Unfair to Harold?
Sir: I would have thought it was for the Prime Minister, and not Bill Grundy, to decide whether or not my support for him and the Government is 'embarrassing'. My attitude since Labour took over in 1964 has throughout been based entirely on an assessment of men and women, and their policies. I refer to both sexes because the Government today has in the Cabinet two extremely capable and also very charming people in the persons of Mrs Judith Hart and Mrs Barbara Castle, who cannot be adequately matched on the other side of the House.
My attitude is, of course, markedly dif- ferent from the 'personalised' and therefore 'most embarrassing' stance regularly adopted by the Government's enemies. Ad- jectival abuse and invective seem so much more widespread than they were in the Tory party of my youth, and many, though not all journalists, seem to take their cue from the shrill denunciation of ministers from Heath downwards—if that is the way in which it should be put!
Having said this in the context of Bill Grundy's article, I turn with refreshment to J. W. M. Thompson (30 May). I have previously crossed swords with him and I hope he will not now feel 'embarrassed' if I tell him how right he is to censure the Leader of the Opposition for his antics overseas. It was bad enough for Heath to make what seems to have been a party political excursion into the Middle East and, since then, to have had the Shah of Persia virtually denying what he told the British public. It is far worse to have re- peated the question-begging nonsense he recently wrote in the anti-Government Sunday Express, to an audience in America, as if it represented the political truth merely because he said it! Why could he not, when questioned, have said 'What I wrote was primarily for home consumption with the idea of winning support from the British electorate, and, of course, in a democracy like ours there will always be other points of view.' He could not be expected to admit, at home or abroad, that his party still has no viable alternative programme. He might, however, instead of ignoring British tradition, have also noticed and acted in the same spirit as did Herr Strauss two weeks ago during his visit to this country. He kept publicly quiet about the bitter domestic political controversy in- side West Germany in which he is involved —and an election there is only a few months, and not two years away.
The Leader of the Opposition all too rarely seems to use the forum of Parliament for expressing his one-sided views. This is a deplorable trend as it weakens our demo- cratic system, and implies that under fire he cannot justify what he says. Neither 'closed shop' Tory mettings, followed by a timed period of standing acclamation, nor foreign platforms, seem to me substi- tutes which enhance Heath's credibility as a future British Prime Minister. And if the outcome of the next election is 'in the bag', as Opposition spokesmen and their press
satellites continually assert, then it could well be that, before long, a Heath govern- ment might face a near-revolutionary situa- tion with a growing nostalgia for a return to Labour's years of comparative plenitude and placidity. For, in my view, it would mean the British people, having been 'conned' into turning their backs on com- passion, conscience and concern for others as the only worthwhile and lasting basis for good legislation, might react in untraditional ways with a growing urge to take drastic and perhaps unconstitutional action.
This is a prospect which should alarm everyone. That it might result from schemes to make the rich richer and the less well-off members of our society poorer should be self-evident, not forgetting the need con- stantly to remember, rather than ignore, the fact that most of the world is still starving. Widespread domestic greed centred in the few could be our downfall.
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