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It is odd to think that politicians were once notorious for flattering the voters. Gladstone and Disraeli would compete in complimenting assemblies of working men on their honesty and diligence. Baldwin was a prince of the trowel: 'There is no nation on earth that has had the same knack of producing geniuses . . . the Eng- lish people are at heart and in practice the kindest people in the world' — he could go on like that all night, and frequently did.

But nowadays the typical MP who wishes to draw attention to himself is more likely to lay into us than to lay it on thick. It is now the Politicians who caricature the People, rather than the other way about. The coming man in Mr ICinnock's new model Labour Party will dilate on the selfishness, greed and callousness of Mrs Thatcher's loadsamoney, I'm-all-right- Jack, devil-take-the-hindmost Britain. The ambitious Tory will pursue a different yet not entirely different line: in Mrs Thatch- er's get-up-and-go Britain, there is a new spirit of individualism, self-reliance and enterprise at work, but, sadly, Some Peo- ple (not the enterprising ones, of course) have now become surly, dishonest skivers; they have forgotten the difference between right and wrong and they leave hamburger wrappers on the pavement. Whether the Speaker is trying to imitate Mr Tebbit's rough populism or Mr Kinnock's smooth socialism, he will take it as read that 'the British character' has altered dramatically over the past decade. If Pont of Punch had begun drawing his epic series on that subject in 1979 and was still drawing for Punch in 1989 (quite a big if), he would be making quite different jokes today from the jokes he started off making.

Or would he? John Rentoul, an alumnus of John Lloyd's New Statesman, has had the simple but serviceable idea of collect- ing the various surveys of social attitudes Which have been conducted over the past few decades, with a view to answering the underlying question: have we really changed that much? Are we really more selfish/self-reliant than we were ten years ago, or than our parents were 20 or 30 Years ago? Are we so malleable?

. What Mr Rentoul does with the answers is what you would expect a sharp young Labour man to do with them. They offer, he claims, a re-opening of the possibilities of collectivism. The popular agenda for the 1990s will be dominated by what he calls an affluent altruism', strongly tinged with green:

Far from the Thatcher Revolution constitut- ing an 'irreversible' shift in values, a final break with the post-war consensus, its

Change is constant

Ferdinand Mount

ME AND MINE: THE TRIUMPH OF THE NEW INDIVIDUALISM? by John Rentoul Unwin Hyman, 172.95, pp.199

achievements in redefining the politics of the possible actually show the way for a much more radical leftward shift than might have previously been thought possible.

Well, that still sounds like a long shot to me. Nor does Mr Rentoul's optimism about a renewal of the prospects for socialism really follow logically from the results of all the opinion polls he quotes. He attributes Mrs Thatcher's dominance of the scene largely to the deep split in the Opposition vote, but that split shows signs of healing only very slowly, if at all. Besides, Mr Rentoul agrees with most social scientists that British party alle- giances are mostly a matter of class and that, since the traditional working class is undoubtedly shrinking, so is Labour's re- servoir of loyalists.

It is the evidence of the surveys that carry more weight. The author claims that 'the evidence is that the values of collectiv- ism are as strong as ever' and that 'there has been no underlying change in egalita- rian values in the 1980s'. Putting it just a little more neutrally, I do agree that the way we are does not seem to be wholly different from the way we were. We are not changed utterly, or — a crucial distinc- tion — our opinions and aspirations are not. The way we behave may be a quite different matter.

Most people still feel warmly towards the National Health Service and believe that decent health care should be available to all. But most of us are not hostile to private health care and would be prepared to consider private insurance if we could afford it or if it was offered by our employers. The majority have steadily held similar views about education. They want to see a high-quality state-provided system of some kind, but they are open-minded about private schools and would consider sending their children to one if they could afford to. Beliefs about housing have not changed much either. As far back as 1967, Gallup found that 74 per cent were in favour of local authorities selling council houses to their occupiers — exactly the same proportion as today. Home- ownership remains the overwhelming pre- ference, but both home-owners and would- be home-owners expect the government to see that the homeless are decently lodged.

There are some questions to which the answers given have changed over the past 40 years: 'Are trade unions a good thing?' and 'Are you in favour of more nationalisa- tion, or more denationalisation, or the status quo?' But as Mr Rentoul points out, these answers have changed very largely because 'the goalposts have been moved'. When huge sections of British industry were nationalised, nationalisation was very unpopular; now that only a minority of industries and services are left in the public sector, further denationalisation, especial- ly of water and electricity, is unpopular (although this too could change after they have actually been privatised, as happened with gas and telecommunications).

Similarly, when trade unions were per- ceived to be overmighty, they were loath- ed; now that many of their legal privileges have been removed, there is a modest revival in their public standing. In 1979, people agreed that unions were too power- ful by a majority of 41 per cent; in 1987, people disagreed by a majority of 20 per cent — and 71 per cent also said that unions were a good thing, the highest reading for more than 30 years. So people seem to have a fairly clear idea of how they like their trade unions, namely, law- abiding, unprivileged and without political pretensions.

On social questions, there certainly has been a modest change in the balance of opinion, but it is not in the direction of 'illiberal' or 'repressive' views. The publi- can with an Alsatian and a BMW who believes in hanging rapists does not seem to be the archetypal citizen. The propor- tion of people who think that 'the availabil- ity of abortion on the NHS has gone too far' decreased from 43 per cent in 1974 to 30 per cent in 1987. The proportion think- ing that 'attempts to ensure equality for women have gone too far' has halved since the 1970s. Support has been growing for each of the ten possible grounds for di- vorce which the pollsters asked about. The minority opposed to the death penalty has risen slightly, from 17 per cent in 1979 to 23 per cent in 1987, according to Gallup, or from 25 to 37 per cent, according to the British Election Studies, which asked a different question. The only exception to these emollient trends was on homosexual- ity, where a rise from 23 to 33 per cent was recorded between 1979 and 1986 in those who thought 'homosexual relations be- tween consenting adults should not be legal' and a rise from 63 to 75 per cent in those saying that 'homosexuals should not be allowed to adopt children'. Mr Rentoul plausibly guesses that this counter-trend has something to do with publicity about Aids, but he also points out that even the new higher figures of hostility are lower than the figures in 1966, the year before the Act was passed.

True, these are all crude measures of opinion. Our sympathies and aspirations may have changed without us necessarily believing that a change in the law is either desirable or practicable. People may now agree more heartily with what Norman Tebbit says than with what Roy Jenkins used to say, but they may also feel that the rules of a modern democracy rightly pro- hibit too much state interference in private conduct.

But even if we make every allowance for sampling error, loaded questions and the author's quirky interpretations, Mr Ren- toul argues pretty effectively that our views cannot have changed that much. The mysterious process of yuppiefication can have blighted only a minority of souls, and in many cases even their upward mobility and their novelty as a class of new rich may be exaggerated. Today's gentrifiers of Docklands are often the children of cou- ples who gentrified Fulham and the grand- children of people who were ashamed to admit that they had moved north of the Park. One of the great coarsening factors in conversation on these matters is most people's failure to understand how con- tinuous both social mobility and geo- graphical mobility have always been in our island story.

Openness in a variety of senses has been characteristic of British society for centur- ies, and it has always been deplored by both immobilists and moralists, whether they choose to describe themselves as socialists or conservatives. Restoration comedies lament the same arriviste money- grubbing as Caryl Churchill's Serious Money (a point Miss Churchill herself makes by opening the play with an excerpt from Shadwell's The Volunteers, or The .-.ockjobbers). And it is a preference for openness which comes through as a com- mon sustained theme in the answers people give to pollsters. Tolerance and pluralism are facets of this general openness. Where hostility is expressed, it tends to be against bodies like trade unions and nationalised industries which are thought to have grown too big for their boots and to be constrict- ing or dominating the individual in their own corporate interests. In working against the restrictive practices of a closed society, Mrs Thatcher can quite fairly claim to be working 'with the grain' of the British people.

This openness does not conflict with an equally ingrained belief in 'fairness', a feeling that society cannot flourish unless it is grounded in some basic standards of distributive justice. The polls find a desire steadily expressed to see public services properly organised and funded. This desire certainly offers and his always offered plenty of scope to the Labour Party, and the Conservatives have always had a strug- gle to convince the electors that they too have a heartfelt tradition of looking after the public services. Mrs Thatcher is by no means the first Tory Prime Minister to have had to declare that 'the Health Ser- vice is safe with us'.

But Mr Rentoul is, I think, deluding himself if he thinks he has stumbled upon a dazzling new insight here. The Health Service and the welfare state generally have never ceased to be 'good issues' for Labour. 'Collective values', if that is what you wish to call them, have never lost their vitality. The question is whether these issues are now or have ever been central to deciding how we vote.

Mr Rentoul argues repeatedly that working people have not been seduced from their loyalties and transformed into 'new individualists' by Mrs Thatcher's re- forms. 'People who have bought their council houses are no more likely to vote Conservative after buying than they were before.' The same is apparently true of people who have bought shares in newly privatised companies. It just so happens that it is the more Tory-inclined who do these things. It is, he says, the class changes, which are determined by one's job, and not the changes in housing tenure, that influence party. allegiance. But since middle-class occupations are, as we have seen, remorselessly expanding and working-class ones are shrinking, that seems poor solace for Mr ICinnock.

Nor does this argument tackle the cen- tral cause of Mrs Thatcher's continued ascendancy — that her administration re- mains associated with a particularly open and self-confident kind of economic suc- cess. A general sense that new opportuni- ties are on offer may be encouraging even to those who will not themselves take advantage of them but see them rather as sources of hope for their children. Of course, if the Tories' reputation for sound economic management comes to pieces in their hands and inflation sticks at a high level or rises further, then all this will turn to dust. But the 'new individualism' is certainly a political factor if it is defined in terms of opportunity and openness rather than used simply as a synonym for selfish- ness and greed (vices which ought to be taken care of through the 'fairness' side of government policy).

What comes through Mr Rentoul's com- pilation is that this notorious individualism is not really new at all but is a long established feature of our way of looking at the world (according to Montesquieu, it is as old as the Germanic tribes, lost in the woods of antiquity, in fact). By giving this tradition more of a free run, Mrs Thatcher has not transformed the British character but liberated, to a modest extent, a part of it that was always there. Far from making Mr Kinnock's task seem easier, then, Mr Rentoul has merely highlighted how far the Labour Party has to transform itself in order to be able to work with the grain, how emphatically it must shake free of its restrictive connections both with the trade unions and with socialist, 'closed-society dogma. Mr Rentoul has not so much moved the goalposts as placed the ball on the penalty spot with some deliberation and then, with a certain élan, kicked it smack into his own net.