hitting the headlines with what must have been the silliest utterance of his career.

In fact, of course, in this country as in the United States, the only effective opposition to government policy at the present time is coming from within the ranks of the ruling party itself. Over the past two weeks, Mr Mayhew and Mr Wyatt have given Mr Wilson a rougher ride than the whole of the Tory front bench have done since the last general election. Certainly it's true that dog biting dog is not news, whereas dog biting himself is; but that's not the whole story. Nor is it a satisfactory solution to blame the present Tory leadership: that would be glib and superficial, as well as unfair. If the Tories have learned anything in recent years, it should be the futility of imagining that a new leader is the solution to every problem. No, there is a more fundamental reason for the Conservatives' utter inability to profit from the Government's successive blunders. And it is this. When a Prime Minister is resolved to govern on the basis of the consensus (and this is the case with most Prime Ministers, not only the present incumbent) an Opposition can only be effective if it is prepared to question the consensus.

Perhaps I should explain what I mean by 'the consensus' in this context. There is in this country a general consensus about the sort of society (and, more vaguely, the sort of world) in which we want to live, and this is thoroughly healthy: it is a sign of a civilised. stable and non-revolutionary en- vironment. But there is also a further consensus, not among the public at large, but within the Whitehall-centred establishment, of the conven- tional wisdom, about the sort of policies that are needed to achieve these common ends. It is this consensus - the sort of views that appear regularly in the pages of the Economist—to which I am referring. This consensus covers almost every aspect of policy, but its chief characteristics can be fairly briefly stated. The belief that the key- stone of our policies should be the Anglo- American 'special' relationship, which must be as close as possible. even to the extent of aligning ourselves automatically with policies (as in Viet- nam) over which we have no influence whatever and which are widely criticised in America her- self. The view that this demands unwavering support of NATO in its present form, and un- yielding hostility to de Gaulle, who seeks to threaten NATO and challenge the United States. The view that. for the sake of America and the 'Commonwealth' alike. we must remain a military power East of Suez. The view that, provided (of course) none of the above conditions are en- dangered. we should join the European Common Market. And in the all-important economic field, the belief that the sterling exchange rate is sacred, and that our problems must be solved by half- hearted deflation reinforced by an incomes policy.

These are the cornerstones of Mr Wilson's policies. It is sometimes argued that he has dis- comfited the Tories by stealing their clothes, or at least by occupying the 'middle ground' of politics which they used to call their own. This is a misconception. These were indeed the main planks of the last Conservative administration, too; but in fact they are in essence no more Tory

than they are Socialist—nor are they in any mean- ingful sense a 'middle ground.' They are simply the policies of the consensus, of the conventional wisdom of what Keynes, I believe, called the elder parrots. And so long as the Opposition con- tinues to accept them, it is bound to be ineffec- tive. So long as it accepts the basic framework of the Government's approach, its opposition is bound to appear carping and niggling, while its fundamental approval of the consensus inevitably reinforces the Government's standing with the public and enables the Prime Minister to play the part of a genuinely national leader. By contrast, the reason that Messrs Mayhew and Wyatt have been so much more effective is that, in one held at least—East of Suez—they have dared to ques- tion the consensus; just as Senator Fulbright has done in the United States and just as, on the world stage, General de Gaulle has done.

Yet the Conservatives, it seems, are not yet pre- pared to go this far. They accept the consensus over the Americans, over NATO, over East of Suez, over the economy. In his speech to the par- liamentary Labour party, the definitive defence of the present Government's East of Suez policy, Mr Wilson produced such a pathetic ragbag of irrelevancies and self-contradictions that even the normally well-disposed Observer felt obliged to head its leading article 'Mr Wilson in Wonder- land.' (One aspect of this 'wonderland' was Mr Wilson's new theory that no one could be a self- respecting member of the United Nations without spending several hundred million pounds a year on military presence East of Suez. In a fifteen- page speech, he succeeded in mentioning the United Nations no less than thirty-eight times. presumably calculating that in a Labour congre- gation each mention was worth a vote. Perhaps it was.) Yet in spite of this painfully vulnerable performance, the official Opposition have been silent. Again, over the seamen's dispute. Mr Wilson. unable to decide whether to try and end the strike by conciliation, or save the incomes policy by toughness and non-conciliation, has characteristically attempted to get the best of both worlds by conciliating toughly, a contradic- tion in terms, and has duly ended with the worst of both. But once again, the consensus in economic policy prevents any effective opposition.

Of course, questioning the consensus can pre•• sent problems. Occasionally the consensus is right. More often even when wrong it is politically popular. But this excuse does not apply today. The mood of the present is characterised by an in- creasing disenchantment, if not with the consensus itself, at least with where it is leading. The rising support for the radical view on East of Suez is one indication; as is the remarkable success de Gaulle has had in changing the whole context of European discussion from the need to maintain a closely-knit Western defensive alliance to the hope of a rapprochement with Eastern Europe. Even the Economist, an excellent newspaper ca its own terms but the house journal of the con- sensus, has felt obliged to shift its attack on de Gaulle to the absurd charge that relations with the East should be improved not on a nation-by- nation basis but by all twenty-five Western nations negotiating as a monolithic bloc.

The economic consensus, too, is beginning to fray at the edges as the failure of its last great white hope, the incomes policy, is seen to lead it to even more dubious paths. The Economist, for example, is now advocating an eighteen-month total wage-salary-dividend freeze to be followed by the Government taking statutory powers to veto national wage agreements in private indus- try. When the consensus gets to the point where it espouses policies that are in fundamental con- flict with the sort of society it was originally de- signed to protect, it takes jittle perception to see that something has gone seriously wrong some- where.

The fact is that the consensus is running into a dead end, yet the official Opposition, by refusing to question it, is unable to provide any national alternative, is, I suspect, at the root of the Eng- lish malaise detected by that latter-day Savon- arola, Mr Anthony Lewis, in his recent and widely-quoted sermon in the New York Times. Of course, there is nothing new in this kind of lament. Like most of what is best in contem- porary politico-economic journalism, its modern origins go back to Mr Andrew Shonfield, who, in his book British Economic Policy Since the War (1958). grimly pointed as an ugly warning to us to the France of the Fourth Republic, then in its death throes (I shall have more to say about this later on), and added, 'I also suggest that many military and political activities of a prestige char- acter ought to be given up, in order to make this country better equipped to grow rapidly.'

It has taken eight years for this to become a live political issue. And Mr Shonfield's diagnosis was followed by a deluge of essentially similar tracts, among them Mr Michael Shanks's The Stagnant Society (1961) and the Encounter symposium 'Suicide of a Nation' (1963). Even Mr Lewis couldn't do better than that. Mr Lewis's only original contribution, in fact, was to con- nect our economic decline with London's rise to swinging-city status, to link the weakness of the pound with the shortness of the skirt. Apart from being neither historically nor logically correct, this analysis is unfortunate in its (no doubt un- witting) support for the increasingly prevalent habit of politicians of blaming the public for all their (the politicians') shortcomings. The incomes policy is, of course, a classic example of this dan- gerous trend: we are no longer very far from the Brechtian President who, having lost confidence in the public, dissolved it and elected a new one.

But Mr Lewis is a shrewd observer and an experienced journalist, and he is right in this: there is a nasty smell in the air these days. And it is the smell of France in 1957, the last days of the Fourth Republic. The parallels are uncanny. There is the same chronic balance of payments deficit, plugged by the same continual recourse to foreign borrowing. The same lack of national leadership, the same drift and indecision, the same sense of politicians who have abdicated from any attempt to control events. There is the same weari- ness of empire, and disenchantment with military 'Well, we really got through to our audieiwe last night!'

adventures in Africa and Asia, the same tendency to turn inward. Differences, of course, there are, as well: we have nothing as disruptive of society as the Algerian war; nor, equally, can we boast the rapid economic growth France succeeded in achieving throughout her crisis. But the similari- ties far outweigh the differences.

And one similarity is, I think. particularly illuminating. The governments of the Fourth Republic. discredited though they now are, did pursue a policy :.a policy which can best be des- cribed as a strategy of weakness. By making a virtue of France's economic and political weak- ness, and hinting at the horrors that would follow a complete collapse, they were able to achieve considerable success Of a kind with their allies. By scaring the Americans with the prospect of a Communist seizure of power should the economy collapse, the French were able to squeeze out of the unwilling Americans one large dollar loan after another. Even more important—for the benefit was a more lasting one--by exploiting its precariousness as well as its indispensability the French government of the time succeeded in exacting from its European partners outrageously favourable terms in the original Common Market negotiations.

This—the strategy of weakness—is, in so far as it has one, the policy being pursued by the British government today. This time, of course, it is not the threat of the country going Communist (although judging by his latest remarks the Prime Minister may not be overlooking even this possi- bility) but the threat of a sterling devaluation, with its allegedly disastrous effects on the dollar and on monetary order, and the threat that we might have to pull out of Singapore or withdraw our moral support for President Johnson in Viet- nam, that has enabled the Wilson government to secure American financial support on an un- precedented and seemingly unending scale. As M Gallard showed, and as Mr Wilson has under- lined, a strategy of weakness can be remarkably successful.

But only up to a point. For one thing, it has to come to an end. Sooner or later the strong countries of the world refuse to allow themselves to be deliberately exploited any longer by their weak sister. We are particularly vulnerable in this respect, since America today can only support us so long as she enjoys the co-operation of France and Germany. And when the drug is removed, the withdrawal symptoms will be very painful indeed. Secondly, it is clear that a strategy of weakness, for all its cleverness, will ensure that we are frustrated in our desire to become a member of the Common Market. If the French object to our increasing economic, and therefore political, dependence on the United States, both they and the Germans are likely to share the view recently transmitted to Brussels by a German member of the Common Market delegation in London and leaked to Le Monde, that, were we to join the Community, the English sickness would merely contaminate the economies of the Six and drag them down, too.

But the most important objection is that there comes a time when a self-respecting nation will no longer tolerate the humiliation of a strategy of weakness, whatever the short-term tricks won by it. It happened in France, and there is no reason to doubt that it will happen here, too. Yet the strategy of weakness was not a policy adopted out of choice. It has come about as a 'logical conclusion of the consensus. We shall "escape from it when—and not before—a political party in Britain, seeing where it has led, is pre- pared to question that consensus, and reject it.