The Tory Opportunity
By NORMAN ST JOHN-STEVAS, MP.
F0R the Tories opportunity is now not so much knocking as hammering on the door, much sooner than even the most optimistic ex- pected. The question is whether the opportunity will be taken and what is the best means to go about it. Some hard choices will have to be made but, unless they are, the chances of returning to power in the 'seventies or earlier could slip away as swiftly as they have appeared.
Some guidance as to what needs to be done can be gained by taking a brief backward glance at the lost elections of 1964 and 1966 which, although technically different operations, were in fact two instalments of the same one. Labour won in part because of the efforts of Hugh Gaitskell to keep the party on the path of political sanity but much more because the Tories threw away the two principal cards they had to play. In the 'fifties the party had been able to win for itself the majority of the new middle classes who identified their rising pros- perity with Tory rule. The disastrous Selwyn Lloyd squeeze of 1961 put an end to that, and confidence was further eroded by the last faltering years of the Macmillan administration. So the party lost the second card, the public belief that the Tory party were more competent than Labour in managing their own and the nation's affairs. The price for these events was finally paid in March of this year when Labour was returned with a hundred majority.
These dismal happenings must be glanced at since they contain their own lessons for action in the future. For Tories at any rate history should be something more than bunk. The cards lost by the Macmillan government are still the most powerful which the Tory party has to play, the promise of competent government, and the prospects of prosperity. Thanks to recent events the possibility of including the cards in the Tory hand is once again in sight.
Britain is still a deferential democracy but deference today is to ability and competence and not to lineage or birth as such. Labour's principal obstacle to gaining power in 1964 was precisely that a Labour government did not seem credible. Mr Wilson's achievement between October 1964 and March 1966 was to make it so. Rhodesia gave him the opportunity `to act like a Prime Minister' and he took it, proceeding to fight the election on the slogan 'You know that Labour government works.' This was really stealing Tory clothes and it paid off..
Today the election and the slogan seem as remote as the stone age : it is difficult to believe that in fact only a few months ago they were in full swing. The first task of the Opposition in this situation is to show that it has the talent and the will to form a government when the opportunity occurs. Nothing would be more damaging to the party than to attempt to re- open the leadership issue once again. Those who criticise Mr Heath forget that as leader of the party be is the inevitable focus. of the dissatis- faction over the party's own past mistakes.
The Tory need is not a change at the summit but the recruitment of talented newcomers for the shadow cabinet and the parliamentary party. Whatever one may think of the methods adopted for revising the candidates' list the need for an overhaul cannot be challenged. The party has 10 ensure that by-elections which offer a chance of reinforcing the parliamentary party are used to best advantage and that the seats which are likely to be won at the next election are fought by men and women who have something to contribute and not by duds and hacks. At the same time those already in parliament who have shown their mettle should be brought forward and given some definite work to do.
For the party to make an impact on the country it has to have a central theme: the theme which I would like to see running through all our Policies is that of courageous and hard- headed realism. The first issue on which the party has to make up its mind is Britain's place in the world. This is of especial impor- tance to a party which by tradition has been the 'patriotic' party and which is credited by the electorate with special skills in protecting and advancing British interests abroad. Tory foreign policy sets out to do just that: it is pragmatic not ideological in aim. The first condition of success of any foreign policy is that it should be realistic: it should fit the facts. -In the past Tories have tended to attach too much impor- tance to prestige policies which unless backed up by economic strength inevitably bring their own nemesis. Now the boot is very much on the other foot. It is Mr Wilson not Mr Heath who is deluded by Palnierstonian visions of grandeur. The Prime Minister is obsessed with his right to sit at the 'top table' and with a world-wide role for Britain irrespective of our abilities to discharge it.
Mr Wilson's delusion is the Tory opportunity and the party starts with the advantage of having made a firm European commitment. Yet the party has still to make it clear that it accepts the political and supranational implications of the Treaty of Rome wholeheartedly. Indeed Britain's principal contribution to the united Europe of the future is much more likely to be political than economic. We have the great advantage of having developed political institu- tions which work and it is here that the con- tinental tradition is most deficient. Mr Wilson like Mr Macmillan before him has never dared to put the political issue squarely before the country : the Tory party should. At the same time Tories will have to rid themselves of im- perialist nostalgia. Imperialisth may have caught the imagination of some sections of the party but it has never developed really deep roots in the country as a whole. The English'character is compounded of imagination and realism and Dizzy's fantasies have always been held in check by the coarser side of the English nature. There is none the less a party wasps' nest to be smoked out on this issue and there will doubtless be some stings, as Mr Enoch Powell to his credit has already found.
If we -need realism abroad we need it even more desperately at home. In 1964 the Tories were lumbered not only with the legacy of stop- go but with the shades of the incomes policy. The present Parliament has changed all that. The Nessus mantle of stop-go is now worn by Mr Wilson: the voluntary incomes policy has now failed Labour as well as the Tories and in its place is the system of centralised control of prices and incomes. The time is ripe for a new departure. There can, of course, be no question of a retreat from the position of managing the economy on Keynesian lines, a commitment made by the party during the period from 1945 to 1950, and on which modern conservatism is based. A break, however, should now be made with the outdated commitments to the old-style incomes policy. There is no need for dogma- tism about this: the policy has been tried and has failed: it is perfectly honourable and con- sistent to abandon it. It has become a chimera distracting Britain from getting down to the task of tackling the underlying and basic weaknesses of the economy.
The Tory task now is to stress not conSensus but freedom and competition. Stress has to be laid on productivity as a principal although not the only means of regulating wages. If this is to be -effective there has to be a shift away from national agreements universally applicable to bargains struck at the local and factory level. Productivity bargaining has to replace the draughty appeals from 'ministers for unions to serve the national interest. The experiences of the Fawley experiment in one direction and of British Oxygen in the other are of prime sig- nificance. The complement to nay policy of in- creasing, productivity must be a programme of radical trade union reform on which the party has already tentatively started.
Realism must also inform our approach to our external commitments.' Mr Wilson hak- made the defence of the parity of sterling the first priority of his policy just as the Tories have been relieved of the responsibility by going WO oppo- sition. I am not advocating devaluation as such but suggesting that the top Tory priority should now be economic growth. One argument that should be going on inside the party is Whether we can continue to maintain sterling as one of the world's principal reserve and trading cur- rencies. Instinct says yes but reason no. The difficulty is how to abandon a rOle which no one else seems anxious to take up. This can be done only by international agreements which would deal in new ways with the whole problem of world liquidity.
The policies which I have sketched out would lead once again to the identification of the party with economic growth and rising social and economic aspirations. The Tory party should never become, as some writers have suggested, the party of management : that would be a formula not only for electoral extinction but one contrary to Tory traditions. Comprehensiveness has long been the secret of the party's survival. We must ensure the emergence of a third alterna- tive to socialist regimentation and restriction on the one hand and the right-wing advocates of misery and unemployment on the other. The Tory party should hold out to the people the prospect that under Tory leadership, with its emphasis on efficiency, competition and the willingness, to change,. the bulk Of the nation will be Able to share in the richer and fuller life which our Own century is the first to bring within the reach' of all.
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