If the lights are observed burning late in Number Ten nowadays, there is no reason to be worried about the Prime Minister suffering from insomnia. More likely he is sitting up with his advisers, juggling with the slide rule, metronome and egg-timer, trying to decide the date of the next general election.
There is, as usual, no lack of advice for him in this, from all those political hacks who earn their living writing clever columns in the newspapers, largely designed to show how basically easy it is to run British capitalism without all those tiresome crises and upheavals. But the timing of an election is more than a game; if the big parties need any encouragement to take it seriously they need only remember how Wilson lost power in 1970. When that campaign opened there was a pretty widespread assumption that the Labour Party was going to win and that the election was little more than a short break in Wilson’s administering the affairs of the British capitalist class. When they were defeated it was put down to a miscalculation in timing by Wilson, largely to do with some unfavourable trade figures which were published a few days before the poll.
The implication of this excuse was that, had those figures come out a couple of weeks later we might never had endured the Heath style of running capitalism. It enabled the politicians to ignore the possibility that Labour might have lost because of their record — their attacks on working class living standards, their support for the napalming Americans in Vietnam, their racist immigration laws, their whole dismal performance of fumbling through one crisis after another.
If this is remembered by Callaghan, he will be weighing up several factors, hoping that if Wilson did make a mistake he will not make it again. Some of the more recent by-election results may have given him some hope that, punch-drunk though they may be, Labour voters still have enough strength to bounce back off the ropes.
Then there are the official statistics, which regularly jerk out of the Treasury, the Department of Employment and so on, which are supposed to tell us how British capitalism is doing compared to its rivals. We have already mentioned the trading figures; there are others which tell how many of us are queueing up for dole money, how much we are paying in the shop for the necessities of life, how successful the government has been in its efforts to hold down our wages, by how much they have inflated the currency.
Workers are usually impressed by these figures, regarding them as something like the temperature chart at the end of a patient’s bed, except that the illness is in this case treated as if it were the patient’s own fault. But if Callaghan also thinks they are important, he is at once faced with a problem; he is dealing with the unpredictable.
No government is able to foretell the prosperity or the failure of its industries. They may guess and perhaps sometimes be right — which will allow them to claim special powers — but it all rests upon the market, which itself is anarchic and uncontrollable. Of course, when a government is able to publish figures which are seen as hopeful — falling unemployment or lower prices for example — Chancellors are quick to claim credit for them. It is only when the statistics tell a different story — when the jobless are increasing or prices spiraling — that governments take refuge in the excuse that they have been hit by the equivalent of a snowstorm in August.
But if the markets — which means the economy — of capitalism were controllable and could be predicted then most of capitalism’s problems would not exist. It would also mean that a lot of economic experts — perhaps even a Chancellor of the Exchequer or two — would be redundant, which many people might consider a small price to pay for such relief.
Meanwhile, as he is wrestling with the unpredictability of capitalism, the Prime Minister must also be keeping an eye on his calendar, aware that we are approaching the conference season. These events can sometimes be useful propaganda exercises to a party anxious to hide its record (although the miners’ conference, with its threat of a repeat of the 1973 confrontation with the Heath government was, at face value, anything but reassuring to the Labour government). There was a time when members of the Labour Party may have thought that their party conference mattered and that if they took policy decisions there they would be written into a Labour government’s programme.
There could be no other explanation for all the effort which went into those conferences, which voted for unilateral nuclear disarmament, or Clause Four, or for something equally unrealistic. But after the celebration of their victory in the vote, the delegates were confronted with the fact — by Attlee, Gaitskell, Wilson — that Labour governments run capitalism as it has to be run — in the interests of the ruling class — and that this would not be affected by woolly minded resolutions from over excited delegates. In the practical world of capitalist government promise is one thing; performance is another.
There have been many such examples of Labour conferences being an embarrassment to their leaders in the hunt for votes. Callaghan will be hoping that there will be no repetition this year (he is, after all, acting with considerable dispatch in the matter of Labour campaigning for the abolition of hunting, not on the grounds that he hates foxes but that such a proposal is likely to lose Labour votes in crucial seats) and that the party will be able to hold a rousing event glittering with promises for the future. He may gain inspiration from the performance of Harold Wilson, at his first conference as leader in 1963, when he dazzled the assembly with his talk about the good life waiting for us in the technological revolution. It quite made the conference forget Labour’s record in office, their electoral humiliations and their internal disputes.
The Tories need have no fear on this score since their conferences are, almost without exception, hearty affairs with one leader after another stepping up to enthuse the faithful and to pretend that the microdot differences between them and the Labour Party are worth getting passionate about. Rarely is the boat rocked; everyone is given an ovation because the Tories love to clap and cheer. It is almost as if, after a long muscle-wasting illness, they have been advised by their doctors to get a little exercise about the hands and forearms.
While Callaghan is musing on these factors, timing his effort like a jockey waiting for the right moment to run for the winning post, few people are likely to be asking why he is so concerned. The simple answer, that Labour is hoping to get some advantage in terms of votes if they get the timing right, does not go far enough. After all, if Labour government is so good for us, should there not be millions of grateful workers ready to vote for another dose of it, no matter when the election happens?
We might do well to approach this question from another angle. The importance attached to the timing of an election implies that the voters will change their minds over a very short period (in the case of 1970, the argument runs, over just a few days) in response to some event or piece of information. Now what sort of influence is needed, to bring such a change about? We have already seen that the trade figures are supposed to have that effect. Another might be a political event — Powell’s advice, in 1974, to vote Labour is one. Another was the sudden change in the Russian leadership in 1964, which came during the general elections here and which had Wilson worriedly claiming to know Kosygin well and to be able to talk to him man to man. What could be more appealing, to a working class concerned that their masters’ interests should be adequately represented in the conference chamber?
Which brings us to the crucial point. Accepting that votes are influenced by the timing of an election, what sort of vote is it which acts in that way? What level of consciousness does it suggest, behind the swinging vote? A worker who is impressed by a set of figures about capitalism’s trade, or by a change in the dictatorship in another capitalist power, sufficiently to change his vote is clearly not about to use that vote to its full power; he is not about to use it to overthrow capitalism. He is voting in ignorance of his class standing, his exploitation and of the essentially anarchic and inhuman operation of capitalist society.
In that political ignorance he is open to any persuasion. He will vote Labour because his dad always did, or Conservative because he has moved to a semi in the suburbs. He will experience, and grow angry and frustrated under, the pressures of capitalism and he may change from one capitalist party to another in desperation that each cannot possibly be worse than the other. A kitten chases its tail to better effect.
A voter who thinks like that may well be susceptible to the skills of timing, which are supposed to be part of the top politician’s essential equipment. If there are enough such voters it may be worth Callaghan’s while to fix polling day so that it might bring in a bigger vote for Labour. But what is the end of it all? Such an appeal is to the politically unconscious; it is a deception, an invitation to trust blindly in leadership when all the evidence is that this is futility. As long as this attitude holds sway, capitalism will continue with its problems, its degradations and its repressed and frustrated workers.
There is at present little attraction for the working class in the appeal to reach out for something better, for an understanding of capitalism and of what it does to us all, of the cynicism of its politics. When the political parties of capitalism set out to manipulate the voters—with promises, flattery or the strategy of timing — they are expressing a contempt for the workers which, sadly, may be somewhere near realistic. The working class should resent this and determine to act for themselves. And this resolution should get through to Callaghan and his like so that in their preoccupation with fixing a date when we are to vote they begin to hear a far disturbance, and know that the bell is beginning to toll for them and for all they represent.
Ivan
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