The skill of equestrian Harold
POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH
Last time the Labour party met in Scarborough —in 1963=there were only twenty-two univer- sities in Britain. Now, said Mr Wilson on Wed- nesday, there are forty-four. After we had cheered ourselves hoarse over this, he revealed the reason—many institutions which had pre- viously been called technical colleges were now called universities, which was a very useful thing to do as it removed much of the snobbery which previously attached itself to university educa- tion. Renewed cheering.
A man who can make a misleading claim at one moment and then make capital out of ex- posing it in the next is unbeatable. But the degree of simple-mindedness which demands this sort of performance can only be gauged once • a year when the magnificent, warm- hearted body of the Labour party emerges blinking in the sunlight from its dark corners all over the country. Noii I am going to ask you all to stand up and sing the "Red Flag,"' shouted Jennie Lee. Lithe, vehement and nervous in a fetching little grey slip, she proclaimed with every wave of her hand that she was a grand lass. Everyone stood up. 'But first of all, I must remind you whose party this is. It is our party. This is our home and our life. Harold, we love and respect you. We don't always agree with you, but we love and respect you very much indeed. The Tories, try to stifle the cries of the distressed. We don't stifle them, we magnify them.' There was an awkward pause while we waited to see ' if Jennie had any more random reflections. 'A ' few ,people started trying to sing on the cue 'Harold, we love and respect you' but they faded away. Jennie gave her most magnetic grin. 'Now, then, comrades. I want you all. to sing.' Absolute silence. Eventually -the person •oper- ating the gramophone sorted himself out and we all basked in fraternal noise. Mr Wilson re- moved his pipe, and stood to attention: At the end of the second verse, Jennie came forward again. 'Now three rousing cheers for the Labour party. Hip-hip-hip'—but she had reckoned with- out the gramophone technologist. Before any- body could say 'Hurray,' we had to listen to the third verse of the 'Red Flag,' sung by the Glas- gow Orpheus Choir. After that we shuffled out of Scarborough's Grand Hall, feeling dejected, Perhaps the serried ranks of the Labour faith- ful are growing up, and no longer enjoy being treated like Lancashire children- on a school treat. More likely, I am afraid, they are just groiving old. The will to respond is there, bUt the reactions are slower and get confused. Whatever the spirit of the Labour party on its posters, the spirit of its annual conference is one of hoary old age.
Judged by the standards of a treat for the dear old things, this conference was a failure. They wanted to hear passionate denunciations of unemployment, but it is a marked character- istic of the left that it can only manage one big moral issue at a time, and this year it was Viet- nam. Nobody mentioned the bomb, and nobody mentioned grants for overseas students. A few months ago you would have thought that our national survival depended on them, as well as our moral influence in the world and our self- respect. All of which is explained by the Wat- kins Theory of Political Fashions, formulated on this page last week. But it was sad to see Tuesday's debate on the economy dragged along at half cock until James Callaghan livened it up.
Earlier, at the annual party rally on the eve of conference, George Brown made an extra- ordinarily aggressive speech which nobody noticed. All the hecklers were waiting for an opportunity to shout 'Yea yea yea tom' or some other expression of their current enthu- siasm. On unemployment, George said that the Government had nothing whatever to be ashamed of; that it had been elected on the promise of creating a little temporary unem- ployment, and this is what it had done; more- over, unemployment was much less bad today than it had been under the Tories. This sugges- tion caused some eyebrows to rise in the press gallery, but the Labour faithful cheered him to the echo. They knew he was talking about the 1930s.
Three days later, they were allowed ten min- utes of sentimental gloating on the horrors of the recession, but the invitation to do so came from the Prime Minister on the platform, not from the floor. Whatever ingenious theses one cares to invent about the way the Labour party is divided—the planners, the wreckers and those who would compromise between the two; the meritocrats, egalitarians, bureaucrats and demo- crats—one must remember that all these and many more are the product of an unhappy childhood. There is a bond between those who have suffered which no amount of sympathy, ideological agreement or anxiety to placate can ever break into.
Which might explain the plight of the young socialists, reduced rather sadly at the conference to distributing Roneoed manifestoes of an illi- teracy which was remarkable even by the stan- dards of political involvement. At one time the delegate from Chippenham constituency Labour party rose to second an innocuous motion urg- ing the Government never to relax its supplies of free milk to schools. At the end of his speech, he said: 'Many of you find my accent funny, but if I had had free milk in British Honduras, which I come from, I might not have such a funny accent today.' The conference gave him a big hand, of course, but he had put his finger, I think, on the only significant division inside the Labour party—that between youth and old age. As delegate after delegate rose to shout into the microphone, one recognised through the deformed English and muddled platitudes yet another testimony to early deprivation. The Labour party—the great warm heart of it, that is, not the socialist fringe of teachers and thinkers—is no more or less than a highly ex- clusive collection of veterans from the indus- trial decay before the last war.
Young socialists are not kept down simply because their opinions are too far left to be practicable. Every imaginable shade of opinion is already represented among the oldsters. They e are rejected because they are young. It would ' be impossible to exaggerate the scorn and re- sentment which surged through the party rally on Sunday against a handful of Vietnam heck- lers, yet their opinions were no different from those of many delegates, as Wednesday's vote showed. But the hecklers were young, knew nothing about unemployment, and had been gorging themselves on free milk all their lives,'" • so they could never have belonged.
Above all such petty considerations, above the tortured noises and elephantine grudges of the delegates, sat Harold the Magnificent, smok- ing a pipe. Scarcely anybody in the whole of Scarborough had a good word to say for him behind his back, but the big difference, tacitly accepted by every delegate and by most MPS, is that Harold is a god and they are mortal.
James Maxton, the famous Scottish left- winger of the 1920s, has been quoted on the task• of leading the Labour party : 'The man who cannot ride two bloody horses at once doesn't deserve a job in the bloody circus.' Since" the Dalek- invasion of 1963, when Harold led on his troupe of noisy, -vaguely menacing creatures, he has been riding about a dozen horses simultaneously as well as acting the ring master with a panache which puts Harold Mac- millatr in the shade. •
Watching Mr Wilson in the conference hall; • one' was suddenly filled with generous indigna- tion. Why should he sit, hour after hour, listen- ing to this- tedious drivel? Why should any of us? Everything was totally predictable and a prime minister must have more urgent matters to attend to. Couldn't the Labour party confer:- ence itself be computerised?
We heard, of course, a great deal about science and technology, including one thrilling • announcement about an electrical aluminium smelter. But we also drank uninhibitedly deep ' draughts of traditional Luddite wisdom. Mabh- ines were often mentioned slightingly and corn-, -; pared unfavourably with men. This is just an-, ., other of the horses which any Labour leader has to ride, of course. When one horse drops out he can always hop on another.
One could tell from the way that speaker after - speaker on the platform stressed. the importance of the conference that the prevailing awareness was of its total unimportance. An unequivo- cally anti-Common Market vote might have provided the French with a further tool to ob- struct us, but they scarcely need it. The anti- American vote on Vietnam might influence British foreign policy a tiny bit, but it almost certainly won't, and even if it did nothing makes less difference in the world than British foreign policy. We all knew in advance that the Gov- ernment was not going to be defeated on economic policy. The only influence which Government party conferences can ever have Is prenatal, in the measures a government Is prepared to take in order to appease it before It meets. The only point of this particular circus was to marvel once again at the ingenuity of equestrian Harold.
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