POLITICS
Dr Owen conceals the comfortable Tory furniture inside
NOEL MALCOLM
Scarborough s Your Journey Really Necessary?' This war-time slogan comes unavoidably to mind on the way to an SDP conference. At approximately 1.30 a.m. on Tuesday morn- ing I decided that the answer was No'. Roused from deep sleep and ordered to leave the hotel immediately, I stumbled, half-clad in pyjamas, across the square and into the hotel opposite, where we were told to remain until the bomb threat had been investigated.
It was at this point that I realised that the most depressing thing about the Blitz must have been the unbearable jollity of other people. Dr Owen sauntered past, beaming with Dunkirk spirit and clothed in a combination of pyjamas, cricket jersey and tweed jacket which made him look like a cross between the hero of Salad Days and Dr Who. A receptionist shouted at us, as if our lives depended on it: Will you please proceed to the ballroom, where we shall have a sing-song.' And just before sleep overcame me, mercifully, again, I heard a hundred jolly voices from the ballroom singing 'Bring back, Bring back, Oh bring back my Paddy to me, to me.'
It has been a good week for Dr Owen. With his party bumping along in the polls at something rather less than the pollsters' margin of error, no news is bad news; and the news that someone might have cared enough about him to want to blow him up must have been positively heart-warming. There have been other encouragements too. The turn-out of delegates was much higher (c. 750) than anyone had dared to imagine, and the debates have been much less critical of the party leadership than the leaders might reasonably have feared. And Dr Owen has responded. Having often seemed lacklustre, offhand or fey during the last six months or so, and having recently begun to sound truculent and paranoiac about 'the media' (a sure sign of incipient decline in any politician), he has suddenly returned to form, delivering crackingly good speeches with his old air of gravity, alertness and self-confidence.
He will need all his old skills, and some new ones too; for the task which he has set his party is perhaps the most difficult one ever devised in modern British political history. It involves accepting the existence of the other opposition parties but reject- ing what they stand for; holding out olive branches while keeping them at arm's length; insisting that policy differences between the SDP and the other parties are no obstacle to co-operation, while still emphasising the distinctiveness of his own party — which resides, if it resides any- where, in those very policy differences. It means saying 'join us', and at the same time saying 'you don't need to join us, you can co-operate with us all the same'.
It is possible to distinguish several diffe- rent strata of argument underneath this curious feature of the political landscape. The bedrock, naturally, is the old idea of an electoral pact with the SLD. February's Richmond by-election (in which the per- centages of the vote were SDP 32, SLD 22 and Conservative 37) demonstrated the need for a pact in a manner so painful to the the SDP as almost to take away the desire for any further negotiations. (Dr Owen now says that he dates the public's recent lack of interest in both SDP and SLD to the day they heard the Richmond by-election results.) Nevertheless, a scheme is now under way to allow local party members in a few south London constituencies to vote for giving way to a candidate from the other party; this may have some symbolic value, though the scheme is unlikely to spread much further.
Another layer of argument is the claim that if you add up all the opinion-poll ratings of the SDP, SLD, Greens and Nationalists, the result is a steady 20-25 per cent, thus proving the continuity of the `centre' vote. This involves rejecting, quite properly, the SLD's much parroted catch- phrase, 'We are not a centre party, we are a radical party'; but it also involves ignor- ing the socialist doctrines of the SNP.
The most recent stratum of SDP think- ing, however, is the most intriguing and the most improbable: Dr Owen's idea of a `constitutional coalition' with the Labour Party. The plan here is to form a coalition government whose sole task would be to introduce proportional representation, a written constitution and a Bill of Rights. All other contentious issues would be kept `on ice' until another election had been held under the new dispensation. This is a piece of such pure fantasy that it is difficult to see what real purpose it can serve Dr Owen, save that of giving him an excuse for talking to Labour without the risk of appearing to compromise his policies — a way of playing footsie-footsie with Neil while keeping his hands primly and visibly folded.
But it does serve a very useful purpose for the rest of us. By hiving off his constitutional policies, Dr Owen demons- trates, unintentionally perhaps, that the main points on which he diverges from the Conservatives belong in a special little category which can easily be detached. Take away PR and the Bill of Rights, and you are left with very few disagreements with the sort of line which a soft-ish Conservative might take on the major issues. Dr Owen is in favour of the trade union reforms, the sale of council houses, most of the privatisations so far, an 'inter- nal market' in the NHS, the retention of civil nuclear power and an independent nuclear deterrent. (I'm fed up with com- mentators calling our defence policy right- wing', he said on Monday. 'It's the same as Mitterrand's. Do these idiots think that Mitterrand is right-wing?' No, David, but this idiot doesn't think there's anything very socialist about M. Mitterrand's policy on nuclear weapons.) The things Dr Owen objects to — poll tax, water privatisation, refusal to join the EMS — are the things that many mainstream Conservatives balk at in the Government's programme. Even on Europe, Dr Owen has started emphasis- ing his hostility to federalism in a way which places him well within the admitted- ly fluctuating bounds of Tory policy.
When the Green Party achieved its unexpected 14 per cent in June, it was widely agreed that much of the surge came from disaffected Tories who did not know where to place their votes. Well, by the time the policies of the Green Party have been properly publicised, they will know whom not to vote for. (I am not echoing the popular cry that the Greens are tota- litarian; if their 'Strategy Working Group', which I attended in Wolverhampton, is anything to go by, their views are mainly anarcho-syndicalist, like those of the Liberal Party's radical fringe in the Sixties — a position much less nasty than Stalin- ism, but equally destructive of our socio- economic system.) The perfect home for disaffected Tories will in fact be waiting for them at the next election, but its facade will be entirely covered by then with banners proclaiming empty messages about constitutional coali- tions; and they will walk past, not pausing even to peer through the windows at the comfortable Tory furniture inside.
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