Political commentary
A slight whiff of revolt
Charles Moore
There have been four Tory 'revolts' in a week. Viewed from afar, the word 'revolt' may seem an exaggeration. There are no crowds in the streets, no rebel stan- dards run up on some hill within ten leagues of London, not even anyone grabbing the Mace or blocking the doors into the chamber of the House of Commons. In a Tory revolt, no mob orator calls for 'Peace, Bread and Freedom'; instead the Hon Charles Morrison (Devizes) says; 'There is in this debate a slight whiff of the pot call- ing the more pristine kettle black.' And the leading rebel of Monday's assault on the rate support grant, Mr Francis Pym, allows himself to be pacified into abstention by an assurance from Mr William Waldegrave that next year's grant will try to be fairer. These revolts begin with mutterings among quite a large proportion of the troops, but they issue in a mere handful of votes against, making it easy for the Government to isolate the ringleaders.
So one might go on to ask why govern- ments allow themselves to be alarmed by these little shows of dissent. Why, in par- ticular, should this Government, with its new and huge majority, pay any attention to the complaints of a few superannuated Cabinet and Prime Ministers, most of whom are not terribly popular with the backbenches where they now sit? Part of the answer may lie with the 'neurotic character of politics. Politicians are now almost the only people with important jobs who are never secure in them. They may be out overnight if they displease some of their number; and all of them fear those dreadful days of judgment when the secret of the voters' hearts are disclosed. When you add to this the fact that the House of Commons is a tense, gossipy place where a large number of men spend their evenings with little to do except fantasise about one another, you can see how each susurrus of discontent can be blown into a freak storm. It may not look very dramatic for a Cabinet minister to sit down from the dispatch box without a single cheer from his own ben- ches, but it is the sort of thing that makes politicians miserable.
And there is more to it than mere wound- ed vanity. The fact that governments devote so much effort to party management is one of the best pieces of evidence against the theory that the House of Commons has become a sideshow in a British constitution now dominated by a bureaucracy (or by big business, or by trade unions — the theory has its variants). Of course the Government has a vast apparatus of bureaucracy, but its only foundation is a majority in the House of Commons. Of course its civil servants are the hands it chooses for carrying out its work, but its MPs are its ears, through which it hears whether what it does is liked or successful. The whips, therefore, though they are seen as suppressors of opinion, are the men who spend the most time attending to it. It is true that the opinions, which begin life in the shires and end up in the mouths of backbenchers, are often neither intelligent, nor well-expressed nor coherent, but that does not mean that they are not widely held. In fact, it adds to the distinc- tion of the House of Commons that it is the only niche in the British political system where one can be stupid and still perform one's function properly. Over the last week, a great deal of fine Tory stupidity has mass- ed itself against Mr Norman Fowler and Mr Patrick Jenkin and Mr William Waldegrave (one cannot get much cleverer than Mr Waldegrave), and has won a moral victory.
It has not been the conceptual brillance of its opponents which has embarrassed the Government. Mr Heath may have spoken in grand terms about local democracy and setting the people free, but the interest of his speech lay not in its content but in the fact that he was making it. Mr Francis Pym on Monday, was at more successful, but less publicised. He sensibly had nothing to say about the overall problems of public expenditure. He was a plain man sticking to plain facts; and those facts proved that Cambridgeshire, though spending 3.5 per cent below its grant-related expenditure, was being fined £4,500,000 under the new rate support grant. In the debate about the cut in housing benefit, the scandal was not the proposed reduction (a good deal of the benefit goes to people who are reasonably well off), but the.confusion that has arisen from the creation of this benefit by the amalgamation of the DHSS rebates for those on supplementary benefit and Environment's own system of rent and rate subsidy. The House of Commons may have been getting the wrong end of the stick, but the important thing is that it picked up the stick and waved it about so that everyone noticed.
In fact, all these latest revolts have been coming from Britain's leading wrong-end- of-the-stick men. Mr Heath, the incomes policy wizard, Mr Rippon, the Euro- negotiator, Sir Ian Gilmour, the theorist of big spending, Mr Pym, the devolutionist a fair cross-section of some of the least suc- cessful management ever called in by Great Britain Ltd. What is interesting about the petty insurrections is that they come at a time when Mrs Thatcher herself is thought to be showing signs of reverting to a style of policy more similar to that so memorably practised by the cross-section in the early 1970s. It is as though the Wets, sensing a certain weariness at the problems of con- trolling public spending, are testing the ground. Why not give up the unequal strug- gle? they whisper; after all, it is so easy to revert to the well-tried revenue-raising methods of begging, borrowing and steal- ing. One or two of them are even talking up the Prime Minister, praising her 'growing realism'.
I am not sure about the 'realism', but Mrs Thatcher does seem to be showing growing impatience. Mr Kinnock did well in Prime Minister's Questions for the first time, when, last week, he drove Mrs That- cher to protest, in defence of cutting hous- ing benefit, that 'we are taxing people so highly'. She seems to be exasperated and, as so often, she expresses that exasperation more by blaming others than by trying to remedy the problem. Whether or not you think it right that local government spen- ding be more strictly controlled, you have to admit that much of the Government's at- tack on local government derives from frustration at it own impotence. Mr Pym made the point by showing that the finan- cial record of Cambridgeshire County Council is rather more impressive than that of the Government. At present, Mrs That- cher seems to be happy to express a strong sentiment in favour of reducing spending and taxes, but not so happy to think of a way of doing it. She assures Brian Walden that she is 'straining' to do the right thing, but it sounds like a promise which one gives in the confessional, sadly aware that one will break it.
The argument of the hard men is that the only time that Mrs Thatcher has to do anything is now. After the first 18 months, they say, every government is weakened by its own divisions and already devoting its time to the next election. Much of which is true, but one might recall that the first Thatcher government lost much of its drive very early on and then rather recovered it by the end of 1981. There was little sign, for instance, until quite late in its first term, that the Government was serious about the privatisation which moves on apace in its second. It may already be too late for it to produce the complete reform of the Welfare State which the Think Tank report raised, but that does not mean that it can- not devise ways of simplifying and reducing its system of benefits.
What we do not yet know is how a That- cher government will react to prosperity if, as we are assured, it is just coming. Is she so dependent on its coming that, if it fails to appear, she will have to invent it? Will we have an artificial rise in property prices, tax credits to borrowers, inflation — in short, a Barber boom? It would be sickening if the woman who has been lecturing so long about getting rid of excess fat presided over a pointless blow-out and began to claim that we have never had it so good.
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