POLITICS
The Revised Version of the Gospels according to the Labour Party
NOEL MALCOLM
So much has been written by now about Mrs Thatcher's theology that I feel merci- fully absolved from any duty to add to the exegesis. More interesting, to my mind, is the reaction of the Labour Party lead- ership, a dog which growled and snapped a great deal but somehow failed, in the final analysis, to bark in the night. A little Biblical quote-capping is all very well, but a grand credal statement of Christian Socialism would have been a much more splendid thing. If, as writers on the Left keep insisting, there are ten verses in the New Testament supporting socialism for every one which supports Conservatism, why have we not been treated to a Labour sermon ten times more powerful than that delivered by the deaconess of Downing Street?
One reason may be that Mr Kinnock has had the honesty to say, in the past, that he is not a committed Christian, so that he may not want to put himself now in a position where his taunts of hypocrisy against Mrs Thatcher might begin to sound a little, well, hypocritical. But perhaps there is another reason too. The much vaunted 'socialist society' of the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles seems to conjure up precisely the image of socialism which the Kinnockian Labour Party has been trying hardest of all to shake off: an image of shared poverty. Whatever else it was, the early Church was not a system of wealth-creation. Nowadays Ananias keeps a British Telecom share certificate behind the clock on the mantel- piece; much as it would like to, the Labour Party cannot afford to make him fall down at its feet and straightway yield up the ghost. It needs his vote. All this talk about fundamental religious and moral values comes at an awkward time for Labour. On the one hand it has been trying hard to bury its old Foot-Benn image, in which ideological ardour always seemed to be combined with economic incompetence. With people like John Smith on its front bench, Labour can present itself with much greater plausibility as a party of smooth, realistic, competent administrators. But on the other hand, Labour under Mr Kinnock has not dis- pensed with ideology altogether; rather, it has wrapped it up in a kind of rhetorical camouflage which curiously mimics the rhetoric of the New Right. Both Mr Hattersley and Mr Gould have published books in recent years which argue that the essential purpose of socialism is to promote individual freedom. The freedom they have in mind is 'economic freedom', by which they mean economic power, and the most straightforward form of economic power is money. Redistribute wealth from a few rich people among a larger number of poorer people, the argument goes, and you increase the sum total of individual freedom in society.
This sort of mimicry is all very well so far as it goes (which is not very far, since it perpetuates the foolish notion that there is only a fixed amount of wealth in any given society). But however much the Goulds and the Hattersleys bang on about freedom in this way, they are still unable to imitate Mrs Thatcher when she tries to connect her belief in freedom with her understanding of Old Testament theology. Her idea of freedom is based not on the economic concept of purchasing power, but on the juridical concept of a right — the right to choose. It may be pretty far-fetched to say that the freedom of choice exercised by Adam and Eve in Genesis iii is the basis of the freedom to choose private education or health-care. But it would be even more far-fetched to argue that the message of the Book of Genesis (let alone the Acts of the Apostles) is that as many people as possi- ble should have lots of money.
As Labour puts the final touches to its 'policy review documents', which will be published later this month, all the old arguments are coming to the surface again: how far can Labour afford, or how far is it obliged, to mimic not just the rhetoric but the actual policies of its opponents? Some of the fiercest debates in the NEC con- cerned the sanctioning, or sanctification, of 'the market' in the documents prepared by Mr Jack Straw and Mr Bryan Gould. The market is, Mr Straw tells us, 'the most efficient means of distributing many goods and services'; and according to Mr Gould, 'the short-term pressures of the market do, of course, spur competition, stimulate in- novation and widen consumer choice'. To those on the Left of the party, these comments sound like confessions of devil- worship; to those on the Right they look like statements of the obvious.
The truth is that they are neither of those two things. The principle of camouflage is at work again here. Note, to begin with, Mr Gould's use of the word `short-term'. In his book about freedom we find the underlying argument spelt out at greater length:
There is no reason why a socialist society should not use the market as the most efficient means of allocating resources and meeting consumer demands in the short term, while reserving wider-ranging strategic decisions about the future course of economic activity to a properly accountable and democratic planning agency.
When the contents of Mr Gould's policy document were published last week, it was hailed as a definitive break with the past. Closer scrutiny suggests not so much a definitive break as a little chipping away here and there for cosmetic purposes. The idea that a market is all right in the short term, provided the overall economy is shaped by government planning, is both attractive and false. If a market cannot operate both long-term and short-term, it ceases to operate as a market. Mr Gould offers a similarly specious argument about re-nationalisation, suggesting that private ownership of these major industries is all right provided the 'investment, pricing and other performance measures' are set by the state. What Mr Gould wants is the appear- ance of individual market freedoms and individual ownership, without the reality.
Perhaps we should go back to theology to explain the difference between Mrs Thatcher, who really does believe that a free market is an expression of human moral autonomy, and Mr Gould, who thinks of it as a handy device for 'allocat- ing' goods. But I'd rather not. Few people in Great Britain cast their votes on theolo- gical grounds, and perhaps not very many decide, in the end, on grounds of moral principle. Labour may have accumulated a useful store of moral sympathy during its campaigns for health and social security; but at the next election the old acid test of basic economic competence will be applied once again, and there are no signs so far to suggest that the Gouldian coating of camouflage will be acid-resistant.
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