The hour come round at last?
Patrick Cosgrave
Anything can happen now. That is the fundanlental lesson of the Ely and Ripon by-elec11°ns. And, under the sour verbal defences of Fabour and Conservative spokesmen since ast Friday lunchtime, one could sense that the, too, grasped the potential of the hour '.;?r Mr Jeremy Thorpe and his followers. Their underlying fear was so great that they Could not reach out for the truth: they could not face the terrible possibility that it was not their communications machinery, or their Political cosmetics, or their charm, that had been found wanting, but themselves and their ipth"cles. As I wrote only the other week, both s .e Conservative and the Labour Party alread )1 Possess well-financed and expert pub. ,(ity machines: they also enjoy almost a total e Ir'edia balance in their favour — why else was that the Liberals were totally excluded from ranada's mammoth State of the Nation pro, i!,..ranirnes last week? No, gentlemen: the idea dtr Ripon and Ely happened because people not understand you will not wash. Rather, Y understood you all too well. , t'ut before going on to how well the electorate understands the record and the poteni, 11510f the two major parties, it is necessary to .0,9k at two aspects of politics in the wake of ;91s Liberal revival. The first is the proposi,' ;Ion that this latest manifestation, like its ear'ler brothers, is a flash in the pan; the second 4r1 aspect, one might say, of an aspect proposition that there is some God-given striable tish right to a two-party system with d government majorities; that this, inste:u; is so much a part of our inherently eis-auY state parliamentary system that the ectorate will not abandon it; and that twoparty loyalties will re-assert themselves at the
general election. Both these pro
a °ris, alas, though they have been used as crutches by political commentators as to re-think their own prejudices as e the professional spokesmen on both sides inith Square, are historically groundless. „ Must say, in dealing with the first prOPosition, that I permitted myself a quiet purr r1.1heen.. at lunch on Friday, I heard the news of two by-elections. Almost alone among litical commentators I had taken Sutton had and Rochdale very seriously; and fad had to endure a good deal of chaffing rn 011-1 colleagues when the Liberal tide ap(pared to recede at Manchester Exchange. aterhaPs more significantly, I heard the news vo a predominantly Tory, predominantly arili,r1.gish, predominantly intellectual lunch — th"JOY there was unconfined, because few of fZ.audierice have the slightest faith in or th'Ing for Mr Heath.) My argument had been Ault each of the previous Liberal peaks was re‘‘,.a thing in itself but a step on the road to beelval; and that the Liberal phenomenon had n growing under our noses for a couple of iToc,,a.cles or so without our seeing the conThe between its high points. tio e average Liberal percentage at by-elecbetns between 1955 and 1959 was 24 per cent; ce„Ween 1960 and 1964, just under 21 per be`,Lt; between 1965 and 1970, 15 per cent; and, est'Ween 1970 and 1973, 25 per cent. The highis Points in each period, however, run 26, 27, and 38 per cent. In one respect, therefOre, Party is evidently at a very high peak inis'ed, and 1965-70, on this statistical showing, iirla,n exception rather than the rule. Now, the el'erlYing causes of the rise and fall of politit,"'Parties are obscure, and difficult to divine. 'Ut it should not escape at least some atten
tion that between 1965 and 1970 the Conservative Party was undergoing what then appeared to be a complete renewal. True, Mr Heath suffered humiliation in the 1966 general election; but it was in his final broadcast of that campaign that he sounded the clarion of the new Toryism — radical, principled, competitive, trustworthy in contrast to the shabby bagmen of the Wilson era. Certainly, a lot went wrong for him in the succeeding half decade, but a lot came triumphantly right in the glorious summer of 1970. And all through the struggle few doubted his capacity to be true to a new vision that embraced a great deal more than just Europe. Mr Heath, indeed, raised as many if not more expectations in 1970 than Mr Wilson did in 1964; and, like Mr Wilson, he did not deliver on them. He did, of course, put through the House of Commons legisla tion which he believed vital for the country's future — most notably the European Act — but, by and large, it was not legislation the people believed in, whatever the virtues of character he demonstrated in its enactment.
The end result of the last nine years, there fore, has been the discrediting of the two major parties as instruments of government. And this is not an elaborate way of ex pressing the popular thesis of disillusionment with politicians: it is a way of saying that the two major parties have failed. Yet there is tremendous resistance to the idea that British politics can be stable on any terms but those of the two-party, LabourConservative pendulum. But, we have had nineteen general elections this century. If we take out of the century roughly nine years for war, we are left with one general election every three and a bit years. At least five general elections produced completely unexpected results, and seven minority governments or coalitions of some sort. Sometimes, as in the 'twenties, we have seen prolonged periods of instability in Britain, and these become much more apparent if we look back to the nineteenth century. There is thus an underlying turbulence in the British political world: it is the parliamentary system, rather than the relationship of the parties within it, that has been stable. Indeed, it could well be argued that the system is all the better for not being dominated by the rivalry of two great groups.
There is everything, therefore, to suggest that the Liberals have a good chance of a breakthrough; and nothing about the British political system — nothing inevitable, or settled, or durable — which suggests that it might be resistant to this injection. There is, however, something more terrifying lurking behind the possibility of a Liberal revival: that is the undoubted tendency of the system, having gone through an upheaval, to revert to two-party type. Thus Britain sloughed off the skin of the Whigs to make way for the Liberals; and disposed of them to establish Labour. If the Liberals revive, therefore, it is likely that one of the other parties must die. Which is it to be?
Against Labour there is the fact of its now seemingly ineradicable split; the still bitter taste of its last failure; and the evident anxiety of so many of its talented members to force unpalatable, unpopular and unworkable left-wing policies down the throats of the electorate. Further, Mr Graham Toye, by stressing the fact that Labour are losing higher proportions of voters than the Tories, indicates that the Liberals see themselves as replacing the left rather than the right-wing party. For the Tories there is their astonishing record of political survival; a clear line can be traced from Bolingbroke to the present day. If I had to wager money on the consequences of a Liberal re-emergence as a major party, I would wager against Labour.
But there are disquieting things abroad: never before have the Tories so blatantly disowned the myths, shibboleths — call them what you will, their potency is undeniable of national independence and identity; never recently have the Tories been so unsuccessful for so long a period in managing the economy quietly; and never before 1970 did they promise so much that was new, untried, experimental. The last Conservative leader who hazarded as much as has Mr Heath was Peel; and while the comparison between the two was once very popular in the Prime Minister's circle, it is no longer. For Peel was the leader who led the party to a destruction — through pursuing policies which he believed in but which the people did not — from which it was only rescued twenty years later by the skill of Disraeli and the defection from the Liberals of Joseph Chamberlain.
Of course, none of this may come to pass. But some at least of the older Tories are reflecting ruefully on the complacent claimConservatives used to make that orderly economic management was the most essential prerequisite for success in government; and that their party had a monopoly in achieving it. It is no answer on the part of the Tories (or Labour for that matter) to point to the fact that the Liberals have no record and few policies. Actually, they have a large number of policies, including a highly coherent one on North Sea oil, the necessity for which has only recently been recognised by the other two parties. But Mr Thorpe has still a lot of time to learn; a lot of time to get rid of some of the idiocies in his general foreign policy; and to modify, as the Liberals surely will, his policy on Europe. He is not going to win the next general election; and he can use the next parliament learning about power, if he is lucky enough to have enough members. In any event, it is the ebullience, the freshness, the openness of the Liberals, and their willingness to work hard at local level, that makes them appealing. The only powerful rival appeal is that of Mr Powell and he, for all that he scorns ' pavement politics', has proved remarkably good at them in Wolverhampton for as long as he has been the member there. Two different challenges to the status quo are, then, abroad. Both have a powerful appeal, each in its own way. And, on the 'evidence of Ripon and Ely the status quo has little if any appeal.
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