Mrs Thatcher's real challenge
Christopher Booker
It may be put down as a minuscule sign of the times that it was only, ironically, an industrial dispute which last Saturday prevented the Daily Telegraph from publishing Probably the warmest praise of Mr Callaghan ever to have appeared in its columns. The eulogy in question hardly represented a dramatic volte-face in the Telegraph's official editorial line, being merely the expression of a personal view by one of its more eccentric contributors, namely myself. But the reason why I was so carried away as to describe the Prime Minister's speech on pay Policy at Blackpool as one of the most remarkable political speeches of. my lifetime was that it seemed so astonishingly free of a curse which in recent years has more than any other plagued the political, industrial and indeed journalistic life of this country. Mr Callaghan's remarks seemed not just firm, and in a difficult situation, realistic. Above all they seemed completely to transcend that horrible fog of rancour, self-justification and self-righteousness Which has lain thickly over almost every aspect of our public affairs for so long that we have come almost to accept it as inevitable. If the cynics say that no other approach was open to him, I would merely reply by asking whether they could conceive of such an un-rancorous, unself-justifying Speech being made by his predecessor in a million years. Whether one holds the cynical view of Mr Callaghan or not, it can scarcely be denied that the tenor of our public life has changed very Considerably in the two and a half years since he took over at Number 10. The contrast between the Wilson and Callaghan styles of leadership has been in many ways as marked as one would expect from Prime ministers of different parties. Indeed it may be a trivial measure of just how far the gap between the two administrations has deepened, amid Sir Harold's recent embarrassments, that we are now even beginning to hear it rumoured that, far from resigning freely, happily, and at the height of his powers, Wilson was in fact pushed — so that we may soon be seeing 'Exclusive' headlines in the Sunday Times or the Observer over some blow-by-blow account of how Wilson's senior colleagues forced him to resign in April 1976, because they felt that he had totally lost his grip. If this turned out to be true, it would certainly have been the best kept secret in Labour Party history. Nevertheless, the fact remains that, not least by virtue of comparison with his predecessor, Mr Callaghan has undoubtedly been transformed not only into 'the best conservative prime minister we have' but into by far the greatest electoral asset the Labour Party possesses. In order to understand how this strange transmogrification came about, it may be helpful to consider the three quite markedly different phases through which our political life has developed since Labour came to power in March 1974. Phase One, of course, which lasted until the summer of 1975, was dominated by the unhappy memory of Mr Heath's confrontation with the miners. The keynote of this first period of the Wilson administration was a willingness to give way to the unions and the left on everything. Wage demands rose to 20 and 25 per cent, public spending soared (with inflation soon following suit). The two most powerful men in Britain seemed to be Jack Jones and Tony Benn, with the Prime Minister only in evidence when it seemed necessary to defend his newly ennobled protegee Lady Falkender against accusations of feathering her nest with land deals. This phase came to an unpleasant and fairly abrupt end in July 1975, with a major financial crisis and Mr Healey's first pay policy (one thing we do still have to learn about that time was just how Denis Healey managed to scare the union leaders into accepting his `package' — there was one crucial off-the-record meeting at Congress House, when he is supposed to have spelt out the real dangers then confronting Britain, which must have been fairly spectacular).
Phase Two, with an ever more confident Mrs Thatcher having taken over as Conservative leader, lasted through Harold Wilson's resignation to the aftermath of the next great financial crisis in the winter of 1976-7. This phase was dominated by growing alarm over runaway public spending and government borrowing. Mr Callaghan's first months in office seemed subdued rather than forceful, while Mr Healey seemed increasingly on the run at international conferences. It was the period when Mrs Thatcher seemed to have everything going her way. Her brand of conservatism (cuts in public spending, monetarism etc) seemed for a time so appealing that even the bogey of trade union power went into semi-eclipse, while in by-elections Tory candidates were able to topple vast Labour majorities, as at Ashfield, almost effortlessly.
Then towards the middle of 1977 began the third phase, in the wake of that remarkable turn-round in the general view of Britain's financial position which followed the IMF loan, the piling up of our reserves and the first serious inroads into our balance of payments deficit made by North Sea oil. Over the past year, as inflation lias come steadily down (and despite all the poor economic indicators, such as unemployment and growth), Messrs Callaghan and Healey have been able to present themselves as ever more firm and optimistic. Mrs Thatcher has found it increasingly hard to seem a truly confident, appealing alternative. She has had one or two disastrous performances in the Commons. Her team, Howe, Heseltine, Prior and the rest, have seemed thin, dispirited, even at times divided. Worst of all, as Stage Three of the incomes policy came to an end, we have seen the bogey of trade union power again looming. Maybe Mr Callaghan himself seems fairly powerless to deal with such figures as Moss Evans, Alan Fisher and Clive Jenkins, but at least he seems more of a man in a man's job than Mrs Thatcher (whereas, compared with Harold Wilson, Mrs T for a time seemed the reverse).
According to that law of election predictions which I once put forward in these columns, stating that the party which wins an election is the one most people thought was going to win six months previously (i.e. before all that misleading volatility which accompanies the approach of the campaign proper), Mrs Thatcher could still obviously win the next election by a comfortable margin. But on the totally unscientific basis of keeping one's ears open in pubs, it seems fair to say that there is probably less positive enthusiasm and respect for Mrs Thatcher around today than at any time since she took over the leadership.
The real questions posed by the curious state of the British political scene today take us right back to those implicit in Solzhenitsyn's Harvard speech of July. Why is the underlying trend in politics in our time seemingly so inexorably to the left — and why does it seem so difficult for the right to make anything but transitory and fairly futile gestures in the opposite direction? Why is it, in short, that the left has so consistently in our century (let alone in the past fifteen years) made the political running?
Obviously one question to which we would all like a plausible answer is — what will the Labour Party really be like after the next election, whether it wins or not? Will not the trade union leaders, the extremists, the 'class of '68 polytechnic lecturers' (whom the late John Mackintosh so feared, and who are so over-represented among prospective parliamentary candidates) inexorably push the party even further towards its holy grail of total public ownership and the dismantling of what remains of the old organic, hierarchical society (e.g. the abolition of the House of Lords, public schools, the private ownership of farmland)? Are we not likely to see the unions, most of whom have learned no lesson at all from the experience of the past two years, once again slipping into that insane combination of anarchism and greed which marks the last despairing flicker of the 'liberal democratic' phase of the Platonic cycle (pace my recent references in these columns to Book VIII of The Republic)?
On the other hand, why is the Tory Party so wet? Why, since the closing years of Macmillan's reign, have the Tories so utterly seemed to lose the strength of those roots in the heart of English life — in industry, in the shires, in the City, in the suburbs— which once seemed to give them such a broad, unshakeable base for their selfconfidence in government? It is one of the most curious, even alarming comments on the state of our country today that probably the vast majority of the British public would infinitely prefer the Conservatives' vision of how our lives should be politically orchestrated to Labour's. They like the idea of a vigorous private industry, lower taxes, curbs on union recklessness, a 'firmer' line on all sorts of issues at home and abroad. They would be deeply scornful of the notion that further vast increases in public ownership and public spending, or unrestricted wage demands, could bring the country anything but unhappiness and harm.
Yet such is the bizarre nature of the times in which we live that many of us shut our eyes, hoping that somehow 'Farmer Jim' will give us at least some of the things his opponents stand for — because we simply cannot imagine that Mrs Thatcher and her colleagues will ever be effectual enough to do anything but help, ultimately, to usher in or provoke precisely the kind of society which she and they detest most. To persuade us otherwise is the only real challenge which confronts her at Brighton this week. ing programmes. In 1976 Labour's planned controls over broadcasting were linked to proposals for some control of the press. This was to be financial and achieved by taking the revenues from press advertising and using them, as required, for subsidising new kinds of newspaper, presumably of the leftish type which had never managed to obtain adequate sales even to Labour voters. This idea remained moribund. But the broadcasting section of the 1976 Labour scheme was submitted to the Annan Committe which, in 1977, formally and firmly rejected it, saying in its report (page 36) that 'it seems to us to open up a direct road to ministerial intervention in broadcast prog rammes, which the present structures were devised to prevent and which, in practice they have generally prevented for fifty years.'
The Committee's rejection was so closely argued and so complete that by the end of 1977 the whole ill-advised notion seemed dead. No so. For in the Government White Paper of July 1978 a number of the ideas of 1976 are still alarmingly evident. The entire document, in fact, shows signs of being an uneasy compromise between those members of the Government who were prepared, by and large, to accept Annan's version of the status quo and those who still hanker after greater political and party control over broadcasting.
The BBC, for instance, though still allowed to exist and to be financed from licence fees would have to be reorganised and generally improved. How? Oh, by limiting the executive powers of its Board of Governors and by creating three new Boards of Management which would be responsible for running the Corporation's television, radio and external services with half the members of each Board being nominated by the Home Secretary (i.e. by the Government). In other words here in the White Paper, in a new form but with a vengeance, are the opportunities for ministerial intervention in broadcasting which Annan so decisively rejected and here, in 1978, is a new revelation of the continuing influence of the Labour left.
And the IBA? That, too, will continue to exist and continue to be financed by adver tising. But in the future it will be linked to a ctiusriogU Bsnew authority (the OBA) which will be expected to buy a considerable quantity of its programmes from commercial television. And, since this new authority will depend very largely on the Government for financial support the situation will inevitable have implications for the IBA. The White Paper (page 13) is quite explicit about the effects of this development and it is difficult to believe that they are not intentional. It says, 'The OBA will be responsible for deciding the allocation of time to, and the provision of programmes by, the independent television system. These decisions will have financial consequences: so long, therefore, as the OBA is receiving or is liable to need a government grant, the Gov
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