The Greasy Pole column from the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard
A general election is rather like an execution; as it approaches it concentrates wonderfully the minds of those who fear their end is nigh. Survival becomes the all-absorbing, all-dominant preoccupation of their thoughts. How can they most effectively plead their case for a last minute reprieve? How can they persuade the people who will pass judgment on them to commute the penalty to a life sentence as the Member for one of the more obstinately safe constituencies? If this can be arranged the grateful Member will uncomplainingly suffer years of attendance at constituency committee meetings, fund-raising drives, summer fayres and even surgeries when they have to devote their Saturdays to listening to voters’ complaints about housing or crime or medical services or whatever.
All of this is in the cause of winning— or at least holding on to—votes. To do this it will probably be necessary to be involved in all kinds of otherwise repellent activities. Shopping centres will have to be invaded to that unsuspecting customers, whose only concern is to spend some of their income on something which a recent TV ad has convinced them is indispensable to their continued existence as exploited workers, can be startled into revealing their opinions on issues like the common currency or heavier sentences for criminals or whether MPs should be allowed to make so much on the side. Pretty girls will be cuddled, defenceless babies will be kissed, so that the photographers accompanying this spontaneous demonstration can get some newsworthy pictures.
Questions of policy
Occasionally there will be a pressing, unavoidable need to deal with questions about policy, about where one party stands compared to the others. The replies to some of these questions will have been supplied, in readily-digestible form, in a candidate’s handbook or other material from headquarters. It is as well to get these right because it won't do to acquire a reputation as a maverick before you have even got to Westminster. Of course, the important thing is to stress that there are vast, unbridgeable political chasms between your party and the rest. If you have done your homework diligently you will have committed to memory some examples of how inefficient or unprincipled the other parties are, what impotent flops they have as leaders. It will even be possible to indicate that their honesty is in doubt and to wonder about the sanity of anyone who could possibly vote for them. (This has to be done with some delicacy; it is never wise to imply that the voters are mad, even if they do consistently support a social system which operates like a madhouse.)
If this is to be done successfully it is vital to avoid any diversions into political history or any proper comparisons of the respective parties’ policies. For example, the Conservatives came to power in 1979 saying they were committed to a policy of monetarism. The voters were encouraged to believe that a Thatcher government would allow free reign to market forces, which would involve a retrenchment of nationalisation and state influence or regulation in industrial and commercial matters. The assumption was that if the market was allowed to operate freely in all fields there would be a demand for only the best of the goods and services on offer and the rest would wither away and die. "Everything," as one of Thatcher’s people put it, "should be freed, so that people can do exactly what they want to do."
Continuity
Of course since then a few million people have found they are not free to do exactly what they want to do. People who survive on state benefit when they are unemployed, people whose homes have been taken over by the building society, people who see their children being schooled by desperately over-stressed teachers in crumbling buildings don’t feel that this is happening to them by their own free choice. But for the moment the point is that the ideas put forward by the Tories at the 1979 election were not new or exclusive to them. In truth, it was the outgoing Labour government which began the process and, particularly in view of how the Labour Party has developed since then, it is a matter of speculation about how far they would have carried it on had they been in power.
It was described by Robert Blake, the historian of the Conservative Party, in an interview in August 1989:
"One should never forget that Callaghan and Healey between them were changing economic and social policy quite markedly. In suited both sides subsequently to play this down. Margaret Thatcher doesn't want to be beholden to them, and they, of course, do not want it implied that they were doing these things earlier. There's more continuity than one might appreciate between Callaghan’s administration after the IMF and all that happened in 1976, and Margaret Thatcher's administration than either side wishes to admit’’(Thatcher’s England. John Ranelagh).
Choices
The fact is that the parties who compete for power over capitalism change each other, in the sense that they are ready to absorb and adapt policies which they all see as successful. That was the history of the Conservative Party after l945,when Wooltoon and Butler went some way to refashion their appeal to the working class. It has been the history of the Labour Party since 1979, with their drive for change becoming more determined and blatant as they perceive themselves getting closer to power. That is why we now have the New Labour Party, openly competing for what Blair calls the middle ground, with ideas on the economy, trade unions, crime and market forces which are all but indistinguishable from the Tories.
At the election the minds of the candidates will be concentrated in persuading us that they represent a choice when all they offer is minor deflections to the mainstream of running capitalism. But it doesn’t have to be like this; we don’t have to be that class who volunteers for our own execution.
Ivan
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