POLITICS
Of course there's a lurch to the Right Labour can't get any Righter
BORIS JOHNSON
John Major has at last planted his ban- ner in the centre-ground, and the battle is on. When Tony Blair accused the Tories this week of lurching to the Right, many Conservatives wished it were so. They thought the idea of shifting Right was rather attractive, and lurching positively exciting. John Major, by contrast, was so alarmed by this calumny that he chose to deny it, in the House, to the Leader of the Opposition. Someone around here might be pretending to lurch, but it certainly wasn't John Major. You lurch if you want, he told Mr Blair. Major's not for lurching.
`If you think the policies we are pursuing, bringing choice to parents and opportunity to children is a lurch to the Right, then the country won't agree. If you think spending more on patients' health is a lurch to the Right, they won't agree, or dealing with asylum abuses or standing up for Britain in Europe. None of that is a lurch to the Right.' Mr Major then went on to espouse an extraordinary new doctrine of ideologi- cal finders keepers.
It was as if the oppressed peoples of east- ern Europe had been told they could not become capitalists, because the West had already bagged that idea. 'You know that the centre-ground of British politics is our ground, and there is no way a squatter like you will be allowed to rest on it,' he said. So push off, he went on: 'You may regard yourself as the Trojan horse of socialism, but you will find it is our land you are park- ing on, and there is no room for you.'
What the Prime Minister was presumably trying to say was that Tony Blair is an impostor. In Blair's wooden belly, to con- tinue Mr Major's metaphor, are the clank- ing hoplites of socialism, ready to spring out once the electorate has naively granted them admission to their city walls. Many back-bench Labour MI's doubtless longed to believe Mr Major's accusations against Blair — that he wasn't really right-wing just as many back-bench Tory MPs longed to believe Mr Blair's accusations against the Prime Minister — that he wasn't really a Centrist.
But the longer one reflected on the Prime Minister's exchange with Mr Blair, the less obvious it was who was fooling whom in the question of the Great Right Lurch, and indeed what was the very mean- ing, now, of Left and Right. Such is the propinquity of the two parties that the old labels have become detached and muddled up. It was seen to be part of the Tories' `lurch to the Right', for instance, that they objected in unison when the admirable Clare Short said there was room for reflec- tion about the legalisation of cannabis. Well, not quite in unison, because there are a few Tories — notably Alan Duncan who are in favour of legalising not just cannabis but crack, smack and the rest.
It is ambiguous which is the real right- wing position on drugs, the libertarian or the authoritarian: coercive or leaving it up to the individual. Very well, you might say, but surely the Tories have adopted a dis- tinctly right-wing posture on the Family. As John Redwood said in the House that same day, the Tory party 'is primarily the party of the family'. You might cite in evidence of this new hard line the Lord Chancellor's impending climb-down on the divorce bill. Again, it is unclear whether this represents a shift to the Right or the Left, let alone a lurch.
The climb-down has been chiefly forced by the risk of a rebellion from MPs who do not like the Bill; some, perhaps, because its salient feature is that it abolishes so-called `Quickie' divorces, by which estranged cou- ples can end their misery in three months. To drop this Bill, which envisaged all sorts of compulsory state-sponsored Acas talks between the feuding parties, strikes me as a move in a liberal, not reactionary, direction.
All right, you might say, but the Tories are at least more right-wing than Labour in respect of Law and Order. Perhaps so but then contrast the attitude of the two parties to squeegee merchants. According to Jack Straw, shadow home affairs spokesman, these are vermin of the road, to be swept from the gaze of the bour- geoisie, along with vagrants and winos, as soon as Labour comes to power. According to Brian Mawhinney, Tory party chairman, squeegee merchants come under the cate- gory of honest toilers. It is uncertain, again, which is the true right-wing position: pro- road user, or pro-enterprise?
Very well, then, you might say: surely the Tories are now unambiguously to the Right of Labour on immigration. It is true that it is right-wing to launch a 'crackdown' on bogus asylum-seekers. But there are other ways of being right-wing. As one minister who tried to strangle Michael Howard's proposal at birth put it: 'We're meant to be the party of deregulation, but we're making employers criminally liable for accidentally employing an illegal alien.' Right-wingers, he said, are also meant to be free-marketeers.
That leaves the alleged lurch to the Right on Europe. It is true that the Prime Minis- ter is coming under pressure to toughen up his stance: that is, make a manifesto com- mitment not to join the single currency in the lifetime of the next parliament, or else to pledge a referendum. It remains to be seen whether he will in fact make this move, since degrees of opposition can be expected from Messrs Clarke, Gummer and Dorrell. And if he did, it is not obvious why this should automatically qualify as a right-wing gesture. To be anti-Common Market always used to be a sound left-wing position, in the style of Tony Benn; just as it used to be a strong left-wing position to be against devolution, in the style of Robin Cook in the 1970s. The labels have been swapped.
Only in one respect can the Tories be said to have been consistently more right- wing than the Opposition; and that is that they retain a generally stronger desire to reduce taxation and spending. It may be that the ambition of Mr Waldegrave to cut spending to beneath 40 per cent of GDP is a statement more of attitude than inten- tion; rather like the ceaseless pledges by European ministers to reform the CAP. But such is at least the Tory ambition, while Labour policy, as Gordon Brown showed this week, remains to take taxpay- ers' money and squander it on industry. That is the real Right-Left divide, and the Tories should play it up.
Boris Johnson is assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph.
Previous page
