POLITICS
Fighting the Government tooth and eye
NOEL MALCOLM
Political crises, • like Frankenstein's monster, are man-made.things which sud- denly develop lives of their own. It's not just that governments suffer, like the rest of us, from Sod's Law ('whatever can go wrong, will go wrong'). Some other law needs to be formulated to make the point that the most active ingredient in any governmental crisis consists precisely of the efforts which the Government makes to avoid a crisis.
Tuesday's debate on the imposition of charges for eye tests and dental check-ups offers a good example of this law in action. The point at issue was a very simple one: do such charges deter people from having the tests, or do they not? And that really was the only point at issue. It is a question of fact, not of principle; but at the same time it is simply not capable of being proved one way or the other. Mr Kenneth Clarke can point out, as he did, that while charges have been imposed for dental treatment, the number of people taking courses of treatment has risen steadily from year to year. Yet no one can prove or disprove the claim that that number would have risen even faster if no charges had been made.
As with similar arguments about the deterrent effects of punishments, then, the only way to make up your mind is to put aside the statistics and use your human judgment, asking yourself these simple questions: 'Would I he deterred?', 'Would my neighbour be, deterred?' and 'Would the average family (which spends £8 per week on alcohol and £3 per week on `toiletries') be deterred?' These are ques- tions which . back-benchers are just as competent to answer as ministers. Indeed, it is part of their function as representatives that they should be entrusted with deci- sions on these sorts of issues — issues where human judgment reaches the parts that statistics cannot reach. If a Tory revolt had proceeded, without hindrance, to overturn the check-up charges, I can think of no other current issue on which a successful rebellion would have been so intrinsically unthreatening to the Govern- ment — by which I mean that in this case no actual principle of government policy was under attack.
The Cabinet and the Whips' office, not surprisingly, see things differently. When they see loyal Thatcherites such as Dame Jill Knight leading the revolt, they con-
dude that a rebellion of this kind is even more threatening than it would be if it were headed by the usual assortment of semi- detached back-benchers. The pressure which the Government put on the rebels this time was, by all accounts, exceptional- ly severe — and severe to the point of being counter-productive. Party stalwarts such as Dame Jill are used to toeing the line on all the new developments in Thatcherite theory which are handed down to them ex cathedra. It is the feeling that they are not even trusted now with making up their own minds on simple judgments of fact which really sticks in their gullets.
If the Whips' activities were both pro- ductive and counter-productive, the same can be said of the extraordinary use, of the Chancellor's autumn statement as a sledge- hammer to crack this particular nut. The statement was brought forward by a week, at very short notice, purely for this pur- pose; and its contents were dominated by the massive increase in spending on the NHS which had only just been agreed between Mr Clarke and the Treasury. This was productive in the case of at least one rebel, Mr Anthony Beaumont-Dark, who said it had persuaded him not to vote against the Government. (The logic of this decision is not clear, however: the rebels were meant to be the people who thought that whatever else £140 million could be spent on within the NHS, nothing could be as important as spending it on supplying free dental check-ups and eye tests. So they were the ones who would not be persuaded by increased spending else- where.) But the Chancellor's gesture was also counter-productive, by creating an atmosphere of liberality by the billion, in which his insistence on getting a mere £140
`Sure 1 remember where I was when Ken- nedy was shot. Who's asking?' million from medical tests could only seem even more petty and unreasonable. And in the debate on dental tests later that even- ing, Mr Clarke did in fact spend longer trying to combat that reaction than trying to foster any feelings of gratitude towards the Government's new-found largesse.
The most seriously counter-productive aspect of this whole affair remains to be described, however. As I have empha- sised, the rebels were not questioning any of the principles of the Government's policies; they were not attacking the assumption that people should contribute towards the cost of treatment, nor were they attacking the idea that the NHS should be run more like a business. Their objections, on the contrary, were entirely business-like. If the NHS gains a small amount by charging for tests, and if those charges do deter people from going to be tested, then this will cost more in the long run when their undetected illnesses even- tually come home to roost. Supplying free tests, on this assumption, is as commercial- ly sound as the practice in up-market bars of giving customers free salted peanuts to increase their thirst. There may be no such thing as a free peanut; but there are peanuts which more than pay for them- selves.
This whole revolt, in other words, had nothing to do with the debate about universal benefits which is also simmering away in the Conservative Party, and which does indeed concern an important point of principle. Nor does it have anything to do with the related point of principle which was at issue in the revolt over the poll tax — the principle that if people are able to pay the cost of the services they receive, they should do so, with only the poorest being protected by a redistributive safety- net. So great was the sound and fury of the check-up charge battle, however, that these distinctions have all become blurred and lost; this will go down in folk memory as part of the same campaign as the Battle of Poll Tax and the Siege of Child Benefit. Next time Mrs Thatcher tries to put those principles into practice she will be warned, as Canute warned his courtiers, that she is fighting a mounting tide — a tide which now seems to be running through the Thatcherite heart of the Conservative Par- ty. And if that is not a counter-productive thing for her Government to have done, I don't know what is.
Previous page
