Out of touch
Willie Whitelaw went down to the mid-Staffordshire by-election to help the Tory candidate but probably lost him a bucketful of votes when he bought a box of chocolates and grandly said he wanted only the pound notes in the change. The shop girl had to remind him gently that we use only pound coins now—the notes went out years ago.
Being out of touch is one of the criticisms being levelled now at the Thatcher government—out of touch over Poll Tax. mortgages, interest rates, privatisation, the National Health Service . . . They are so out of touch that they lost a rock-solid seat like mid-Staffordshire— and that to a Labour candidate whose pre-packaged. master-minded campaign was openly contemptuous of the voters. Like football teams—or rather like their managers' excuses—when governments are out of touch they are also out of luck. Whitelaw's well-meant blunder was hungrily recorded by the news-hounds who accompanied him on his sweetshop safari, to be retold to an increasingly bewildered and irritated electorate. Thatcher's standing has crashed, as if she has fallen off a cliff, from that of a woman who single-handedly beat the Argentinians. Arthur Scargill and inflation and who then went on to persuade the people of eastern Europe of the benefits of McDonald's burgers and privatised water, into that of a reckless and stubborn dogmatist who would do everyone a favour by applying for her pension and her bus pass.
Squabbles
Of course there are still some hard-core Tories who pretend that all these difficulties are, to use one of Nigel Lawson's unhappier expressions, a “blip" and that all is in fact well within the government. But these loyalists ignore the evidence of their own eyes and ears and what they read in their favourite newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Sun. To begin with, there is the squabble over the leadership, before it is officially available to squabble over, between Heseltine, Tebbit and Howe. Not that any of them ever admit that the leadership is in question or that they would ever dream of opposing Thatcher. It is just that, in all modesty, if the party were ever to be in need of another prime minister who will give his all in the service of this Grand Old Country, well perhaps they have something to offer, perhaps they could be persuaded . . Since all these hopefuls also say that they wholeheartedly support Thatcher's policies and will do their utmost to ensure that we get another dose of Tory government under Thatcher at the next general election it is rather difficult to see why anyone should take them seriously.
Another symptom of the government's malaise has been the sudden eagerness of some of its prominent members to desert it. We refer to the moving examples of Peter Walker and Norman Fowler, both of them the slickest of political operators but who are now revealed as sentimental family men. Walkers survival through the years of opposition to Thatcher, while all around him other ministers were being picked off to crash into back-bench obscurity, must rank with the world's most thrilling escape yarns. Norman Fowler had some of the stickiest jobs in the Cabinet, some of its dirtiest work directly connected with class conflict and working class poverty but he adroitly rode most of his problems by setting up enquiries. By the time the enquiry reported Fowler was off to some other ministry, leaving an exceptionally unpleasant can to be carried by his successor— like the hapless John Moore at the Department of Social Security. Walker and Fowler have left the government, earnestly professing undying loyalty to it. on the excuse that they need to spend more time in their sumptuous homes with their lucky, secure families—a lot luckier than the families who desperately try to make the best of the cruel reforms which Fowler initiated at the DSS. Does anyone believe these reasons? Perhaps there should be an enquiry to find out.
Labour ecstatic
Naturally the Labour leaders are ecstatic about these developments as each day brings yet another crisis for the Tories. As they scent the government's impending doom they are presumably spending less and less time with their families. All that is needed, they happily burble, is one last electoral heave to dispense with the Tories and then we shall have a government of realism and humanity. People who worry about how they will pay the Poll Tax. or about whether the Building Society will be asking for their house back, or what will happen if their doctor's budget runs out just as they need some treatment. may find this an attractive vision. A reference to the history of Labour government should deflate their misplaced optimism.
In the middle of 1968 the Wilson government were facing a crisis which was remarkably similar to that of the Tories today. They had been returned to power, on a surge of expectation, with an increased majority in 1966. But two years later they were in an economic crisis with a persistent deficit in the balance of payments; they were in continual conflict with the unions over the statutory wage-freeze (the BOAC pilots were constrained to make a little history in this); they had lost a series of by-elections, the opinion polls said that only 27 per cent of people were satisfied with Wilson as prime minister and that if there were a general election then the Labour Party could expect to hang on to only 50 seats.
Plots
George Brown had finally managed to resign from the government because he objected to being left out when they were discussing economic crises (apparently he still wasn't bored by them) and Ray Gunter left the Cabinet grumbling about it being ‘overweight with intellectuals". It wasn't clear whether Gunther thought the government's crises could have been avoided with a bit of educational subnormality. In any case his departure was not deeply mourned. There were active plots to ease Wilson out of Number Ten, on the theory that he alone was responsible for capitalism's waywardness, encouraged by the Times, the Observer, the Economist and. under the deranged guidance of Cecil King, the Daily Mirror. Meanwhile, the Tories busily promoted their own candidate for prime minister as a "Man of Integrity". It was, of course, Ted Heath. Yes. it was rather a long time ago.
The Wilson government's response was to do just about the only thing they could do—plough on patching things up as best they could while pretending that the problems were only temporary provided everyone kept their nerve. Wilson soothingly assured the nation ". . . new and spectacular evidence from all over the country showing the robust strength of British industries" —rather like Tory ministers today who bleat about the "underlying strength of the British economy" or words to that effect. The Labour Party got out a mid-term manifesto which admitted some mistakes but insisted that basically the government was on the right lines—which is what the less obdurate Tories now try, when they harp on the violence among Poll Tax protests—to divert attention from their current problems by setting up a conflict, between the Commons and the Lords, a revival of the famous battle cry of Peers versus People.
Good and bad luck
What this shows is that governments do not basically differ. They all grapple with the problems of capitalism which are always beyond their powers to influence significantly. How the voters judge governments is based largely on what might loosely be called luck. Governments have their good times when, perhaps to their surprise, capitalism's affairs go well for them and the voters love them. And they have their bad times when the crises come one after another and the voters switch their support to another, equally ineffectual, style of reforming capitalism. These are the times when the cracks show, the squabbles become public, when some ministers suddenly want to go home to their wives and families and others can't remember things like what currency to use in a shop.
Ivan
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