Political Commentary

Rhetoric or Reality?

By DAVID WATT

THIS week's three by-elec- tions at St. Marylebone,

Sudbury and Woodbridge, and Manchester, Open- shaw, are our first genuine preview of the general election. Only an incon- siderate fate can now alter radically the shape of the The two major parties at any rate obviously recognise this. More than usually high- powered characters from the headquarters on one side or the other of Smith Square have been seen around local campaign offices being frightfully tactful to the local men but making sure that some brand-new lines in attack, defence, derision and obfuscation are tried out. The research departments who have manufactured them have been in process of re-tooling since the new parliamentary session and we are now seeing the first crude results of their labours.

Shorn of their decorative statistics, quotations, contradictions, local variations and general blarney these are the propositions the sluggish electors have been invited to swallow during the last two weeks' campaign:

LABOUR.—The Tories have had twelve years to modernise Britain and make us all happy but they are only now rushing out desperate expedients and plans in preparation for the election. They broke the promises they made before the last election and they will break them again. They can't pay for their programme except by a higher rate of economic growth than they've ever been capable of. The Liberals are irrelevant. Sir Alec Home is an aristocratic nitwit with a long reactionary record. Mr. Wilson is a wise but with-it whiz-kid.

coNspdv ■rives.—The Socialists (very much sic at election time) will betray Britain's great- ness notably by giving up the Bomb. They proved under Attlee that they can't govern for 'toffee and it took ten years to clean up the mess. Now that that's done and we are all happy again the Government can at last modernise the country unless the villainous Opposition gull the electors with vague promises. The Liberals are a nasty bunch of quislings who abet the Socialists, Mr. Wilson is an untrustworthy little squirt. Sir Alec Home is the greatest statesman of the West.

LIBERALS.—Conservatives and Labour have sold out respectively to big business and the trade unions but the Tories are more particularly awful because they are more reactionary and incompetent. Liberals are the only really honest politicians and their advent will scatter all class- hatred and release the energy of the people. Sir A. Home : as Labour. Mr. Wilson : as Con- servative. Mr. Grimond: blithe and bonny and good and gay.

Three things must be apparent at once from this summary. In the first place the Labour Party is sticking mainly to bread-and-butter issues— education, rents, rates, pensions, land-prices- while the Conservatives are trying to widen the argument to take in the 'question of Britain's place in the world, thus giving the maximum chance for Sir Alec's personality and a possible Summit meeting to take effect. Secondly, Mr.

Macmillan has been dropped well and truly down

the oubliette. He has not figured in any Conser- vative election address or speech that I am aware of during the past fortnight. And Mr. Hogg's remark that 'Since the accession of Sir Alec Home to the Leadership of the Conservative

Party a new political wind has been blowing' was a polite way of putting what most Conserva- tive managers knew months ago and are now saying with generous openness—Harold Mac- millan was the Tory Party's biggest electoral liability. Lastly the Liberals, after a brave effort at Brighton to evolve a constructive programme, have relapsed at the hustings into reliance upon waffle and simple abuse of the Tories And how are the electors taking to this grand full-bodied diet of half-truth and exaggeration? They are a little sick, I should judge, having supped full of horrors over the last six months and are likely to abstain in fair numbers now. Meetings, with one or two exceptions, have been mediocre and questions few. One has heard on the doorsteps a lot of the old familiar cry, 'They're all out for themselves, aren't they?' Another important. fact is that, in spite of Conservative efforts to elevate the contest, the voters still persist in a no doubt swinish obsession with their own interests and comfort. The defence issue, the Commonwealth and even 'peace' have, it is agreed by all parties, failed to make any real impact so far.

These attitudes are significant and in fact the results at St. Marylebone and Sudbury and Woodbridge will be a fair test of the present relative'standing of the parties in the country at large. Manchester, Openshaw, is less interesting. It is a safe Labour seat being fought by a popu- lar local candidate. If he has consolidated his position by less than expected he can simply claim, with some justice, that many Labour sup- porters don't bother to turn out in safe situa- tions. In both the other seats the Conservative share of the vote was bound to fall. The question has been whether it would fall by less than the

recent average of about 10 per cent or by more. Has the tide turned for the Conservatives or is it still on the way out?

Nothing in the world could prevent Mr.

Quintin Hogg being returned at St. Marylebone. He is not, however, in a particularly enviable situation for a man whose chief claim to the Tory, leadership two months ago was his alleged ability to pull in the votes against the odds.

Mr. Hogg was bequeathed a majority of nearly 15,000 by his conveniently ennobled predecessor

Sir Wavell Wakefield. The vast majority of the electorate is enormously wealthy and well-housed. Ensconced in those tall and stiflingly heated twenty-guinea flats, moreover, are a large propor- tion of former European refugees who have made good. They keep three locks and two chains and a spy-hole on the door and the Conservatives represent to them an additional security against the winds of chance. The traditional Labour vote has dwindled steadily since the war and is still dwindling. Why then have a considerable number of habitual Tories probably abstained or .voted Liberal? The reasons are rates, which ' have gone up an average of 50 per cent in the borough on the recent revaluation; general disenchantment with the Government; the cir- cumstances of Sir W. Wakefield's elevation to the peerage; and lastly, the character of the Con- servative candidate. Mr. Hogg generates enthu- siasm among his immediate supporters, but in spite of his buoyant energy and brains I found a lot of people dubious about his aggressiveness and emotionalism. Perhaps, also, he showed too transparently his dislike for meeting his con- stituents. A picture springs to mind of the great man talking to a group of friendly teenagers outside a coffee bar the other day and turning abruptly to his agent with the stentorian words, 'Let's get on, then: We seem to have drawn this covert—for what it's worth'.

Mr. Hogg's colleague at Sudbury and Wood- bridge, Mr. Keith Stainton, has also been fightiog to avoid having his majority drastically reduced from Mr. John Hare's comfortable 9,882. There are a lot of similar constituencies within one hundred miles of London and if Mr. Stainton's majority drops much below 4,000 cold shudders will go up a good many Conservative spines.

By comparison with this trend Mr. Stainton's peculiar local difficulties have been trivial. He has had an ebullient Labour opponent with a red-and-yellow bus, a Liberal well entrenched in local government and he has had the disadvan- tage in a rather pukka area of being a self-made man. The much publicised admission by Fison's that they have paid £2,300 to Tory Party funds doesn't seem to have surprised or shocked any- one much in the constituency, though we shall certainly hear a good deal about it at West- minster.

A week in the constituencies does not improve one's opinion of the present state of party politics or politicians' respect for the public. Mr. Hogg rants engagingly enough with traditional grandiloquence about courage, faith, compassion and righteousness. Mr. Woodbridge, the Labour candidate in Suffolk, rants equally engagingly about the Working Man versus Big Business. Mr. Stainton, the new-style Tory, dangles before us enticing statistics and nice modern expressions of faith. Young Mr. Plouviez, the St. Marylebone Socialist, another man of our time, goes on about dynamism and repealing the Rent Act.

The choice, as President Kennedy wrote, is between rhetoric and reality, the plausible and the possible. On the hustings of Britain at any rate we still eschew possible rhetoric and real plausibility.