POLITICAL COMMENTARY
TrrT Hugh Macpherson
The Labour Party is having a collective nervous breakdown. That is the sad conclusion which one finds among the men thinking about the future of Her Majesty's Opposition, and looking at some of the extraordinary reactions of the party to the present political situation. I hasten to add that this has nothing to do with such splendidly eccentric activities as Mr Raymond Fletcher's pugnacious advocacy of the need to return to the airship or the campaign of Mr John Robertson, the dourest of Scots, to inoculate every MP and journalist against flu, which resulted at the last count in 240 MPs braving the needle and not a single journalist or even to the fact that Mr Anthony Crosland has been seen in the tearooms.
There is much more firm evidence of a deep seated party neurosis that is clouding the judgment of the party managers. For example some leaders are afraid that the Prime Minister will spring an election on them in the autumn of 1972. The reasoning is that the consumer boom which Mr Barber apparently has on the way, as any journalist in Rome will tell you over a glass of chianti, could begin to take effect in time for an October election. By then the government would hope to have so much of its Market legislation on the statute book that the nation will acquiesce. Then when Mr Jenkins climbs on the hustings, in his cloth cap with a bottle of Newcastle Brown sticking out of his pocket he will be in great difficulties over the principle of entry as indeed will the rest of the leadership.
There are, of course, enormous gaps in this kind of reasoning. For example, unemployment will inevitably still be at a skyhigh figure and the Rubicon of a million unemployed will by then have almost certainly been passed. But there is the feeling that unemployment is no longer the political secret weapon of the Labour party, for it tends to occur in regions such as Scotland and the North of England which are Labour strongholds anyway, and the country at the moment seems comparatively unconcerned about the high levels of unemployment — perhaps due to better levels of social security.
There is also the bland assumption in the argument of an autumn 1972 election that the government will not be in greater difficulties over its Market legislation next October. This is an unwarranted assumption. Mr Rippon's present troubles, which have revealed a lack of faith in not settling the fishing difficulties before putting the question of entry to the Commons, will, if anything, strengthen the resolve of the anti-marketeers to make the passage of the legislation through the Commons difficult if not impossible. There is a further false assumption that public opinion will be firmly behind the government on the Market issue by next October. The govern
ment already burned its fingers over rallying public opinion to the Market cause last summer and could not be so sanguine again over a public relations campaign — no matter how much money is available.
Yet Labour leaders, and influential men in the party, have been genuinely concerned over the possibility of a general election next autumn. One suspects that behind such uneasy feelings is the recognition that the party wranglings over the last few months have lowered the stock not of any one of the major leaders but of them all. If Mr Wilson is in firm control it is not because his stature has increased but because it has sunk less than the others.
Mr Callaghan lies rather dormant with one eye on Mr Wilson, one eye on Transport House and one eye on a happy retirement on the farm. He is one of the few two-eyed men in captivity who can achieve this, and his position as the party safety net remains unchanged despite some setbacks in popularity along the corridors. Mr Jenkins has now glided into a nice position where he will never lead the Labour Party. But it would be quite wrong to draw fundamental conclusions about the proand anti-Market struggle from this week's results.
All this is not scolely due to the Common Market issue — even though that has produced one or two bizzare incidents
such as the spectacle of the Tribune group advocating the election of Mr. Douglas Jay to the Shadow Cabinet as a fiendish counterploy to the Jenkinsites' manoeuvres (and whenever the Tribune group starts trying to be clever it is a clear indication of mental derangement).
What the Common Market issue has done is to draw into focus the fact that the right-wing of the Labour Party is steadily losing contact with the main body of the party in the Commons and the country. During the troubled Bevanite revolts there was always the assumption that the left-wingers might well walk off and start a rump group of their own. The right-wing felt secure partly due to the fact that the Macmillan era of politics encouraged this move to the centre by the two main parties. Schismatic tendencies were felt to be the prerogative of the Left. Under Mr. Heath's more robust form of Toryism this no 'longer holds good — a gap in the centre of politics is opening — and the discomfort of the young rightwingers in the Labour party was already being felt during the opposition years when some of the bright young men, who are now prominent pro-Europeans, were discussing with Liberals like Mr. David Steel and Mr John Pardoe a possible party of the centre. They were only a small group but often the smallest symptoms are the most significant and these brash individuals were simply expressing what some of their friends felt in their bones.
Part of the trouble with politicians — and indeed with human beings — is that they can only analyse present difficulties in terms of what happened before. So it is sometimes assumed that as in the past the trade unions, who as the bankers of the Labour party are all-powerful, will provide the stabilising influence, that the presence of such uncomfortable figures as Mr. Hugh Scanlon is only a passing phase, and that soon reliable and supremely worthy figures such as the sadly departed Arthur Deakin and Lord Carron will flower again.
The kind of man now stepping on the leadership ladder of the unions is not filled with social/political ambitions which he cannot achieve through the normal channel of a university education, but is someone who either failed to go to university, or, as will develop over the next decade or two, is a man who has made a conscious choice to work out his ambitions within the unions themselves. Such men will owe immediate loyalty to the shop floors — the grass roots of Labour. A figure such as Ernie Bevin going from the unions to high political office will be a rare bird indeed, for politically ambitious working class boys will enter politics by a different route and for those who stay it will be a conscious decision to be a Clive Jenkins writ even larger (from whom God ever preserve us). When, therefore, a man who achieved government office from the grass roots of the party, and whose views I deeplY respect in assessing the 'feel ' of the Labour party, speaks of his fear of the 'coalitionists,' I can see what he means. For the followers of Mr Jenkins, who so often speak of themselves as being the sector of the party which provides the government, if they find themselves
isolated from support in their own party in a situation in which the main parties are diverging, will naturally turn to the centre. Indeed by a coincidence that is not so curious when examined, a major leader of the Labour party used almost exactly the same terms in stating his fear of those in his party who are drawn to a Europe that thrives on coalitions. In such a situation Mr Jenkins would be the natural man to reach to the centre in the same way that Mr Gaitskell and the then Mr Butler were wrapped in the warm embrace which gave birth to the unhealthily inbred child called Butskellism. The Common Market divisions are only the first disturbing Symptoms of that much deeper schism and It is because some Labour leaders recognise the danger signs that the Labour Party is so uneasy at the moment.
Previous page
