Would a Conservative Government be any better? (1976)

From the October 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

The alternation of governing parties is usually represented as a free choice by the electorate: a political Judgement of Paris in which the voters composedly select the most beautiful, fair-spoken and wise. The actuality is something different. The party in charge has failed once more. Its inability to control the system has produced fresh grievances, its leaders are divided; and the opponent party, which itself was in this position not long ago, prepares to catch the Judges’ eye again. The voters don’t feel like masters of the situation. The widespread sentiment is that the existing régime is beyond hope, and to see if “the other lot” can do any better.

In these circumstances the Conservative Party is now looking at the prospect of winning the next general election. The Labour line, and that of the militant groups who attack the Labour Party but unfailingly support it at election times, is that the Conservatives stand for wealth and privilege and so must be kept out at all costs. It is much more fruitful to consider that many Conservatives, leaders and supporters alike, believe with Disraeli that they can and should “elevate the condition of the people”; and to see the reasons why they have failed and will fail.

State and Enterprise

The conspicuous difference between the two parties is that the Conservatives frankly accept the capitalist system, while Labour is committed to social-democratic ideas which mean running capitalism with a different vocabulary. The Conservative tradition is for “free enterprise” and against state intervention in production and distribution. In The Conservative Party (1949) Nigel Birch wrote: “They do not believe that the present type of central planning, which involves the attempt by the State to interfere in almost every aspect of human life and activity, can succeed or if it did succeed would lead to the good life.”

This passage goes on to quote J. M. Keynes— “The advantage to efficiency of the decentralisation of decisions and of individual responsibility is even greater perhaps than the nineteenth century supposed.” Most Conservatives would regard as ideal Keynes’s colourful statement in his General Theory:

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig them up again . . . there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.

The rôle of the state is thus confined to priming the pump, and the interplay of market forces provides not only the profits which are the rightful due of the capitalist class but benefits to the working class. This is seen as the practical alternative to state control and to a lot of welfare legislation. It embodies a taken-for-granted idea of justice: the most efficient industry and the most diligent workers get their reward.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. If it did, we should not have a trade depression with 1,500,000 unemployed in Britain today after thirty years of the application of Keynesian policies by Labour and Conservative governments alike. However, the Conservative Party has never been able in practice to reject “central planning” and, both before and since the war, has carried out more measures of state control of industry and social institutions than the Labour Party. It has to do so if it is to further the interests of capitalism. Prospect for Capitalism, a Conservative pamphlet published in 1958, urged action to restrain “the excesses of naked capitalism”, and in its introduction Lord Hailsham proposed the super-state as the unit for the future:

Moreover, the very size of modern units of production, and the prime cost even of the apparatus necessary for basic research, has limited the effectiveness of competition as a spur, and has provided an inevitable field even in Britain and America for the emergence of the State as a capitalist ... In some cases, the State itself has become too small a unit, and capital development has become the province of a consortium of States, as at CERN at Geneva.

Cutting Back

The outstanding matters for a Conservative government elected in the near future would be public expenditure and a wages policy. On the first of these, Conservatives have abandoned Keynes and latched on to the monetarist case put forward by Enoch Powell, Sir Keith Joseph, and the editor of The Times: that inflation can and must be stopped by containing the money supply. It is not denied that this would mean unemployment and bankruptcies as liquidity dried up. The monetarists argue that we have those now, as the result of the policies they aim to stop. A report in The Times of 27th August said:

The Prime Minister must reject the demands of trade union leaders when he sees them next week about the serious level of unemployment, Mr. Prior, the Conservative spokesman on employment, said yesterday . . . He said it appeared that the union leaders were going to Downing Street to seek an intensification of the very policies that had proved so disastrous for their members and for the nation.

Prior did not add that these policies were pushed by the Conservatives every bit as much as by Labour. In the years 1972 and 1973 under Anthony Barber, the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, the money supply increased by 24 and 26 per cent. respectively.

Given that the Conservatives have now changed their views, they are faced with the same problems as Labour. The reduction of the money supply means cutting government expenditure on roads, subsidies, schools and services—measures hardly likely to appeal to voters. On this, Conservative spokesmen are inevitably unspecific. In an article in The Observer on 22nd August Sir Keith Joseph said only that “Government spending is too high” and there must be “less Government spending”. But with the present-day importance of the car industry, for example, is it supposed that a Conservative government would have refused the “rescue operations” of putting massive sums of money into Leyland and Chrysler? It is unlikely.

In fact the belief that it is the money supply that is to blame is a mistaken one (see the article “The Financial Times and Inflation" on another page of this issue). But the greater fallacy is supposing that ending inflation would cure unemployment and solve the economic problems. Large-scale unemployment was chronic through the years up to 1939, when inflation was hardly known in most countries. In the early nineteen-twenties, at the same period as there was high unemployment with inflation in Germany, there was high unemployment without inflation in Britain. In his Observer article Sir Keith Joseph said: “The inequality of rewards by which a market economy functions is not unjust.” This implies not a cure, but a return to the disease as it was in the good old days.

Unions and Parties

The belief that a Conservative government could not live with the trade unions has no foundation. Obviously the unions have made their terms with Conservative governments for a large share of the post-war period. Both Wilson and Heath misjudged matters in this respect, and both their parties learned from that. An all-party Commons committee in 1974 unanimously rejected further attempts at a statutory incomes policy. After declaring that it would mean “an authoritarian state” (a fear not entertained when they were trying it):

Secondly, they argue that prices and incomes policies are liable to have all sorts of nasty side effects, including stagnation. This possibility, they say, should be closely investigated before anyone blindly advocates a statutory policy. Thirdly, “it is a fact of political life that a statutory policy cannot currently be imposed in Britain. The previous Government fell while doing so. “People who continue to advocate the solution,” they argue, are “living in a dream world, not the one that really exists.”

(Guardian, 14th Aug. 1974)

At the present time it is the relationship between the unions and the Labour government that is under strain, on account of rising unemployment. The speeches at last month’s Trade Union Congress repeatedly demanded government action for “an efficient manufacturing industry ... a more sustained and vigorous implementation of its economic strategy” (Hugh Scanlon). What the unions do depends more on the state of the economy than on ideological considerations; and that applies to governments equally. Given a change after the next election, government and unions will aim to make the best bargain they can in the circumstances. The TUC’s vote for a qualified return to free collective bargaining with employers in 1977 was a hope for conditions to improve, but also a message to whoever is in power a year from now.

Getting Anywhere ?

Another question which has made a battleground between Labour and Conservatives is education: comprehensive schools or a system of varied schools? The arguments about this range round the idea of “choice” and it is not the issue at all. The education system has failed throughout its history to find a formula satisfactory to the needs of capitalism, hence the repeated reorganisations. Over fifteen years the eleven-plus system was shown to be unsatisfactory, and the comprehensive system has turned out calamitous in an even shorter time.

Despite the elation over Thameside, it is unlikely that the Conservatives would go back to the old régime. An article by a Tory lecturer in social policy in The Spectator (31st Aug. 1973) attacked “artificial social impediments” provided by the public schools: “capitalist society requires greater social mobility if it is to survive in its present state”. This can be applied to separate-schools organization generally, and was the main Labour argument in 1958 for the introduction of comprehensive schools. What the Conservative Party is faced with is a fresh attempt to devise a formula for education, with the knowledge that the alternatives have all been tried.

The question put by Edward Heath as an unsuccessful election slogan, “Who governs Britain?” is the apposite one in looking at the Conservative Party. It stands for capitalism: the private ownership of the means of living, and production for profit. Conservatives approve those motives, and are made impotent by them. It is capitalism that inexorably produces unemployment, crises, and the social problems which defy solution. The capitalist system governs Britain, including the Conservative Party: on one hand forcing it to abandon ideas and policies, on the other making it as incapable as Labour of using political power in the interests of most of the population. Supporters of the Conservative Party would do well to ask themselves why they should go on accepting that state of affairs.

Robert Barltrop