Political commentary
The conversion of Paul
Ferdinand Mount
Brighton Defectors must be brushed aside. All human organisations — nations, political parties, bureaucracies and businesses alike — have a standard technique for restoring morale and cushioning the shock to the system caused by members who go over to the Other Side. First, you play down the importance of the defectors and try to destroy their characters. You let it be understood that they were in fact low-level personnel, never really proper members of the organisation, drafted in or drifted in by accident. They were also second-raters, incompetent, unreliable, insubordinate, probably homosexual or drunk and would have been sacked if they had not sugared off first.
The Left has behaved beautifully to type in coping with its present crop of defectors. Mr Tom Nairn, for example, in a Guardian review, describes the movement away from collectivism in England as 'exclusively the property of magpies and bibulous hacks' —a phrase which sounds as though somewhat awkwardly translated from the original Azerbaijani. In the New Statesman, the man of letters whom Judge Willis has taught us to call 'a journalist named Hitchens' says that 'most of the renegades list comprises people we are well shot of (Prentice), people who were never very socialist anyway (Paul Johnson) or people whose opinions could not interest anybody.' Mr Hitchens adds menacingly that 'some of the guys will want to defect back again soon, and it will be great fun turning one or two of them away.' The picture of disillusioned renegades outside Transport House pleading piteously to be let back in is delightful.
As it happens, the contributors to Right Turn (Leo Cooper, £3.95 hardback, £1.95 paperback), Patrick Cormack's collection of essays by right-wing converts, include a former Gladstone Professor of Government at Oxford, one of England's best novelists, a former Professor of English at Cambridge and the country's leading Hispano-American historian as well as the supposedly never very socialist ex-editor of the New Statesman (although those of us who remember Mr Johnson's blissful aubade to the revolting French students of May 1968 have our doubts about that).
But, as everyone knows, the defection is on a far larger scale. The number of exMinisters and talented Labour MPs who have turned away in disgust from Labour policies cannot be blinked: Marsh, Taverne, Shawcross, George Brown, Woodrow Wyatt, Walden, Marquand, Robens, Prentice. Can anyone seriously argue that these men would have made up a worse Cabinet than the present incumbents? The defec tions, to say nothing of the expulsions, from local Labour parties and council caucuses represent an equally damaging haemor rhage. And these are paralleled by the long-term decline in constituency individual membership — from 1,014,524 in 1952 to 659,737 last year. Even these figures vastly understate the decline, as for reasons of shame and sloth 533 of the 623 constituency parties are now credited with the notional tally of 1,000 members (the minimum necessary for affiliation) — although Transport House itself admits that actual membership is below 1,000.
Some Labour supporters try to minimise this mass defection at all levels by pointing out that from time immemorial the ideals of youth have shown a tendency to decay into cynical disillusion. We are reminded of the Communists of the 1930s who turned so violently to the right. In fact the parallel serves rather to emphasise the unique quality of the present defection. For the 1930s Communists were young men, and many if not most of them turned to The right very quickly, often before the age of thirty. The new defectors are already well on into middle age. Nor are they mostly hot-headed idealists. On the contrary, many are prosaic careerists who would have been quite happy to chug on inside the Labour Party without asking too many questions about its direction if only their lives had not been made intolerable. Again and again they claim: we are not the defectors, it is not we who have changed, it is the party.
The ultimate defence offered by the organisation and its sympathisers is weary, worldly-wise denial that anything has changed, Look, they say, we know there are a lot of loonies on the National Executive now, but then there always have been. Cripps and Attlee were pretty bolshie in their youth. Same with the party conference. You heard a lot of rubbish spouted at Blackpool last week and a bundle of half-baked notions were carried. But then that was always the way. We have our ups and downs with the unions, but basic realities haven't changed much. Look at the Cabinet; dull it is, but you could hardly call Jim and Merlyn and Denis a gang of extrem ists. Look at the PLP. Look at the respectable young men being adopted for winnable seats. Even if Jim goes tomorrow, the moderates will still be in the driving seat.
This argument finds a curious echo within the Conservative Party. Mr Heath — and he is by no means the only one — says that his party should not spend much time this week 'gloating over the Labour Cabinet's recent discomfitures.' Voters, he believes, are used to seeing the Labour Party divided and quarrelsome; they have come to accept this as 'part of the price they have to pay for having a doctrinal Left-wing Party in our Democratic system.'
But then why the defectors? Why have so many ambitious men given up careers to which they dedicated twenty years or more of their lives? Why this huge, embarrassing cloud of witnesses?
What the defectors say over and over again is that, almost without knowing it, the Labour Party has crossed a great divide. Those tendencies which were always present in the party have at last slipped the leash and begun to control events. However moderate, pluralist and parliamentary the instincts of the leadership may still be, it is now being forced to bend more and more to the will of the trade union bureaucracy and of the far Left. The rule of law gradually becomes a matter of convenience, subordinate to the will and purpose of the Labour movement. Tactical prudence may dictate occasional periods of relative quiescence such as in the Callaghan regime, but the defectors unite in believing as Paul Johnson says in his CPC lecture at Brighton this week: 'We are travelling down the road to serfdom, in a characteristic British manner, inches at a time, so that it is difficult to determine the speed or even the direction of the movement. But we are travelling nonetheless, and perhaps faster than we realise at present. There are forces in our society bent on destroying our freedoms. They are more powerful than they were five years ago; far more powerful than ten years ago.' It is not simply a historicai coincidence that peoples who have felt themselves to be free have lived under the rule of law. It is not a coincidence either that peoples who have felt themselves to be free have lived in a free-market economy. Hugh Thomas points out in the other distinguished defector's lecture to be delivered at Brighton — to Keith Joseph's think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies — that the connection between capitalism and freedom is ancient and unvarying. It isn ly It ly because we are the prisoners of Marx's deceiving yet seductively articulate visions of the past that we have lost touch with our own history. The critical omission in our historical imagination is the part played by private enterprise in the establishment of freedom. Professor Thomas argues in an unusually Macaulayesque flourish that even Acton 'sought the palm of freedom without the dust of commerce.'
Whether or not you believe the defectors are ultimately right, theirs is the case which has to be answered. The Tories have made this a defectors' conference — and so it should be. Mrs Thatcher's tactfully phrased appeal to disillusioned Labour voters to come over to the Tories was the right theme to open the proceedings on. There is a time for gloating — in the most constructive manner, naturally. And there is a time for rejoicing over prodigals, lost sheep and former editors of the New Statesman.
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