ANOTHER VOICE
Time to return to the fundamentals of democracy
AU BERON WAUG H To all the masses of information and comment which we have received about the SDP/Liberal Alliance since its 're- launch' last weekend, I must add one melancholy fact. Having watched the two Davids being interviewed by Mr 'Nick' Ross on Channel 4's A Week in Politics last Friday evening, my dear wife has reaf- firmed her intention to vote for this party at the next election, as she voted for it at the last one. When I think of all the friends, relations and acquaintances who have confided a similar intention, I begin to wonder whether the Conservatives have made a study of this massive defection from the ranks of their logical supporters. At very least, the time has come for a personal inquiry into the phenomenon.
My wife explains her preference in part by a feeling that the middle ground in politics must always be the right one possibly itself to be explained by the nest-builder's natural revulsion from con- flict — but more particularly by the fact that Alliance spokesmen have better man- ners. The two Davids did not interrupt each other, they even seemed to listen to what the other was saying. They answered each other's observations, clearly and in- telligently, and were not always trying to make party political points, either against each other or against their political oppo- nents. By comparison, neither Mrs Thatch- er nor Mr Kinnock appeared to be able to say anything that was uncontentious. Everything had to score. Hattersley, Kauf- man and Nigel Lawson were equally bad. By contrast, the Alliance seemed to agree with itself and everyone else; it was not trying to prove half the country wrong, or wicked, or stupid.
As Mr Peter Riddell pointed out in last week's Spectator, the Alliance's threat is almost entirely to the Conservative vote: of the 100 or so Alliance target seats, about 88 are Conservative-held in rural southern England — the Conservative heartland. If one sees this defection as embodying the greatest single threat that we shall once again suffer the hideous, loping figures of Kinnock, Hattersley and Kaufman at the centre of our national stage, then the time has surely come to take it seriously and ask what can be done to counter it. There is plainly no future in asking leopards to change their spots, and if the Conservative Party were to change its politics in order to accommodate everything that is most fatuous and half-baked in English middle- class sentimentalism — all the insecurity and guilt of the well-to-do — then there would be no further point to its existence.
The most obvious tactic is to frighten these would-be defectors, tell them that a vote for the SDP in the South of England has the same effect as five votes for Labour in the country as a whole. I have tried this tactic, but I am rather afraid that where the surviving core of Alliance voters is con- cerned, another British characteristic com- es into play, and people refuse to be frightened. We have survived Labour gov- ernments in the past, they say, and if necessary we will survive one again.
Various explanations are offered for the dramatic decline in Alliance support since the founding of the SDP in 1981. The most generally accepted, and least convincing, is dissatisfaction with its posture on defence. If defence is taken to include disarmament and nuclear weapons, I should have thought it had everything to gain and nothing to lose by facing both ways on the issue. I prefer Lady Falkender's explana- tion in this week's Mail on Sunday: `I believe things really began going wrong for the Alliance when . . . it embraced the cause of higher personal taxation,' she wrote, and followed it up with a passionate argument in favour of `young executives' and suchlike admirable people: 'When politicians talk about the "rich" they mean quite ordinary people who are doing just a little better . . . they mean young executives struggling with mortgages, trying to pay for a private education because maybe the local state school is simply not good enough, buying modern consumer durables . . . wishing to live, in short, like people of the 1980s, not of the 1950s.'
Lady Falkender can scarcely describe herself as a young executive any more than I can, but I understand her tender feelings for the class. In fact she is that compara- tively rare animal, a highly paid, self- employed female, and knows all too well what it feels like to sign cheques made out Do you allow tactical voting?' to Inland Revenue for income tax, to Customs and Excise for VAT, and to various local authorities for rates. My wife, by contrast, has never signed a single cheque to any of these bodies. The only way they impinge on her at all is in the occasional howls of anguish she hears four or five times a year coming out of the room where I work. She may occasionally say wistfully how pleasant it would be if we could redecorate a bathroom or buy a child some shoes. It does not occur to her that we could hang every bathroom with rose damask silk, gild every bathtub and equip all our children with as many shoes as the former First Lady of the Philippines if only she would do her duty and vote for Mrs Thatcher.
A fascinating Sunday Times Mori opin- ion poll, published at the weekend, re- vealed that since Mr Norman Fowler started deluging us all with his dirty pam- phlets, the banned topic of .s has crept up in public awareness to be a voting issue of more importance than schools and education, old age pensions or defence and foreign affairs. We know where the Alliance stands on defence, which is all over the place; no doubt it believes in giving OAPs more money, like everyone else. We have heard various policy sugges- tions on education. When I last looked into it, they were proposing to bus southern children up to Merseyside and vice versa. It sounded great fun. But there seems to have been a strange silence on the subject of *.s. Should high-risk teachers be discri- minated against? Or those actually suffer- ing from the disease? Should homosexual- ity be taught in schools? Would an Alliance government issue free condoms to school- children, and if so, at what age? Would it issue them to both sexes, or only to boys?
The real Achilles' heel of the Alliance may be the issue of redistributive taxation, which, like Lady Falkender, I honestly believe is profoundly repugnant to the spirit of the 1980s. But, as I say, there are innumerable women who never see an income tax form, let alone an income tax demand. Lest it be thought that there is anything remotely sexist in my remarks, must stress that, as always, I am referring to women of both sexes. Somehow these women must learn that if our democracy is to survive, good manners, compassion and general amiability are not enough. There must also be an awareness of class interest.
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