Political Commentary
A taste of honey: the taint of money?
Patrick Cosgrove
At Southport last week there were a lot of Liberals in neat or even elegant three-piece suits, the upper lips of the men frequently adorned with well-kept moustaches, the torsaes of the women frequently encased in cashmere and decorated with pearls. They were middle-aged, or even older, and there was a spring in their step and a light in their eye not seen for many a year. They hobnobbed far more cheerfully than at previous conferences with the more garish army of youth, and rubbed their shoulders with good grace against the shiny suits of many intense new Liberal councillors. The young and the activist, in turn, were tolerant of those who, in lean decades, had kept the flame alive, despite what they obviously felt to be an antiquity of style. After ail, the string of recent victories had been won mainly by them.
But there is an incipient struggle between the two wings. And it is one that absolutely must be resolved before the next general election. It is still not, for example, quite clear how Mr Thorpe would react to an offer to join a coalition: but it is certain that the men and women who came to Southport as first time delegates would regard the acceptance of any such offer with repulsion. (It is worth remembering, too, that the Tories are expert at digesting and destroying coalition partners, having absorbed the Chamberlain Liberals, and smashed both another Liberal Party and Ramsey Macdonald's Labour Party through the same process, all within a century). There will almost certainly have to be some compromises on policy matters between both wings before the election, the right-inclining old wing going slightly left, and the leftinclining new wing going slightly right; nor is there anything shame-making about such a process. The difficulty is that the 61an of the new wing is based on the belief that the recent electoral leadership has made but little contribution.
There is one way in which the old wing can reverse that conviction, make their own decisive contribution to community politics, and decisively re-assert their power within the party — by raising lots of money. So far, the Liberal Party has operated on a stretched shoestring. Though the measure of its success has been remarkable, it is still a very small success. From now on, the party will be judged by more exacting criteria than in the past: good will, high-mindedness, and the ability to get cracked pavements repaired, will count for much less. To conSolidate the hold which a curious development of national sentiment has given them, full-time agents and full-time researchers will be needed in large numbers; and £250,000 at the very least will he required for the general election purse.
One of the leading new community politicians, Mr Cyril Smith, is likely to be in charge of the new drive and will take money from almost anywhere he can get it: other, purer, fund-raisers, want to make sure the sources are not tainted. On the ethics of fund raising Mr Thorpe himself is pretty silent, save when, as he frequently does, he repeats his own conviction that any essential part of Liberal appeal is that, unlike the Tories or Labour, they do not rely predominantly on one major source of finance.
Now, the curious thing is that the record suggests that the old Liberals are far better at raising cash than the new. It was Jeremy Thorpe, for example, who cleared the old £180,000 overdraft; and that was an effort which makes everything done by Mr Philip Watkins, the present Party Treasurer, or by the community politicians, look pretty puny. Mr Thorpe, moreover, controls the two secret funds which finance the party secretariat and the method of channeling money from the centre to constituency organisations in need. The two major questions now to be asked are, what policy he will adopt in his attitude to these funds in the future; and, to what extent can he enrich them?
"I," said Mr Thorpe last week, "I expect to raise a million pounds within the next few weeks." In his closing speech on Saturday morning he referred to the — for them — vast amount of money the Liberals would need in the very near future, and added that he expected to get some of it " within a few moments." At the same time, the Thorpe followers and the old wing spent some of the time at Southport exhorting the new wing, and especially Mr Jones the Vote, not to commit the party to the massive task of putting up 500 candidates at the next general election in case there were not enough resources. (Mr Jones believes — and there is a lot to be said for his view — that the momentum of the revival can be sustained only by continually upping the electoral ante, whatever the risks run in the process: his is a psychological argument as much as anything else). Most of the new wing, I found, 'were, however, sceptical of Mr Thorpe's prospects, and inclined to downgrade financial necessity, preferring to rely on massive volunteer enthusiasm.
The fact of the matter is, nonetheless, that they will shortly find money an absolute necessity. And the point about the old wing is that some of them at least have money. One man whose arrival at Southport was eagerly awaited, for example, was Lord Tanlaw, son of Lord Inchape of P and 0 fame, and treasurer of the Scottish Liberal Party. Tanlaw is a quiet, elegant and gently humorous (he lists his recreations as " normal ") man, of considerable wealth, who could remove more than one financial crease from SneTh8tato _ r September 29, 1973 Jeremy Thorpe's brow without making more than a tiny dent in his own considerable resources. Liberal millionaires are not, of course, very thick on the ground, but they are not non-existent either. They have, however, one or two characteristics which make them reluctant to open their purses too readily.
Any member of the old wing who is rich and in business, and whose money is old rather than new (there are some well-to-do men ambitious for a political career who are, having made their own fortunes, jumping on the Liberal bandwagon) has remained a Liberal, and refused Tory temptations, only because he personally believes in Liberalism, as practised and preached by the older generation. He is bound to be nervous, if not suspicious, about the wilder flights of the new liberalism. Lord Tanlaw, for example, is strongly rightwing on education, and a deep believer in the maintenance of traditional standards (he sits on the board of the privately financed Independent University); his shudder at learning of the liberal stall devoted to the works of the philospher of de' schooling, Ivan Mich, not far from another stall trumpeting the virtues of transcendental meditation (as practised, incidentally, by more than one prominent Liberal) can be imagined.
The old Liberals, as I say, are men who have resisted the temptation to become Tories; but they do not want to destroy the Tory party; nor do they want socialism in any of its guises. Mr Thorpe's repeated defence of free enterprise in recent weeks is an act of deference to the old wing. Such an act of deference also was the decision of the Southport Assembly to concentrate on Labour rather than the Tories as the immediate enemy: this was against the instinct of the new wing, who wanted to proclaim a plague on both the other houses. But old Liberals see themselves as the only true repository of the left wing tradition in this country, and dislike anything more extreme than themselves as much as they dislike Torism. As one of them wrote to me recently, " If Jeremy Thorpe knows his business; which is still in doubt, he has to decide who is his chief enemy . . . Jeremy's only tactic, therefore, is to smash the Labour Party . ." Significantly, my correspondent added, " This was the chance that Jo Grimond lost in 1964, through his belief that Labour was bound to win and that this would be a good thing.' I don't know whether Jeremy has the sophistication, or the ability or, indeed, the power within his own party to put across a tactic of this kind, but 'if he has, the result will be the eventual creation of a Liberal-Social-Democratic party, with the Labour Left filling the sad role of the Liberal Party under the fervid leadership of Michael Foot."
At the present moment it is unnecessary in national political terms for Mr Thorpe either to say who he thinks his enemy is, or whether he is for or against free enterprise. That he has chosen to do so indicates how much he feels he needs the old Liberals, and how much he needs the money they have, and the money they can raise. The difficulty about social democratic liberalism (and the qualifying adjective is important) is that it may not have much appeal to the free-wheeling radicals who have made community politics a reality; just as the non-community politics of those
radicals (in parliamentary reform, for instance) may have little appeal to the social democrats with the purse-strings in their hands. The really delicate task of Mr Thorpe is just beginning. He enjoys neither the full trust of the community politicians, nor the full confidence of the old wing. How he handles that situation, what concessions he extracts from both sides, and what money he raises and keeps under his own control, manipulating it in such a way as to ensure the choice of the kind of candidate he can control in the House, is crucial to the Liberal future.
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