Politics
Whole new ball game
Blackpool
As part of its covert campaign to imitate the skill of the Conservatives at self- presentation, the Labour Party this year has constructed an elaborate stage set round its platform. The red and grey Art Deco lines remind one of Hollywood be- fore the war, but there is a hint of something more hellish — the cramped, hot, metallic appearance of the inside of a battleship just struck by a missile. There in the middle of the inferno is the chief engineer Mr Eric Heffer, sweating profuse- ly as he tugs at levers that will not work, swearing at underlings who cannot lay their hands on a spanner. The captain and the mate are keeping self-consciously calm, but they know that the crew is mutinous and they are beginning to suspect that the damage may be mortal.
And in the excitement, Labour has entirely forgotten the purpose of building this set, which was to impress. Although the party is obsessive in its attacks on the 'media', it finds its own affairs so endlessly fascinating that it forgets — as the Tories never do for a second — that it is on television. That is why, when it appears unfavourably in the press, it is so outraged: it has no conception of what it looks like to those outside itself.
Old hands who have known and loved Labour down the years find this unselfcon- sciousness attractive. Labour, they reas- sure one, may get a bit emotional but that is only because of its good-hearted integ- rity. Of course you get a few extreme types — always have done — but they are only minor bi-products of a passionate commit- ment to justice and change. In recent years, these kindly justifiers have had to work a little harder. Unilateralism has established itself; so has re-selection. Attacks on the police and the Government have come routinely to include the word 'fascist' . . . but it has still been possible to argue that Labour, although its head is rather distracted, has kept its heart in the right place. This year, though, the argu- ment has finally become unsustainable, and even the old sentimentalists quietly agree. We are, as Stan Orme said about something else, In a whole new ball game as such'.
One could learn something of the whole new ball game's rules from watching the reaction to Mr David Basnett on Monday. Mr Basnett said: 'And Arthur, it would help us if you would say to your members: "Do not let them provoke you".' Not one of the most strident condemnations of violence — rather on the lines of 'look, Vlad, I know these virgins are making life virtually impossible, but couldn't you im- pale them a little more gently?' — but enough to drown Mr Basnett for a moment in boos and interruptions. And when Mr Eric Hammond of the Electricians' Union condemned violence and hooliganism on the picket lines, Mr Heifer had to shout down the booing chorus. It was not merely that etiquette suggested that the question of violence should be handled delicately, but that to condemn violence was dis- graceful.
If one wanted to be persistently genial about the Labour Party one could find some defence even for this. The miners are having a difficult time, one could say, the police are being nasty — do your best in private to cool the pickets down, but do not sap their morale by public attacks. If Mr Peter Heathfield, who is clearly not a fanatic, were leading the strike, one could see how this argument could find favour among almost decent people. But Labour this week has gone farther than that. The strike is being led by Mr Scargill. Mr Scargill is popular here not despite his union's violence, but because of it. Vio- lence is what gives his policy its glamour.
It is a sub-orthodoxy of the old hands to write off the speeches of the Electricians on these occasions — once it was Mr Chapple, now it is Mr Hammond —as impossibly crude and provocative, but Mr Hammond does have that quality of seeing what Labour looks like from a distance, and he said on Monday that the miners' strike had produced the cult of personality and the cult of violence. This is true, and one notices it painfully at a Labour confer- ence where in the past the dislike of success has meant that no personality — except those of the amiable old bigots who receive their 'merit' awards and Lord Brockway making his annual speech in favour of the League of Nations — has been much culted. Mr Hammond quoted a speech at a Labour conference made by Oswald Mos- ley, and for once the suggested comparison with a fascist mentality did not seem strained. Mr Scargill is as vain, implacable, orotund, shallow and clever as Mosley; one can only hope that he is as self-destructive.
Since Mr Kinnock is not a competitor for this sort of nastiness because he does not have it in him and would not want to, one wonders why he spoke as he did on Tuesday. As he intended, all the exegetes, of whom Mr Roy Hattersley is always the most resourceful at teasing amazing mean- ings out of deceptively simple texts, noticed the 'attacks' on Mr Scargill that the speech contained. There was the criticism of men who throw concrete blocks and use battering rams and there was the bit about how there shouldn't be a trade union 'Charge of the Light Brigade'. But Mr Kinnock chose to unbalance his remarks so that he appeared to accept almost all the premisses of Scargillism. The police, of course, were more violent than the pickets, and most of the violence was coming from Mrs Thatcher anyway — the violence of unemployment, poverty, even the 'vio- lence of ugliness' (si exempla requiris cirumspice, one mutters), all that sort of violence.
If it is true that Mrs Thatcher's 'violence' is the same — worse, in fact — than the violence on the picket lines, then Mr Scargill is right and Mr Kinnock is wrong. If Mrs Thatcher really is being violent, she is not respecting democracy, the rule of law or any of the other things to which Mr Kinnock claims to defer. It follows that to allow her to stay in power a moment longer is only to allow evil to entrench itself. Mrs Thatcher is being violent to working pee- ple — very well then, she must be stopped. No time to wait for her to decide whether to permit the use of the ballot box ever again, no point in respecting the law which she manipulates: time to get to the barri- cades. Mr Kinnock senses something of this logic, and made his arguments for democracy and legality prudential rather than principled — we must get enough support to be sure of power, we must get people to obey laws which we pass. But here is Arthur and he has a much readier and surer solution, an army of pickets, a movement which can force Mrs Thatcher to stop being violent. No doubt in taking the line that he did Mr Kinnock did the obvious thing, and did it quite well. It was a tricky afternoon, it was important to preserve `unity', inwor- tant (he thinks of the television) not to get booed during his speech. By speaking as he did, Mr Kinnock ensured that he will be back next year, by which time, he prays, the miners' struggle will have been half forgotten. But what is it that makes him suppose that a Labour Party surviving on the terms which it now sets for itself can win an election? After warning against, 'political amnesia' Mr Kinnock asserteo that at the last election Labour had been right and the electorate had been wrong He appeared to suggest that the miners strike was helping voters to see the error of their ways. He could instead have invented a 'whole new ball game as such' by saying no more than what, in little bursts, or rather drips, he has already hinted. He could have said that the strike was irregular because there had been no ballot, that because of this other unions should not be expected to help, and that Mr Scargill was arrogant in his disregard of rules and worse in his support for violence. All these remarks are compatible with fervent social- ism and trade unionism. Of course he could not and would not have said these things: Labour would not stand for it. But that is why Labour is sinking so fast and so low.
Charles Moore
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