Political Commentary

The voice from Dorking

John Grigg

Mrs Thatcher has returned, at Dorking, to the Russian bogey theme which she first broached a year ago at Chelsea, and on Which she spoke again last January at Kensington. Dorking, Kensington and Chelsea are not, perhaps, the ideal addresses for such addresses. One could wish that they had been delivered at, say, Plymouth, Manchester and Edinburgh. But never mind, the theme itself is literally of vital importance, and Mrs Thatcher deserves very great credit for the emphasis that she IS giving to it.

In the 1930s those who criticised and warned against the Hitler regime were themselves denounced not only by German Propagandists but also by many of their own bien-pensant compatriots, who suffered from the ghastly delusion that a tyranny could be made less tyrannous, and aggressive intentions spirited away, by a Policy of unilateral concessions and soft talk.

Many as are the differences between then and now, in that respect there is a most disturbing similarity. Moreover, whereas the appeasement of a generation ago was due principally to the feeling of those who had experienced 1914-18 that any recurrence of such a nightmare must at all costs be avoided, today pacifism and neutralism are often preached with the most intense ardour by young people who have never experienced war and who cannot believe in the reality of a military threat to their civilisation.

I have only visited the Soviet Union once and that was thirteen years ago. But nothing struck me more than the number of Yining men in uniform, which unpleasantly recalled Britain in wartime. The whole Place seemed like an armed camp, and have no reason to believe that it is any different now.

The Helsinki Declaration has, in itself, no significance whatever. Mere words are no more binding upon Brezhnev than they were upon Hitler. Though we must hope that the present Russian leadership is less nsYchopathic, and therefore slightly more cautious, than the pre-war German leaders_biP, it is surely quite obvious that the Russians, like Hitler, are contemptuous of Moral principle lacking the sanction of nhYsical force.

Mrs Thatcher is right to draw attention to 'our Western tendency to assume that Other people will apply our own standards and values', and to say that we should not :look at other nations as if we were standing in their shoes'. The Sunday Times, comml. enting on the Dorking speech, has fallen Into this trap, arguing that, because some

Russians 'have begun to quote the Helsinki text in support of their campaign for civil liberties', the Soviet leadership must be feeling uncomfortable.

But if members of the Politburo were the sort of people whose consciences could be stung so easily, they would never have got where they are and would certainly not have stayed there for five minutes. Mr Mulley may feel some discomfort when the Law Lords rule against him, or Mr Foot when he is accused of stamping on the liberties of Parliament. But we may be sure that there is no serious loss of equanimity in the Kremlin when a few dissidents quote passages from the Helsinki Declaration.

What would gravely incommode the Russian leaders, however, would be a threat by the Americans to cancel or drastically reduce their economic aid, because this, from the Kremlin's point of view, is what detente is really all about. In return for empty gestures and meaningless phrases they are being saved from the economic collapse which their beastly, inhuman and inefficient system would otherwise ensure.

It is not capitalism, but communism, which would be doomed by its own internal contradictions if it were simply left to rot. But for reasons which are hard to fathom the Americans are preserving Soviet communism from its fate, while the Soviet communist leaders continue to anathematise their saviours as the ideological enemy.

At Dorking Mrs Thatcher referred to Britain's provision of 'large-scale credit facilities to help the Soviets to buy our goods on terms far more favourable than those on which we could borrow'. Scandalous indeed, but of course British credits would not be enough to keep the Soviet economy afloat. The big offenders are the Americans.

Mrs Thatcher is fully justified in lamenting the cuts in British defence expenditure, but her remarks on this subject would carry more weight if they were more objective and, therefore, rather less partisan. Labour is not the only party which has cut defence spending, and it is very arguable that the worst mistakes in defence policy since the war were committed by the Macmillan government, which unilaterally abolished national service and concentrated too much upon nuclear deterrence.

Besides, Mrs Thatcher contrasted the Soviet level of expenditure on armed forces-11-12 per cent of GNP—with the average NATO level of 44 per cent, without mentioning that Britain even after the latest cut will still be spending well above the NATO average—about 54 per cent of estimated GNP. This does not mean that Britain is, or will be, spending anything like enough for safety. But the reason for our inadequate expenditure on arms is that our general economic performance is so poor. The only way to increase defence spending as it should be increased is to have a much larger GNP,

In present circumstances any significant increase is politically out of the question, as Mrs Thatcher seemed to imply in her very lame commitment : 'If necessary we will strengthen our defences when we return to power (my italics). Since her earlier analysis of Russian strength and Western weakness—more especially British weakness, due to Labour cuts—had pointed to the absolute necessity for increased defence spending, one can only conclude that when she said `if necessary' she meant 'if possible'.

Another flaw in the prescriptive, as distinct from the analytic, section of her speech was that she said nothing of the need—surely vital—for closer political unity in Western Europe. At a time when the Government seems to be dragging its feet on direct elections to the European Parliament, in spite of the recent agreement in Brussels, she could have raised this issue without transgressing the gladiatorial conventions of a party rally. But alas, it is an issue on which she herself is sadly lacking in faith and vision.

The threat to Western Europe is less that it will be conquered outright by the Soviet Union, but that it will gradually drift into the condition and status of Finland, without an independent role in the world and with domestic liberties subject to a Russian veto. This ignoble fate would only be temporary, moreover, because America's position would be hard to maintain with Russia controlling the whole western seaboard of Eurasia, and probably much of the African Atlantic seaboard as well.

The 'Finlandisation' of Finland is acceptable to the West (however disagreeable to the Finns), because Finland does not affect the world power balance one way or the other: But Western Europe could not afford to be Finlandised. If the Russians were to succeed in reducing us to to such a condition, they would have taken a large step towards the total enslavement of the world.

The only answer to this threat is a more confident and coherent Western Europe. The Eastern bloc is united, willy-nilly, by the force of Russian arms. Western Europe will have to be united by the force of popular will and popular enthusiasm.

Can Mrs Thatcher not see that her coolness towards the ideal of European integration is inconsistent with her admir able awareness of the Russian menace? And can she not also—incidentally—see that the more whole-hearted her commitment to Europe, the better her chance of uniting the Tory Party?