Political commentary

Chopper and the Scots

Ferdinand Mount

Mr Michael Cocks sits tight on the front bench. He is a little pink about the cheeks. He wears a frozen little smile beneath his neat moustache. In short, he looks uncomfortable, like a boy who knows that he is about to be humiliated in front of the Whole School for Bringing The School's Name Into Disrepute. On the face of it, this is hard cheese, for Mr Cocks was not himself one of the five MPs who dawdled in the No lobby (a sort of long passage through which you pass to record a negative vote) in order to prevent a later vote being taken. Apparently, it was a close shave, though, as he had only just got out before the sergeantat-arms was sent in to ferret out the dawdlers. But Mr Cocks is Labour's Chief Whip and has to take the blame for the unfair charges, tripping, shirt-grabbing and other assorted professional fouls of his deputy, Mr Walter 'Chopper' Harrison,• who along with two other Labour whips, was holding up proceedings by jawing with two Scotnat MPs. The responsibility is all the more inescapably identified as Mr Cocks's because it is not the five MPs who are made to own up and apologise but Mr Michael Foot, the government's spokesman on House of Commons matters. This then was a government-sanctioned conspiracy and not just a little private caper between MPs. Mr Cocks begins to shift on the bench.

Alas, Mr Foot is no great shakes at apologising (being a radical, like being in love, apparently means never having to say you're sorry). Indignation, despair, irony — he is master of many moods, but contrition is not one of them. The words have to be dragged out of him with forceps and they came out somewhat twisted. And so it is that he describes what was going on between the five MPs as an 'altercation [OED: a vehement or angry dispute, a wrangle] about a subsequent division.' You observe how this puckish gloss alters the sense of the text. Instead of five venal old fixers conspiring to prevent Jo Grimond from putting his amendment to give the Orkneys and/or Shetlands the right to go it alone and take most of the oil with them, we have five sturdy patriots engaged in honourably vehement disputation which is improperly but understandably prolonged. At any rate the Tories do not seriously try to explode this version — they seem unmanned by the spectacle of Mr Foot apologising, in however maimed a fashion. Mr Cocks cheers up. There now, it's never as bad as you think it's going to be.

The scene of skulduggery unmasked is worth describing to indicate the spurious quality of much of the outrage generated by the incident. The Prime Minister let it be known that he was appalled but appalled as much, it seems, by the fact that the vote was lost and his hit men got caught as by their failure to observe Queensberry rules.

'Chopper' Harrison already enjoys a reputation for disastrous inventiveness in this line. He seems to be one of those endearing finaglers who is always found out. But the fact that he was allowed to try out his latest wheeze shows just how desp erate the Government is to fiddle the Scotland Bill through in a form which will enable Labour to hang on to its vital clutch of Scottish seats. Mr Callaghan is determined to retrieve the damage, but he may not find it easy, certainly not on Mr Grimond's.

amendment which was passed by a startling margin of 204-118. This may be partly due to the anger of some MPs at Chopper's stratagem. But much more important is the growing feeling that, if Scotland has the right to self-determination, then so do the Orkneys and the Shetlands. For if 270 years of the union have not weakened Scotland's nationhood, why should the briefer and earlier period of the islands' rule from the mainland be held to have obliterated their• own Scandinavian character? And, in the case of Mr George Cunningham's amendment, which requires that unless more than 40 per cent of the Scottish electorate vote for the Assembly, the Assembly is to be scrapped, the same gradual dawning of perception has occurred. The longer the Scotland Bill is discussed, the more clearly MPs have come to understand that devolution is not such a burning issue in Scotland as the Scotnats claim. Of course most of the MPs who voted for the indefatigable Mr Cunningham's plan did so because they want to kill the Bill. The point is, though, that they have a respectable argument, because there is a real danger of home rule and eventually independence being foisted upon a largely apathetic Scottish people. The 40 per cent hurdle is a perfectly defensible method of assessing enthusiasm, of finding out not only the answer but whether the question needs to be asked.

It is true, as Enoch Powell says, that a process of self-education has taken place. Are the Tories really moving towards Mr Powell's faith in the sovereign nation, and is Mr Powell really moving back towards the Tory Party? The flash and flicker of Mr Powell's snipe-like flight across the wilderness does appear to assume a definite direction. Those close to Mr Powell's thinking, like John Biffen and George Gardiner, perhaps anticipate and over-simplify the flight path leading to an eventual reconciliation with Mrs Thatcher. But to the Scots and the Northern Irish (for whom Mr Pow

ell takes the question of nationhood to be supreme) there is no reason why his influence should not tend increasingly to favour the Tories.

Yet in England, Europe and immigration are more serious obstacles to reconciliation.

While the .Tory Party is almost wholly

united in its support for a directly elected assembly, a clear majority in the Labour Party is opposed to British membership of the EEC — and that, after all, is the reason why Mr Powell originally advised us to vote Labour. Nor is he likely to be much impre ssed by Mrs Thatcher's laryngitic TV interview on immigration. For, despite the squawks of the race relations industry, she could and did fairly claim to be saying nothing that Willie White law had not said in 1976. The smile that hovered round Mr.

Powell's lips as Mrs Thatcher ploughed on through Labour jeers in the Commons was more of ironic satisfaction than of sym

pathy. There are differing opinions about.

how great a cut in the inflow can be achieved without breaking existing com mitments, but there is no doubt about the huge gap between Mrs Thatcher's intentions and Mr Powell's own increasingly extreme policy of voluntary repatriation. Enoch now proposes 'a return or moving on' of the children born in Britain to immigrant parents. Letters and parcels are returned; loiterers are moved on. Voluntary repatriation?

The danger of crossfire on Mrs Thatcher's left-hand flank may have diminished a little too. Many Tory MPs are more fearful of what Mr Heath may say or do over the next few months than of anything Mr Callaghan might throw at them. The omens, while not exactly favourable, are not as bad as they were. It is not that Mr Heath does not continue to say exactly the same things; his speech on Monday night was a re-run of the old themes, blaming unemployment and the rise of the National Front on everything and everyone — Arabs, Socialists, businessmen, monetarists — except the economic policies of his own government. Yet there was a more goodhumoured and less self-justifying tone to lt and, unlike Mr Heath's last Commons speech, on proportional representation for Europe, it went down well, particularly with Labour MPs, partly because such solemnities suit a subject like unemployment, which everyone piously deplores but nobody knows how to deal with.

But those who believe that either Mr Heath or Mr Powell will easily modify their views should take note of the fact that Mr Heath was one of only four Tory MPs to vote with the government on the Cunningham amendment and they should also have heard Mr Powell's blistering attack on the shadow cabinet's failure to tell Tory MPs how to vote on the guillotine for the European Assembly Elections Bill. These are sensitive matters involving sensitive men. For those on the touchline it's sometimes more fun watching Chopper and his lads at work in a goalmouth melee.