POLITICS

Where have all the issues gone?

Gone to Brussels, every one

NOEL MALCOLM

It must be so exciting, writing about politics at the moment', someone said to me at a party last week. 'Election on the horizon' . . . 'back to real two-party poli- tics' . . . 'the knives are coming out again' . . . . While the phrases washed over me I nodded dutifully, sipped my wine and became aware of a semi-crushed peanut under my left foot.

Much of what my interlocutor said was true, of course. We are closer to old- fashioned two-party politics now than we have been for the last nine years. And even though the next election could be in June 1992, we are already witnessing the start of the kind of pre-election bombardment which aims to soften up the enemy's position. Conservative Central Office scored a flukeish direct hit on Mr Kin- nock's punctuation last week, opening up a rather spurious ambiguity in his remarks about Labour's taxation plans. And Mr Cecil Parkinson's personal attack at the weekend on his opposite number, Mr Prescott, had a feverishness to it which can only be attributed to pre-election hysteria.

So why is it that, as I listlessly ground that peanut further into the carpet, I began to feel that the one great qualitative change which has taken place in British politics over the last few months is that it has become significantly more boring? The verbal fisticuffs, the cut-and-thrust, the bobbing up and down the greasy pole — all the activity is present, and may well become more intense. But something is missing. Though the body may be flailing around more than ever, the spirit is not there.

What has happened? To say that the battle of ideas has fallen silent, or to murmur about 'the end of ideology', is to say both too much and too little. On the one hand the battle still goes on in places such as the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies; and on the other hand 'ideologies' are too abstract and systematic to have more than a tenuous connection with most of what passes for political life in this country. The real problem today is not the lack of great ideas or abstract justifications, but the lack of great issues. An issue may be spawned by ideological argument (the issue of nationalisation, for example), but it need not be; it may just awaken instincts, loyalties and gut-feelings (as with the issue of appeasement in the 1930s, for instance,

or Irish Home Rule in the 1880s). A real political issue is something which can combine a strong appeal to principle with a powerful sense of interest. A great issue is something that comes among us like a sword, dividing friends and making men argue with strangers. But where are the great issues today?

'The environment' is a cause, not an issue. It does not divide people. No one (no one outside Combe Florey, anyway) argues against it. The major political par- ties compete with each other to be greener- than-thou, and the electors are divided only into those who are concerned and those who vaguely feel they should be.

The poll tax had some of the makings of a great issue (as Sir John Stokes gravely warned the House of Commons in Janu- ary, in the tones of a soothsayer reporting blood raining on the Capitol, it was 'mak- ing people talk about politics in pubs') but not enough. It has become, in a sense, an uncontroversial issue, since almost no- body argues in its favour. The Government spokesmen who have to defend it argue from the brief, not from the heart. And the two points of principle which used to be raised in its defence — one to do with accountability, and the other to do with treating local services as commodities, not welfare — have been whittled away by the Government's own reforms and conces- sions: charge-capping, safety-nets and ex- tended relief.

Most of the other main subjects which people raise with pollsters on the doorstep are concerns, not issues. 'Education' and 'the Health Service' are concerns: there is no great divide there, no for and against, merely a hunger for more 'government money' and, in some quarters, a desire that it be better spent. But whether the im- provements to the Health Service should come in the form of the Tories' internal market and self-governing hospital trusts, or Labour's 'patients' charter' and 'Health Quality Commission', is a technical ques- tion, a secondary matter.

And the same goes for nearly all of the so-called issues in domestic politics which help fill the comment pages and discussion programmes today. Neither side in the political debate is consumed by reforming zeal or reactionary fervour. There is only one question which concerns them in the minds of the electorate: which side can run the system better? Managing the system, not changing it, is the order of the day. The new Labour policy document promises to 'help to make the economy more produc- tive and competitive'; where all such general statements of aims are concerned, the next Conservative manifesto could use the very same words and no one would notice the lack of difference.

The broad contentment with our present system which this implies is not necessarily a bad thing. What is dispiriting is the unwillingness, or inability, of most people to recognise a point of principle even when it comes up and bites them in the . . . well, amost anywhere except in the wallet. And nothing illustrates this more clearly than the one political question of our day which is, or at least should be, a great issue: the transfer of powers to Europe.

A small minority of the 'pro-Europeans' are genuine federalists, who believe in a European government on principle; but the majority of them are people who think that the system will just be better managed if more of the management is entrusted to those nice clever foreigners. 'Europe', in these people's imaginations, is not just a fount of superior wisdom, it is also a fount which has been drained of politics. To read the commentators on this week's Dublin summit referring to Mrs Thatcher strug- gling against 'what Europe wants', or 'what Europe is moving towards', one might forget altogether that 'Europe' in this instance means a number of politicians engaged in active politics.

Most dispiriting of all is the public's tendency to judge everything in terms of advantage, and nothing in terms of author- ity. If they are convinced that something will be organised 'better' by Europe, they will hand over the authority to organise it without a qualm. Europe means cleaner beaches, or safer baby-carriages, or what- ever. The idea that one day, with a different set of politicians at the helm in Brussels, it could mean dirtier beaches or higher taxes or anything else they might not like, and that they might then chafe at their inability to overturn those measures, does not enter their little heads.

So Europe is the exception to the dearth of great issues, but an exception of the rule-proving sort. For the ultimate issue here is between those who want to be ruled (knowing they may be misruled some- times) from Westminster, and those who would prefer to be bored from Brussels.