POLITICS
Mr Steel gets his harp out and heads for home
NOEL MALCOLM
Blackpool in January is no place for wearing sandals, though a beard might at least help to keep out the snow. The popular Identikit picture of a Liberal 'activist' includes both these attributes, together with a bobble-hat, a day-glo anorak and a pint of real ale. The ale may have flowed last weekend, but few ques- tions were asked about its reality, and on the whole I have to report that I have never seen such a body of ordinary, respectable citizenry disagreeing so earnestly but politely with one another. This was meant to be the activists' last stand, but where were they? Have they all bought tweed jackets and gone underground? Or have we been the victims of a popular delusion, a fantasy about Greens under the bed?
Delusion, perhaps, confusion, certainly. Our notion of what an activist does comes mainly from the Labour Party, where we think of small caucuses of active members who seek to take over the local manage- ment of their party because they are hooked on ideology. The more hard-Left the political principles they believe in, the more impracticable those principles are, and therefore the activist effort needed to get them adopted anywhere is so much the greater. Labour activists, in other words, become active precisely because they be- lieve in a set of doctrines which are, by ordinary people's standards, abstract and remote.
The Liberals too have their loony ideo- logues. But the true activists, who are spoken of not with suspicion but with pride, are neither conspiratorial nor head- in-the-clouds; they are down-to-earth local councillors, attenders of meetings and de- liverers of leaflets. Things like housing policies mean a lot to them, national economic issues mean much less. They are professional politicians, in the sense that they spend a great amount of their time in committee rooms thinking about political tactics and political organisation; and yet their mental world is far removed from that of the front benches in the House of Commons or the editorial columns of the national press. Equivalent toilers in the Labour and Tory ranks often feel that their own activities are essentially subservient to their parliamentary parties; these local Liberals have a greater sense of power within their party and a greater sense of identification with it.
- All this may help to explain the curious absence of high-level political argument at last Saturday's Liberal Assembly. The most passionate speeches came not from ideologues attacking the SDP's policies, but from old stalwarts expressing their devotion to the Liberal Party they knew and loved. Any inquisitive Martian who happened to visit Blackpool that day would have come away with only the haziest notion of what the Liberals' policies really were, and an even hazier idea of what the SDP was meant to believe in.
Nato was mentioned several times as something problematic, but nobody actual- ly stood up and gave a reason for not supporting Nato – the Martian observer would have concluded that the only policy here was a policy of not offending Quak- ers. The burning issue of whether to go for a no-growth economy was passed over almost in silence; it was touched on briefly by a spokesman for the Young Liberals, but his only contribution to economic theory was to remark that 'I don't believe you can create wealth – you can only acquire it.'
In a general way, it was possible to discover that the Liberals were against things. They were against Thatcherism, poverty, racism, privilege, secrecy and so on. Yet it was very hard to tell whether anyone thought that the SDP was less strongly against these things, or that it was against other things which the Liberals were for. Perhaps there was genuine uncertainty here. At the back of their minds they seemed to recall that 'social democracy' was a jumbled-up version of 'democratic socialism'; and Liberals, when they remember to think about it, are against socialism. But at the front of their minds was a feeling that on issues such as defence and wealth-creation the SDP might be too right-wing. Very confusing.
The real debate, therefore, was never about political philosophies. It was about sentiment, loyalty, identification, tradition and trust. One side told the delegates that they owed it to the Liberal Party to go for merger, and the other side said they owed it to the Liberal Party to turn merger down. David Steel's speech, hailed by some as a triumph of political oratory, was by any ordinary standards an empty emo- tional appeal: 'a big family' ... 'a great sense of belonging' ... 'we have laughed together and cried together' ... 'I feel myself clothed in the aura of the word "Liberal". But delegates seemed not to mind that their Emperor was clothed only in an aura. Empty emotionalism was just what this big family wanted, and he had more of it than his opponents. Speaker after speaker begged the Assembly not to let David down after all these years. The anti-mergerites had agreed that loyalty was trumps, and they discovered too late that Mr Steel held the ace.
All this bodes well for Liberal cohesion in the months ahead, but badly for the long-term future of the new party. In an odd way, the process of preparing for merger has strengthened the Liberal Par- ty's inward-looking tendencies. Those SDP members who join the new party are more likely now to have their policies blunted and deflected, not by direct political counter-argument but by the benign assur- ance that 'what matters is people, not policies'. This may be a good recipe for winning council elections or the occasional by-election, but it is not something that will break the mould of national politics.
As for the leadership of the new party, this last-minute surge of 'we owe it to David' loyalty may have tempted Mr Steel back into the contest. He should resist the temptation — not because the little fiasco earlier this month branded him as a failure, but because the Social and Liberal Demo- crats will need to avoid, above all, the appearance of being the self-same, dear old, dreary old Liberal Party writ large. A new face is needed, and there are precious few to choose from. Paddy Ashdown, the orientalist ex-Marine, is politically a babe- in-arms compared with the baby-faced Charles Kennedy, but he might just about do. He looks like Mr Clean, and if he knows how to speak Mandarin and kill people, so much the better.
The poems of Marvell and Burns were quoted at length in Blackpool; but no one quoted the poems of David Steel, only one of which, to my knowledge, has ever been published. He wrote it when he was about 13, and the title, believe it or not, is 'With Purpose but No Head': Suspect, revile, press on and play the game; We know we are
Harp players always playing Safe at home.
We run, we fleet and make towards the lair.
Time, perhaps, for David to head for his lair. There is a lot of suspecting and reviling still to come.
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