Naked out of the chamber
POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH
Few people are going to forget the South African affair in a hurry. Last week, I wrote about its repercussions inside the Cabinet. On the left, it has been taken as a minor tactical victory, marking a turn in the tide perhaps, but no more than that. Confirmed in its belief that history is on its side, and confident in the in- evitability of the triutnph of socialism—whether this is brought about by Mr Wilson or not—the left is now spoiling for fresh conquests. If the Prime Minister really saw the South African arms embargo as a means of buying off the left, rather than as a means of whetting its appe- tite, he is a much less astute judge of left-wing psychology than has always been said. But there is no reason to suppose that he was under any illusions on this score. He hopes to keep the left permanently at his beck and call from now on.
If the Labour left had any sense, it would see that its best chance of convincing the electorate that it represents a viable alternative would be to withdraw from the contest now: to let the Government drift into electoral collapse with- out enacting further socialist measures, and then draw the conclusion that it failed because it wasn't socialist enough.
But it is very easy to draw clever inferences from such an unlikely premiss. If the left had any sense, pigs would almost certainly have wings and their seasonal migration from Ire- land and Scandinavia to the warmer climes of India would do much to solve the food prob- lem there. Once, at the London School of Economics, I was called upon to oppose the motion that no serious person could support a Conservative government; before the debate was half-way through, it emerged quite plainly that in the minds of the audience the word 'serious' was synonymous with 'socialist.' A similar identity exists in the minds of the left between 'conservative' and 'stupid.' Thus, to say that the left is stupid would be thought self- contradictory. The correct word to use is 'opti- mistic.'
. This has always been an inalienable charac- teristic of the left. In Russia, one hears, it, can be an indictable offence, in certain circum- stances, to evince a lack of optimism, just as it was in England during the war. Perhaps,-as crisis follows crisis, and the likelihood of a freeze on foreign-owned sterling becomes closer, Mr Wilson will be moved to remember the spirit of Dunkirk and those heady days in the Ministry of Fuel and Power when a man could be sent to prison for spreading alarm and despondency. Compulsory optimism is doubly optimistic. Of course, one might have thought that where optimism is allowed to in- fringe upon a realistic assessment of the satiation, it becomes, like pessimism, a form of stupidity.
To left-wingers in particular, but in- creasingly to modern government in general, this argument is meaningless. Intelligence is judged on a scale which moves from 'progres- sive' at the top to 'conservative' or 'reactionary' at the bottom. The scale which moves from 'optimistic' at the top to 'pessimistic' or 'de- featist' at the bottom is used to judge moral fibre. Thus to criticise the Government's opti-
mism on grounds of its unpracticality leaves one, so far as the House of Commons is con- cerned, in the position of someone having to defend, in the presence of God, Woman's Own magazine and the Chief Scout, some propo- sition along the lines that virtue is useless.
This may sound far-fetched, but it has been the only real bone of contention in the three months I have so far been sitting in the House. Veterans assure me that this has been the most exciting term in parliament since Suez, that the devaluation debate marked one of those high- water marks of parliamentary drama which will be remembered for a generation. To at least one fresh pair of eyes the devaluation debate seemed totally devoid of content. It was the only occasion on which the Opposition pro- duced even a semblance of that moral outrage which is the left's stock in trade, and what a futile exercise it became. Against the unthink- ing euphoria of Labour, unwilling to accept that devaluation need bring any disadvantages, the Conservatives could range only a petulant and discredited optimism, insisting that the pound could have been saved.
But the saddest thing has been the way in which on every other issue until South African arms (except perhaps defence cuts) the Govern- ment and Opposition have combined to fight the left, in support of the motion that virtue is useless—virtue being represented by higher welfare benefits and greater government ex- penditure in all fields. Whenever a left-winger —from either side of the house—has stood up to announce his principles, Conservatives and moderate Labour men alike have listened with respect before jumping up to show that, although they share the same principles to a certain extent, they have contrived to stifle their finer feelings in recognition of the fact that any selfish application of their own stern morality to the matter in hand would be highly injurious.
So long as the left has the monopoly of virtue, it seems to me that unsocialism will be left in support of this highly immoral pro- position, that virtue is useless and therefore it is better not to be virtuous. When people deny the existence of a Conservative alternative, they are not pointing to the absence of alternative policies so much as to the absence of an alternativeinspiration.
But before the Conservatives can begin to formulate an alternative morality based on self-- help, and necessarily involving a certain amount of what is nowadays considered as optimism, in that it must presuppose the exist- ence of enough private charity, or local authority charity, to cater for society's drop- outs—they must try to convince themselves that the principles and high moral attitudes of the left are, in fact, defective. There is an Eng-, lish tradition, born of indifference and .the desire to avoid embarrassment, that anyone's religious principles, however ludicrous or logically indefensible, be treated with respect. But in default of any effective moral outrage to counter it, the moral outrage of the left's.hooli- gan rump—as represented by John Mendelson.' Eric Heller, Stan Orme, little David Winnk and the furious James Dickens—carries
before it.
Most conspicuously it now carries the Prime Minister also. Their moral certainty has be- come, in the words of the great Anglican hymn, both his outward vesture and his inner clothing. It is occasionally challenged by such stalwarts as Dame Irene Ward, and rather more effec- tively by Messrs. Paget, Donnelly and Wyatt on the Government side, but its only front bench opponent is Mr Powell, whose respon- sibilities in the field of defence tend to confuse the pristine clarity of his bugle call. Such out- rage as Mr Heath summons to his assistance from time to time is generally embarrassing because it seems to equate morality with efficiency, and while socialism's ineptitude may affront his tidy executive heart to its very roots; a sense of responsibility is no substitute for a sense of moral purpose.
Yet the foundations of the left's moral cer- tainty are very hard to pin point. Certainly, they do not rely on the, democratic fallacy 'vox populi, vox Del,' which, as the Daily Ex- press is never tired of pointing out, would scarcely countenance the abolition of the death penalty, support for coloured immigration or even, in all probability, the South African arms embargo. It does not rely on the teach- ings of that new mystical body, the inter- national liberal consensus, which holds no brief for steel nationalisation, for the principle of universality in welfare benefits, or for rail- way as a more ethical means of transport than road. Marx does not concern himself with moral obligation so much as with an analysis of historical inevitability, which is something very different. But the fact remains that until the opposition to the left—both inside the Government and inside the Conservative party —can abandon its pragmatism, meet moral out- rage with moral outrage, and convince itself that the morality of the left is not only in- jurious to the common good but also defective. the Prime Minister will never be revealed as the naked creature he is.
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