Scarborough Commentary—i
Pirates and Landlubbers
s one of. Sir Brian Robertson's more spec- tacularly dreadful efforts crept like snail unwillingly to Scarborough, I found myself in agreement with my favourite member of the XYZ Club on the fact that if our journey had no other advantage it was at any rate giving us a fine view of the English Cathedrals. Peterborough, Lincoln, York—all were clearly and magnificently visible from the line. 'It would be almost worth staying on the train,' said my companion, as his tea (if you can call it tea) slopped into his saucer (if you can call it a saucer), 'for Durham.' Was it imagina- tion, or did I detect an undertone Of yearning in his voice that suggested he would have liked to by-pass Scarborough for reasons over and above his passion for Gothic architecture? For the 57th Annual Conference of the Labour Party could not, in the very nature of things, hold out the prospect of much joy for the more intelli- gent of the faithful who assembled in the Spa Grand Hall on Monday morning. A year ago, writing of the Brighton Conference, I said that they went there `to be filled with the old familiar juice, to be uplifted and occasionally to uplift.' As it happens, I was speaking of the Conservative Conference, but the words, which are in general true of the annual Tory roustabout, were far more particularly true of the Labour sing-song this year. 'It is highly probable,' said Mr. Driberg, in his highly literate Chairman's Address, 'that, before we meet again next year, we shall have fought the eagerly awaited General Election.' That is as may be: but Mr. Heathcoat Amory could, I repeat— without harming a hair of the Constitution's head —present not one more pre-election Budget but two, and if Mr. Macmillan's nerve holds the election might well be in May, 1960. But clearly the prevailing winds at Scarborough (which seem, I may say, to collect outside my bedroom window most of the night) are blowing in the direction of Mr. Driberg's opinion. And even these fellows have enough sense, in such conditions, to sail close-hauled. As we shall see in a moment, they very nearly sank the boat with all hands aboard on the first day out of port; and as we shall see in two and a half moments, I think it highly probable that they are sailing in the wrong direction any- way. But at least they are not actually spending their time dumping the cargo overboard and massacring the 'officers. Which, in a ship whose crew seems to be composed equally of pirates and landlubbers, is quite something.
True, feeling ran high in the education debate; there are not many subjects that can still rouse real emotion at a Labour gathering (there are any number, of course, that can provoke the synthetic kind), but education is high on the list of those that remain. The emotion it generates is composed of two parts, one good, the other bad. The good element—still surprisingly strong in the Labour Party--is the traditional Radical belief that educa- tion is a good thing in itself. The worscr half is the party's loony obsession with the public schools. Now although the public schoolboys on the National Executive of the Labour Party do not at the moment actually outnumber the rest (well, dammit, there are six women on it), I do not need to spend the entire evening with Who's Who to feel fairly safe in saying that of those members with sons of the appropriate age the majority send the lad to a public school. (In the Shadow Cabinet the proportion would be higher still.) Yet there was not a word of defence for these institutions from the platform; Mr. Griffiths in opening the debate and Miss Bacon in closing it both spent a fair part of their time apologising for the public schools and promising that the party would get around to abolishing them in due time, never fear. Only there were more important things to do first.
Well, yes. One of the most important is for Mr. Gaitskell or Mr. Crossman or Mr. Greenwood or Mr. Driberg or some other leading product of the Headmasters' Conference to tell their party that if their aim is to, see that the country is as well educated as it can be they will be a little wide of it if they proceed to urge the abolition of a high proportion of the best education going. After all, when a commodity is scarce opinions may differ on the best way of distributing it; but nobody, as far I know, argued during the war that the best way of dealing with the butter shortage was to toss half of what we did have into the sea.
And yet a quarter of a million votes in the other scale would have overruled the platform and left the Wykehamists very miserable indeed. Why did Mr. Gaitskell allow Miss Bacon to say, 'We all dislike and detest this public school system'? As far as a large number of the most influential of her party colleagues are concerned, the statement is a fiat lie; yet one more line was allowed to be painted in on the public image of the Labour Party—a line painted in the most vivid jealousy-green. There was a woman from Watford who pointed a quiver- ing finger at Heaven and rained curses on those who argued (nobody had, actually) that a Labour Minister of Education would be powerless if new fee-paying schools were opened when the existing ones were done away with. 'A Labour Minister,' she snarled, 'will have to say, "You can't open a school without a licence; and you can't have a licence."' Does nobody in the party know what harm that sort of thing is doing them? This is what I mean by saying that the conference seemed to be going in the wrong direction. From the beginning the conference has been directed to the job of closing the ranks and putting heart into the faithful. In this job it seems to have succeeded well enough; they will arrive home happier than they have been for many a Gallup Poll. But what does the public get out of it all? What the public has so far, I fear, is a picture of a party indistinguishable from a collage made up of two application forms, a Schedule 'A,' a licence, a restrictive practice, forty- two bound volumes of the Annual Digest of Statistics and Mr. Douglas Jay. Whatever the merits of the 736 pages of policy the Labour Party has produced, the general effect of them—or more particularly of the way they have been put upl has been a picture of a party whose horizon is dull, uniform society hag-ridden by controls ant restrictions; the picture may be a false one, WI it looms large. Nothing I have seen so far a Scarborough has struck me as going half an incl towards dissolving this image.
As for Mr. Cousins, he is showing precious little sign of anything except a remarkable aptitude foe making a proper Charlie of himself. He began bI being on the losing side in the public-school, debate—and being on the losing side does no come easy to Frankie-boy—after making a speed which was even more ambiguous than his cele brated contribution to the H-bomb discussion last year, and he persisted, almost literally alone in opposing the Executive policy itself after thi amendment to it was rejected. And at the privati session on Tuesday, when the expulsion of Mr John Lawrence and his St. Pancras fellow travellers was discussed, he really lost his grip The question was whether Mr. Lawrence shoulc be allowed to state his case to the conference Frankie began by asking a perfectly meaningles: question-1f we decide that Mr. Lawrence ha! no right of appeal to the conference, does thi! mean that he has no right of appeal?'—and whet Mr. Driberg explained that Friar Lawrence ha( already had his appeal to the Executive, Frankie boy asked his question again, rather pettishly That sort of thing, for him, was unusual; what wa! even more unusual was the jeering and ever scattered cries of 'Siddown' that broke out when he pursued his altercation with the chair. And you should have seen the way he tried to repair the damage on Wednesday afternoon, ,spreading the butter inches thick over Mr. Gaitskell, no doubt in the hope that some of it would stick to the knife.
It was with his speech on the economic situation that Mr. Gaitskell finally riveted his domination upon the conference. His speech on the emergency Far East resolution had been unusually vigorous for him, and was happily free of 'statesmanship.' The applause for it was hardly tumultuous but it was at any rate respectable. In the debate on the economic situation he pulled out even more. M r. Harold Wilson had had a great success in introduc- ing the subject earlier. Mr. Wilson for once dropped his folderols comedian act which, how- ever acceptable it may be in the House of Com- mons, would be out of place at this rather more serious gathering, and, without ever raising his voice, managed to get them stamping on the floor for the first time in the conference. And after Mr. Wilson we had had a hair-raisingly erudite address from Professor Roy Jenkins, who somehow manages to convey the impression that 'and' is a word of four syllables. Perhaps (if such human motives ever affect Mr. G.) he was spurred. on by these two performances; the result, in any case, was both lucid and powerful and received an ovation which, even without the musical honours, would have been a notable one.
But has Mr. Gaitskell's success been too domestic? He has certainly not done his party any harm at Scarborough, and he has even prevented some of his less 'statesmanlike' followers from doing it any harm. But this is not, when all is said and done, the warmest tribute one could pay a party leader at his annual conference.
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