Spare Us a Landslide!

By DESMOND DONNELLY

LiBOUR looks set for a massive majority in the new Parliament if the public opinion polls are to be believed. Thus 1966 may come to rank, with 1906 and 1945, as the third great floodtide of British radicalism within this century. Cer- tainly this is the public mood as I judge it. But the question remains: Will an excessively large Labour majority really impel the modernisation drive that the nation demands? Or, paradoxically, might it not impede it?

The central reason for the surprising doubt is that manifest public desire and the actual work- ings in Parliament of a government with a majority of 200 seats are not the same thing. And whilst the disputed area in politics is always the centre, a government with too large a majority sometimes becomes the prisoner of its extreme wing of opinion.

This was shown to be the case with the Mac- millan administration after 1959. Without any doubt at all Britain would have been a member of the Common Market today had it not been for the fact that Mr. Macmillan was compelled to make genuflexions before the parochialisms of the Tory right wing. The result was the long- drawn-out negotiations on a series of nonsenses which gave President de Gaulle his chance to fling his great spanner into the Brussels machinery.

The same thing could happen with a Labour government with too large a majority, when the power passes, in proportion, from the administra- tion to the swollen back benches. Already one leading left-wing spokesman has been talking twaddle in the past few days, contending that entry into the Common Market would imperil jobs in Britain because (so the reasoning of ignor- ance goes) a free movement of capital would lead to British factories being built on the Continent. In fact, the converse is true because unless Britain joins the Common Market a number of leading British companies will have to cut back on expan- sion plans within Britain and build new produc- tion units within the European community as the only way to overcome the common external tariffs.

The same is true of many radical decisions that are essential if Britain is to come to terms with the 1970s.

Take railways as the example. The voices of the grass roots were the natural haters of Dr. Heeching and—what is more—all that 'Beeching- ism' stands for. The grass roots are naturally slower to change. The twentieth century came late to them and it is leaving them more slowly. The fact that Britain has (and will have for a long time) an acute labour shortage has largely escaped grass roots opinion. Yet Britain already has a pool of untapped surplus labour in the form of 250,000 men who spend their lives run- ning trains that very few people use. In short, if power passes from the executive to the back benches, is there any guarantee that we shall not be economically hanged by sob stuff about the railways being 'a social service'?

It is no secret that Mr. Wilson is disturbed by the prospect. A number of inspired leaks from his entourage indicate that he is longing for the gap between the parties, as given by the opinion polls, to narrow. He wants the election to be his '1955.' He fears that it could become his '1959.'

Implicit in the reasoning is the belief that as the number of Labour MPs approaches 400 in the new Parliament, so does the likelihood of a strengthened left wing. Behind it is the memory of Ernest Bevin's recurrent snorting at Labour conferences whenever an extreme left-wing motion was being debated. 'This resolution comes from Chislehurst,' he used to shout, meaning that Chislehurst, at that time, at least, ultra-Tory in his eyes, was also the home of a gaggle of leftist lunatics.

There is some truth in the argument...Con- stituency parties—be they Labour or Conseryative —tend to pay more attention to their own preju- dices and less to the public and vote-getting in seats that are not traditionally on their side. The responsibilities of winning do not rest heavily upon them. Thus, taken to its extremes, we often get the strangest Labour candidates in the seaside resorts; and the most astonishing Tory poujadists appear regularly in the Welsh valleys.

There is a second factor. A government is often as good or as bad as its opposition in its early years of office. If the opposition is strong, the government must tread warily. For example, I shall always believe that the greatest single factor in postponing steel nationalisation in the 1964 Parliament was not the combined efforts of Mr. Woodrow Wyatt and myself but the sweeping results of last May's municipal elections that transformed our lonely position. We knew we had the country behind us. So did Mr. Wilson and the Government.

Thus, whilst I am, in my more lighthearted moments, in favour of a devastating Tory defeat, recognise (like Mr. Wilson) that we need a goodly Tory army to face us across the gangway to keep our parliamentary party facing the right way and constantly to prune the eccentrics.

The plain fact is that the new Parliament faces the longest haul that any British House of Com- mons has ever met with in peace time. The balance of payments is still adverse. It is likely so to remain into early 1967. The £ sterling's backing is largely money that is borrowed from other central banks—and that money has to be repaid. It could take all that we can do to achieve this task by 1970.

The May Budget is bound to be tough. It will be rough sledding for many months. The nation will have to impose self-discipline on wages or face the consequences.

There is no alternative to British entry into the Common Market. We have to get that larger in- dustrial base or go into a long national decline. Indeed, if Britain does not join, the emigration queues will soon be stretching down the streets from Australia House and the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

In all this, the British nation is just not at the point in its history in which it can afford the luxury of extremist views. Just as we must elimin- ate waste in our society, we must also eliminate the irrelevant legislation of party dogma and keep our sights constantly on the focal points of prac- ticality and national interest.

For myself, and those who think like me, the 1966 Parliament will be our great test. The argu- ments on steel of last year will be as nothing compared with the challenges of sustaining a truly radical administration against tape-recordings from the 1930s and half-digested clichés from the Bevanite era. We have got to get national econo- mic policies on the roads to eventual success. And whilst most will depend upon ourselves, much will be conditioned by the climate of the new Parliament. Even in the cacophony of a general election—indeed, because of it—I believe moderation and practicality to be the new patriotisms.