POLITICS
'Oh, where are you going to, all you Big Steamers?'
NOEL MALCOLM
Elections, as the old saw has it, are never won by the Opposition, but they are sometimes lost by the Government. The last ten days have seen two important pieces of evidence — the Conservatives' uncomprehendingly defiant performance at Scarborough, and the Labour Party's hopelessly unconstructive response to the Budget — which tend to confirm that point of view.
To condemn Labour outright for its failure to put forward any convincing counter-Budget of its own would be unfair, of course. The Opposition's first job is to criticise, and they have done plenty of that — even if too much of their criticism has made them pose rather unconvincingly as champions of the yuppie or middle mana- ger with a large mortgage. But where questions of overall economic strategy are concerned, Labour's performance during the Budget debates was even more puz- zling than that of the dog which did not bark in the night. Here was a dog which growled occasionally, but which also quacked.
I borrow this last metaphor from Mr John Major, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who observed that the shadow Chancellor, 'has as much chance of under- standing the economy as Donald Duck has of winning Mastermind'. This was a bit hard on Mr John Smith, but scarcely an exaggeration where some of his Labour colleagues were concerned. Mr Stuart Bell, for instance: The Chancellor said today that the national debt would be reduced by one sixth, but the national debt is just a figure. It does not take into account the £530 billion that is owed to people contributing to pensions; if it did take that into account, it would be out of the question to pay off the national debt.
Or Mr Stuart Holland:
Paying off the national debt is like putting money in the bank and telling the bank manager not to lend it. It is even worse than putting it in a current account, because once repaid it earns no interest for those who lent it.
But the Pluto Prize for cartoon economics must surely go to the Labour policy review committee which, according to reports last Sunday, is proposing a national minimum wage which would be set at two thirds of the national average wage — a policy which is the exact conceptual equivalent of an energetic but dim-witted dog chasing its own tail. In general, the Labour Party seems to have accepted the idea that inflation, rather than unemployment, is the great Satan. Its plans for increased public spend- ing have not changed very much, but all its energies are directed now at showing that such spending would be, in Mr Smith's words, 'non-inflationary and counter- inflationary'. This is a hard thing to de- monstrate in the case of the policy on minimum wages. It is arguable in the case of increased spending on training: that is, it can be argued that any short-term infla- tionary effects of training subsidies will be outweighed by long-term gains in produc- tivity.
But when Mr Smith insists that a pro- gramme of increased regional grants and subsidies would be non-inflationary, one begins to suspect that he is just using the term 'non-inflationary' as a misleading synonym for 'good'. And as for the rest of the 'new look' economic policy package unveiled this week — a British investment bank issuing 'Britbonds', for example, or a new state-owned company called 'British Enterprise' — it is a classic case of mutton dressed as nouvelle cuisine. The Labour Party economists are still a long way from devising an election-winning recipe.
And what of the Conservative Party, with its apparent urge to force-feed the people with whatever recipe it thinks is good for them? The spectacle of Mr Peter Brooke, the party chairman, telling his audience that the more criticism they ignored, the more popular they would be, was deeply dispiriting. It is true, as he said, that most governments go through a phase of comparative unpopularity after the first year or so of their tenure. But this is a complex phenomenon with many causes, and to treat it almost as a sign of success in itself is short-sighted, to say the least. The old line about the Government 'running out of steam' has become a parrot-phrase, a substitute for thought. We still need an answer to Kipling's question: 'Oh where are you going to, all you Big Steamers?'
The opinion polls are already beginning to repeat the patterns of 1985 and 1986, when Tory strategists were alarmed to find that the Government was regarded as less resolute and competent on the one hand, and more harsh and uncaring on the other. It is a familiar pattern of contradictory accusations: the Government is too weak and too strong, too wobbly and too bossy. And the familiar government response is to meet the charge of weakness by becoming even more dogmatic in its policies, and to meet the charge of harshness by spending more money. This is almost exactly the wrong way round. The concessions on spending are forgotten almost as soon as they are made. (Who now remembers last year's massive increase in NHS spending?) Increased ideological purity is no answer to the accusation of wobbliness, which arises from the unpredictable contingencies of political life — last time, Westland; this time, eggs and bomb warnings. To take the line, 'Mr Channon seems to be losing his grip, therefore we had better close ranks on water privatisation,' is painfully uncon- vincing. And to urge silence and delay even on such an internal and uncontentious issue as the affiliation of Conservatives in Northern Ireland, on the grounds that a discussion of it might 'rock the boat', suggests the very opposite of real self- confidence.
The captain and crew of the Big Steamer should really be devoting less effort to keeping up maximum pressure in the en- gine, and giving more thought to questions of navigation — to distinguishing, for example, between essential and inessential aspects of their policies. Some more intelli- gent communication with the passengers would not be a bad idea, either. Mr Kenneth Clarke, for example, has spent so much of his time arguing on close-circuit link-ups with doctors, that the general public has been left to derive its idea of the real meaning of the NHS reforms from Mr Robin Cook. Most people approve of choice and efficiency when they encounter them in ordinary life; if they can be convinced that these things will grow under the new NHS system, this will impress them more than any amount of 'we're sticking to our course' rhetoric.
A quotation, not from the Conservative Party handbook, but from a closely similar document: Take the scattered and unsystematic ideas of the people, and turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas; then go to the people and explain these ideas until the people embrace them as their own.
Has Mrs Thatcher, in her haste to push through her permanent revolution, over- looked by any chance this crucial passage from Chairman Mao's Little Red Book?
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