A reply to the tough brigade

John Grigg

In the correspondence columns lately there have been letters from several people to whom my form of Toryism is clearly abborrent. In particular, there was a long letter from Edward Pearce describing it as 'Conservatism of the passive mode', and echoing Edward Elgar (apropos the English music of his day) in suggesting that Tories like myself exhibit 'a peculiar whiteness'. The use of 'whiteness' as a pejorative term will give considerable pleasure to race relations workers, who often complain that the idea of blackness is associated in the public mind with badness, that of whiteness with goodness. But of course I know what Mr Pearce means when he calls me a passive, or white, Tory. He means that I am not militant enough, not enough of a partisan, too interested in compromise and consensus. And in a way he is perfectly right.

Yet in another and more important sense I am sure he is wrong, because (to echo a famous contemporary of Elgar) what should they know of partisanship, who only partisanship know? It seems to me that Mr Pearce and others like him have a mistaken idea of what a political party — or at any rate the Tory Party — is for, seeing it as a missionary society operating in heathen lands afar, rather than as a traditional British secular institution seeking the support of as many British people as possible, with a view to providing the country with stable, intelligent government, and thus to promoting its unity and strength.

The Tory Party has never for very long been just a society of ideologues, ministering to each other's enthusiasm and appealing only to those of similar temperament and cast of mind. It has occasionally veered in that direction, but whenever it has done so the results have been bad and it has then had the sense to take corrective action, returning to the broad highway. The dangerous moments have been when it has been unduly influenced by dogmatists who have joined it from outside, or whose ideas have temporarily captivated some of its leaders.

One deviant period followed the split in the Liberal Party over Irish Home Rule, Which brought Joseph Chamberlain and other Liberal Unionists into alliance with the Tories. Chamberlain was a great man, but his ideas tended to become obsessions and were pressed beyond the limits of decency and prudence. Under his influence many Tories became infected by a rather crude imperialism and by a cure-all economic doctrine, Tariff Reform. They also became as fanatical in their opposition to Home Rule as Gladstone had been in espousing it. The results were a disastrous colonial war in South Africa, grave social and constitutional conflict over the 1909 Budget, and by 1914 an approach to civil war over Ireland, which only the outbreak of European war may have prevented.

During the inter-war years the Tory Party deferred too much to a financial orthodoxy which owed a lot to the thinking of Manchester School Liberals, by then strongly represented in the party, as the Liberal Party disintegrated. This restricted both the Tories' response to the evil of unemployment and the effectiveness of their reaction to the menace of Nazi Germany. Nevertheless Baldwin's personal belief in the Tory ideal of national unity and harmony did a good deal to mitigate the virulence of class feeling, and would have done a good deal more if he had been a less indolent man.

The two decades following the second world war showed the Tory Party at its best in home affairs. The Welfare State was accepted as a fail accompli and, with reason, claimed as partly a Tory achievement. There was no attempt to undo all that Labour had done, even where it had been wrong. Unnecessary controls were scrapped and there were big cuts in taxation, but at the same time good relations with the trade unions were assiduously cultivated, even at a modest cost in monetary virtue. Consequently the social atmosphere improved, socialist dogmatism in the Labour Party was forced on to the defensive, and the Tories won three elections in a row with growing majorities. Had they won a fourth — as they would have done in my view, but for the 1963 leadership contest and its aftermath — the politics of recent years would have taken an entirely different course.

The first phase of Edward Heath's leadership, from 1965 until 1972, was marked by a sharp increase in partisanship. When he became prime minister in 1970 he was committed to a neo-Liberal economic programme and to the reform of industrial relations. As we should now be prepared to acknowledge, the result was the loss of an historic opportunity. The previous Wilson government having gratuitously antagonised the trade unions, the Tories had such a chance as they had never had before (and may never have again) to wean the trade unions away from their exclusive attachment to Labour. Instead, the two wings of the Labour movement were driven into an unprecedentedly close partnership.

In 1972 Mr Heath and his colleagues decided, quite rightly, that they must change their policy or catastrophe would ensue. The dogma of laissez-faire non intervention was abandoned, and the trade unions were no longer treated as outsiders but were brought into consultation with the Government and the CBI on the future of the economy, more especially on measures to combat inflation. The talks failed to produce a non-statutory policy, but the new climate enabled a statutory policy to work. Its eventual failure was due, above all, to external forces — wholly unpredictable and freakish rises in world commodity prices — but also to deliberate sabotage by one trade union, aided (in effect) by an irresponsible Labour opposition.

A year later Mr Heath was deposed as leader, and the true causes of his deposition were more personal than ideological. But since politicians (with rare exceptions) like to believe that they are acting from high motives of principle, a mythology has gathered around the change of leadership, which sets it in a quite false perspective. Among Tory MPs and activists, and still more among Tory journalists, it is now fashionable to assume that Mr Heath was on the right lines until 1972, when he lost his head and went disastrously off the rails. As a general proposition the reverse is true.

The false mythology helped to bring Mrs Thatcher to the leadership, and to some extent she subscribes to it herself. But fortunately she is more practical politician than ideologue, and during the past year she has been moving, behind a thick smokescreen, towards the centre, and therefore towards a more authentically Tory position. Her freedom of movement is inhibited, however, partly by her own lingering prejudices and still more by the prejudices of 'radical right' enthusiasts, who persist in regarding her as their champion. Unless she can somehow manage to shake them off as leader of the opposition, she may never have the chance to disappoint them as prime minister — as she most assuredly would.

The 'radical right' corpus of doctrine is a resurrection of nineteenth-century Liberalism largely accomplished thrOugh the thaumaturgy of two foreign academics— the Austrian Professor F. A. von Hayek.ancl the American Professor Milton Friedman. Both are eminent thinkers, bat neither could be said to have Much understanding of the realities of politics in Britain. In any case, Tories must always beware of theory as a guide to action. Among British politicians, Dr Friedman's chief disciple is Enoch Powell, and how good a Tory is he? It would be absurd indeed if Tory leaders were now to act as surrogates for a man who is giving most of his support to Labour.

Two issues which most obviously divide Tories like myself from Tories of the 'radical right' are incomes policy and attitude towards the trade unions. On both, I would suggest, Mrs Thatcher is in practice on our side, if ostensibly on theirs. She has been careful not to deny herself the option of a statutory incomes policy, while professing her extreme distaste for incomes policy of any kind. And on the substance of immediate controversy regarding the trade unions she was positively dove-like in her Weekend World interview with Brian Walden, though she distracted attention from the fact by raising — irrelevantly, and some would say unwisely — the question of a referendum.

Does this mean that she is an 'iron blancmange', as Mr Pearce calls Mr Heath? Did the Russians give her slightly the wrong nickname? It means nothing of the sort, but rather that she is a realistic politician with an honourable desire to become, and to succeed as, prime minister. She knows that the previous attempt to tackle trade union abuses by frontal assault did more harm than good, even though it was backed by an electoral mandate. She is also well aware that no British government can now hope to achieve very much without a fairly large measure of cooperation from the unions.

This is not to say that Britain is becoming a corporatist state. The word 'corporatism' is now used very freely, and since it does not appear in my edition of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary I am unable to supply an authoritative definition. But surely its proper use is to describe a state like Mussolini's Italy, in which all secular activities and associations were subordinated to the state, so that the state itself became the single, all-embracing corporation. As yet there is no sign of anything like that in Britain and please God there never will be. Yet Britain has a vigorous corporate life, in which the state is a key element. All the various corporations within the country — such as the trade unions, the CBI, the building societies, the National Trust and any number of others — are free to operate on their own but from time to time are called into consultation by the state, as the largest and most representative corporation. But that is surely a far cry from corporatism in the bad, totalitarian sense.

British governments have always had to bargain and negotiate with large interestgroups, even before the age of democracy. Today any alternative way of governing is unthinkable, because the state's powers of coercion are strictly limited. The trade unions have certainly become the most powerful interest-group in the country, and if they unite in defying the state they cannot be suppressed by the methods that a tyrant would employ. But they are not monolithic, and in any case the overwhelming majority of their members are law-abiding and patriotic. The art of government (more especially Tory government) must be to nourish their sense of responsibility as an estate of the realm, and to give them no excuse for running amok.

By the way, Mr Pearce's muddled think ing on this subject of corporatism is most evident in his ludicrous attack on de Gaulle. 'Grigg speaks about Gaullist corporatism as if that were something fcir us to admire. But what in heaven's name is there to say for that miserable regime and the sonorous old charlatan who presided over it?' I will tell Mr Pearce what there is to say for de Gaulle. He was the greatest conservative statesman of our century, to date. He was also a great democrat, who saved the liberties of Frenchmen from probable communist revolution at the end of the war, and from almost certain military dictatorship during the Algerian crisis. His regime bore no relation to the corporatist regimes of Mussolini, Hitler or Stalin, or even to that of Franco. And he gave up his power as soon as he felt that the French people had lost confidence in him.

Perhaps it was de Gaulle's freedom from ideology that Mr Pearce could not stand, just as he resents Mr Heath's emancipation from it after he had learned from experience. It was de Gaulle, after all, who said that the principle of the future would be neither communism nor capitalism, but cooperation. To the 'radical right' that is heresy. Their aim is a capitalist counterrevolution, with the trade unions cut down to size and the state's role in the economy drastically reduced. With such a programme the Tory Party would be most unlikely ever again to win an election, and would tear the country apart if it did.

Mr Pearce's diatribe against Mr Heath includes the statement that he is 'simply not in the English tradition'. It is true that, until 1972, his leadership was not wholly in the Tory tradition, though it had compensating merits and in no way deserves Mr Pearce's (or Paul Johnson's) venomous strictures. But the moment when it became, in fact, more distinctively English and Tory — when he faced reality in a national, rather than a severely partisan, spirit — is precisely the moment that 'radical rightists' depict as the great betrayal. This is surely not the view of most British people and will not, I believe, be the verdict of history.

In any case, the apparent lurch to the right which accompanied, -and to some extent caused, his removal from the leadership, has already had a disastrous effect upon the fortunes of the party. For who can doubt that if he had still been leader during the past year — with his opinions on incomes policy, on working with the trade unions and, for that matter, on devolution — it would have been morally impossible for the Liberals to enter into a pact with Labour to keep the present government in being? In other words, is it not more than likely that, but for his removal, the Tories would even now be back in power?

As it is, their return to power at the next election, though still a strong probability, is beginning to look less of a foregone conclusion. And if the party conference gives a display of Mr Pearce's kind of toughness, it may soon have to be regarded as even more doubtful. In particular, if the Tories at Blackpool reject the well-considered policy of the shadow cabinet on the closed shop, the damage to the party's prospects will be incalculable.

Many people are now talking about the closed shop as though it were an abomination invented by Michael Foot. In fact, it has existed for a long time, and its abolition in the Tory Industrial Relations Act was more apparent than real. For one thing, the 'agency shop' which was permitted under that Act (and whose revival Sir Geoffrey Howe has been suggesting) was in reality the closed shop thinly disguised — just as Mr Foot's measure re-enacted, thinly disguised, many features of the Tory Act.

The argument for allowing closed shops to exist should, in principle, make sense to any Tory. It is that those who enjoy benefits and privileges should accept corresponding obligations. If workers in a factory get increased wages and improved conditions as a result of bargaining by a union, it is surely only fair that they should be asked to bear their share of the union's costs and to contribute, by their membership, to its collective power. And it may be in the best interests of all concerned — including management — that there should be a single union rather than rival unions bidding against each other.

Mr Weatherby (Letters, 24 September) rather quaintly suggested that it was unfair to put workers under pressure to accept a Beal giving them better pay and conditions. 'What do they do if they don't like it? Organise themselves and go on strike for lower pay?' With great respect, I would say —Come off it, Mr Weatherby. The situation is unlikely to occur except in very rare cases, and in those cases it would surely be open to the workers to give the undesired increment to charity, or to return it as a private and confidential donation to their employer.

Of course the closed shop must only be permitted — never imposed — by law, and of course the abuses and injustices to which it can occasionally give rise must be legislated against, preferably by agreement with the TUC. It must also operate on a strictly postentry basis. But it would be extreme folly for the Conservative Party to be stampeded, by just indignation at particular outrages, into another attempt to ban the closed ship in all circumstances. Hard cases make bad law, and there is no institution in the country that has no blemishes. The social security system, for instance, is clearly open to abuse, but few would regard that as an adequate reason for abolishing it.

In general, it is madness for Tories to speak of the unions as though they were a modern equivalent of the press gang. By and large they have been, and still are, institutions contributing infinitely more to the advancement than to the restriction of personal liberty. Far from being enemies of our freedom, they are a vital part of it — and of that communal discipline without which we cannot be free. As A. Yasamee put it in his admirable letter (24 September): 'All we need is to perform a logical abstraction: just remove from human life what society provides and see what would be left'. Without collective restraints and the solidarity of people working together, personal freedom is a mirage.

The Conservatism that I would like to see at present would not in the true sense be wet or 'white' or 'passive', nor would it be boringly undisputatious (because politics have to provide entertainment as well as edification, and the public naturally likes a good scrap). But it would concentrate its militancy upon the left wing of the Labour Party, so appealing to the vast majority of people in the country, and exploiting to the full the fundamental division within the Labour movement. It would fight hardest on the issues of defence, taxation, and free dom as opposed to slavish equality. It would avoid at all costs being dragged into an allout struggle with the trade unions, and would seek instead to shame the TUC into being less partisan than in recent years.

Refugees from Labour like Mr Pearce tend to remain dogmatists in mood even while anathematising the specific dogmas of socialism. But true Toryism requires above all a broad and tolerant mood, a will to reconcile and unify. Though not, in fact, as Mr Pearce states, a 'cradle' Conservative (when I was in my cradle my father was a Lloyd George Liberal), I have nevertheless been a card-carrying Tory throughout my adult life, and am ready to defend the old party's essential qualities against any newcomer.