Westminster Commentary
QUESTIONS this week have elicited the startling information that the world is now revolving more slowly than it used to. This sinister indication of the decline of the West (and of the North, South and East, for that matter) was supplied by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Works (last heard of at the time of the Thorneycroft resignations suggesting that the entire Cabinet ought to have their heads knocked together) in answer to a question from Mr. Partridge, whose close season must be moving slowly but surely towards its end. The House of Commons has also discussed Malta and prostitutes (but I'll bet the Select Committee on Procedure does not recommend, in view of the widespread belief that all ponces are Maltese, that the two subjects should henceforth be discussed on the same day), and the House of Lords, which almost never dis- appoints Me, has discussed and, alas, defeated a motion moved by the Earl of Cork and Orrery (but who else?) which invited their noble and barnacle-encrusted Lordships to resolve 'That in the opinion of this House the depleted strength of the Royal Navy creates a dangerous situation.' What is rather nearer the hub of things, Mr. Ellis Smith asked the Prime Minister whether he would set in train arrangements for having the proceedings of the House of Commons televised. M r. Macmillan gave a guarded reply, but a supple- mentary from Mr. Herbert Morrison which cata- logued the usual objections of the professional reactionaries (or reactionary professionals) did move him to say that the same objections had been raised to Hansard. If it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all. Though 1 think the celebrated television performer I afterwards met in the tea-room, bubbling with joy and combing his hair, may have been a little prema- ture.
Still, though the House of Lords eventually expressed itself satisfied (content, they call it) with.the strength of the Royal Navy, some heavy- calibre shells came whizzing across my bows in last week's correspondence column, and since the Navy shows no signs of coming to my assistance, I had better engage on my own behalf. It may be useful and even—who knows—instructive to reply to Mr. Edward Collins in public. How I cast my vote in the next election is, if one or two of my assumptions are correct, of some importance; for 1 was chiefly concerned to argue that 1 am by no means alone in my political attitudes, and twenty thousand Tapermen knowing the reason why in some constituencies 1 could name might well induce even a party manager to sit up and take notice, at any rate after he and his party had been defeated. Besides, Mr. Collins is a civil and soft-spoken critic, and his arguments deserve respectful attention.
First, Mr. Collins is not quite fair to me. He summarises my argument by saying, 'he assumes first that the Labour Party are concerned about the reunification of Germany only because they think it is an issue at least potentially worth votes and that they are only interested in "such things as housing, education, agricultural policy, pen- sions and what-all" for the same reason.' Now I did not say this, and I do not in fact assume it. The vote-potential, real or imagined, of German reunification is one of the reasons for the Labour Party's interest in and continual pressing of the subject, but it is not the only one. Obviously, many of the Labour Party's leaders and policy- makers believe, as does Mr. Collins, that the British Opposition's attitude to the British Govern- ment's policy towards the American Government's feelings about the Soviet Government's reactions to the problems involved in the reunification of Germany can significantly affect the peace of the world (I don't, but let that pass), and this helps to form their public attitude towards the question. But to imagine that this high-minded approach is the only one which animates a political party desperately hungry for office is a' good deal more naive than the 'they're-only-in-it-for-what-they- can-get-out-of-it' attitude of which Mr. Collins unjustly accuses me. There may be hundreds of subjects on which the Labour Party feels most passionately, and on which it thinks constantly of the public good, and that alone; but does Mr. Collins claim that the selection from that total of issues for public debate and controversy, and the presentation of the Opposition side of the argu- ment, is not activated by a desire to reap the harvest of its selflessness in the polling-booths rather than in Heaven? Mr. Collins would claim no such thing; he says, 'Of course both parties will try to make their policies . . . attractive to the electorate, on whose votes they depend.' Well, yes, but that admission makes a hole in the dike; once you start 'making your policies attractive to the electorate,' on whose .votes you depend, you speedily find yourself thinking more about the attractiveness than about the policy. That is what has happened to both the Labour and Conserva- tive parties, of course; or does Mr. Collins main- tain that the absence from either, party's pro- gramme of any issue on which the public has demonstrated that it doesn't care either way (let us say at random the theatre censorship) is entirely a coincidence?
The fact is, what animates the Labour and Con- servative parties today is above all (not solely, but above all) the desire in one case to gain office, and in the other to keep it. No doubt there is mixed in with this desire a vaguely worthy feeling that the reason for it is their respective convic- tions that they only desire office for the good they can do the country when they have it, and the harm the other lot do the country when they have it. Nor should the capacity of most politicians quite genuinely to convince themselves that they believe this be underestimated. Take Mr. R. H. S. t. Crossman's letter in this very issue of the Spectator. I have no doubt at all that Mr. Crossman believes, with the deepest sincerity, that the Government's Bill is a swindle, and intolerable, and beastly. But can Mr. Crossman not even for a moment stand outside himself and wonder how much of this (perfectly genuine) belief springs from the' fact that he produced, after much honourable sweat, a pensions plan of his, or his party's, own, and that the Government found him bathing and pinched his clothes? I have no doubt that right from the start he believed his pensions plan superior to that of the Government; but let him try for a moment to put himself on the other side of the table and see what it looks like from there. Suppose Mr. Crossman were Minister of Pensions, and had just finished piloting through the Second Reading of his Pen- sions Bill; what exactly would he have felt when Mr. BoO-Carpenter, for the Opposition, had called it 'beastly,' intolerable' and 'a swindle'? I will tell him: he would have thought that Spring- heeled Jack was laying it on a bit thick, but would not have minded. because he would have recog- nised that that was Spring-heeled Jack's job. Well, that is what Mr. Boyd-Carpenter thinks about Mr. Crossman's speech, and so do I.
But this is not really the basic difference between Mr. Collins and myself. What. I was most con- cerned to maintain was my scepticism about the Opposition's order of priorities as far as vote- winning is concerned. To put it in an extreme form : if every Labour candidate at the election should reply to questioners at their meetings who ask 'What is the Labour Party policy on educa- tion?' (or housing, or the reunification of Ger- many. or ‘k hat-all), 'I don't know, and I don't much care,' I do not believe it would make the slightest difference to his chances of election. This is not because people do not care whether they have a decent home to live in, or whether their children are properly educated (though many people do not in fact care about these matters), but because it is practically impossible for most voters to see any causal connection between any- thing they may do in a polling-booth and any- thing that happens to their own leaky roof or their own child's school class of sixty.
On Monday, discussing the Malta Bill, Mr. Bevan ended his speech by urging the Colonial Secretary to take it back and reconsider it. Now if Mr. Lennox-Boyd had immediately risen to announce that he was willing to accept this sug- gestion Mr. Bevan would have dropped dead with astonishment, and so would I. Why was so ludi- crous a suggestion made? Partly because the Labour Party believes that the Government's Policy over Malta is wrong (which it is, inciden- tally), but to 'a great extent because there is a natural tendency to shoot first and ask questions afterwiirds; if the Government is for X, the Oppo- sition will be for Y. Can it be wondered at, with the increasing supply of such nonsenses as the sticky-labels affair and the present steel-survey mare's-nest, that more and more voters (though they may go on voting) find it more and more difficult to believe that what a political party says and what it does, have anything to do with each other? (In a sense, of course, this is inevitable; for what a party says is dictated by what it thinks, even if only by what it thinks of its electoral Prospects, and what it does is frequently decided by events entirely outwith its control.) Mr. Christopher Hollis, in an article in the Spectator almost exactly a year ago, said : The record of the Conservatives shows this as a Government without principle, Conservative 4 or any other. There is no saying what policies a Conservative Government will adopt or abandon. . . . By their disaStrous readiness to tell a different tale every time that they get to their feet . . . Conservative Ministers have fatally undermined public belief in Ministerial integrity. Nobody any longer believes a word that Ministers say.
I am quite certain that Mr. Hollis is, broadly speaking, right, and I am sure that he would agree that the public attitude to the Labour Party is not particularly different. Whether either side is in fact telling the truth becomes a secondary consideration; if the public doesn't believe them they may save their breath. That, roughly speaking, is what I was urging them to do. What is more, I went on to suggest a few things on which they might more profitably spend the breath thus saved. I went so far as to use (quasi-symbolically, I protest) the Litter Bill as an example of an iniquity against which a vigorous protest would engage my sympathy. To that, and to the second half of my subject (and the second half of Mr. Collins's criticism of it), I would like to
Previous page
