POLITICS
If Mr Major listens for too long,
he will not like what he hears
NOEL MALCOLM
When we came to office, Labour said the people could not be trusted. We trusted them. How right we were. Where Labour lectured the people, we listened. We understood their hopes. and we acted to make them reality . . . Watching televi- sion. Seeing properly. Travelling abroad. Just chatting on the phone. Some of the basic building blocks of a satisfying life. All improved by Conservative policies. All opposed by Labour.' In a desperate attempt to construct an interesting quotation out of Mr Major's speech to the Conservative Central Coun- cil meeting last week, I have elided nearly two pages with those three dots. They were two rather predictable pages, about the unfreedom of life under Labour and the extension of choice and opportunity under the Tories. You could more or less write them yourself. What you might not have penned, however, is that startling claim that Her Majesty's official Opposition is against seeing properly, disapproves of chatting on the phone, campaigns against foreign travel and watching television. What Mr Major meant was that these are all areas in which deregulation — a principle often attacked by Labour — has worked. More competition, he argued, has been established among airlines, spectacle sellers, telephone services and television companies. And I quote his remarks on these building-blocks of a satisfying life, not in order to illustrate our Prime Minis- ter's talent for bathos, but to show how difficult it can be to combine realistic examples of what 'the people' want with general statements about politics and ideology. Or, to re-arrange my inverted commas, to know what the people 'want'.
Yes, everyone wants cheaper air fares; but people may not know that they there- fore want deregulation, until a bossily deregulating government has gone ahead and done it for them. Then, when the prices do come down, the people may decide that deregulation was just what they wanted. Or they may continue to have no real opinions about deregulation, being interested only in cheaper air fares — so that if a socialist tells them he can make their air fares even cheaper by imposing price controls, they will want price controls instead. 'We listen', says Mr Major. Listening to the people is all very well, and indeed obligatory for politicians every four or five years; but there are times when you can listen as hard as you like and all you will hear is a murmur of 'you tell me'.
Something like that has happened over the replacement of the poll tax. People have been vociferous enough about getting rid of the tax; but the rest is silence. Opinion polls always used to show that the rates were unpopular. Opinion polls have shown that most people agree with one of the principles of the poll tax, namely that everyone should pay something. Opinion polls now show that most pepple want a return to some sort of property tax. No doubt the opinion polls would also show, if only they asked the right questions, that most people believe six impossible and mutually contradictory things before breakfast. The people, in other words, are dithering on the replacement of the poll tax; but when asked 'Do you have the feeling that the Government is dithering in its handling of the poll tax issue?', 74 per cent say 'yes', 20 per cent 'no', and only 6 per cent are 'don't knows'.
Opinion polls are never a very satisfac- tory way of listening to the people; but the one time that a government cannot afford to ignore these dubious statistics is in the run-up to a general election, which is where we are now. And the dip in the Tories' popularity has been steep and sudden: according to Mori, from 4 per cent ahead of Labour only a fortnight ago to 6 per cent behind them now. There are two possible explanations for this, one concern- ing the poll tax reform the other concern- ing the Budget. The first is to do with dithering and therefore with the Govern- ment's general air of competence, or lack of it; and the second is to do with hard cash (13 per cent say they will be better off after this Budget, and 36 per cent say they will be poorer).
As it happens, these two explanations match exactly the theory of voting which was expounded to me not long ago by one of Mrs Thatcher's senior ex-ministers. The only things that really matter in the eyes of the electorate, he said, were first that the Government should make people feel more prosperous, and secondly that it should look competent and united. All the other stuff about appealing to people's sense of justice, their rugged individual- ism, their entrepreneurial get-up-and-go (the things to which he had appealed so eloquently over the years) was, he implied, just a lot of colourful rigmarole. By tying the Budget and the poll tax reform together and turning Messrs Lamont and Heseltine into a sort of revolving double-act, the Government has made it hard to separate those two essen- tial strands of the public's political judg- ment. At this stage, it hardly seems to matter which consideration weighs more heavily with the electorate: the Govern- ment's economic performance, or its general competence and decisiveness. But the longer Mr Major waits before calling the general election, the more those strands will unravel, to the point where they could be tugging in completely oppo- site directions.
If he waits until the autumn or next spring the drop in the inflation rate, and hence in mortgage interest rates, will trans- form the public's opinion of his economic policies (no matter how high unemploy- ment has risen in the mean time). But on the other hand the longer Mr Major waits, the more unsteady his party will become internally, not just dithering over policies but openly disagreeing about them. The idea that the Tory party can now run on `consensus' is a dubious proposition, given that there are some things on which the party members — and Members — can simply never agree. And the most impor- tant is the issue of Europe, which may be out of most people's minds at the moment (because even politicians can only think about one issue at a time) but has not gone away. If Mr Hurd and his Euro-compliant minister of state, Mr Garel-Jones, come back from Brussels in November with a new, federalist-inspired Treaty of Political Union, and if Mr Major tries to whip it through the House of Commons, the pub- lic squabbling on the Tory benches will play merry hell with the Conservatives' image as a competent and united party of government.
Mr Major's political instinct, in any case, is to go for an early election, both to cash in on his own novelty-appeal, and to gain more authority over his party. But as a Treasury man he is clear about the import- ance of getting the economy right; and he is not clear about many other things. He has a hard choice to make, and cannot make it just by listening to the people. They will not tell him what he really needs to know until it is too late — to be precise, in the small hours of the morning after polling day.
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