Another voice
Mr Walker's bright idea
Auberon Waugh
One of the more enjoyable features of the political scene recently has been the way Mr Peter Walker has been kept out of it. For some reason, Mrs Thatcher does not appear to want him in her Shadow Cabinet. Eclipsed by the greater farce of Mr Heath's exclusion and almost unnoticed, Mr Walker has been shivering in the wings ever since the Conservative Party plucked up courage to rid itself of the turbulent Grocer. Such behaviour is unlikely to be explained by blind loyalty to the fallen provision merchant, since political loyalties are seldom blind and any Faithful Fido awards in this respect must surely go to Mr William Whitelaw. No, one can only conclude that there is an imperfect sympathy between Mrs Thatcher and her former Cabinet colleague, a clash of political ideals not to say personal ambitions between these two busy people, so solicitous for the public welfare.
Those of us who have been enjoying the spectacle of Mr Walker out in the cold will probably not have done so, except in a few cases, from any personal animus against him but because there is always something enjoyable in the spectacle of any politician out in the cold.
Such emotions should not be confused with the mean pleasure which lesser mortals take to see the mighty humbled — Churchill in his senility, or Richard HI hobbling around Bosworth field looking for his horse — although that, too, can be quite enjoyable. Mr Walker may have reorganised, unasked, the thousand-year-old boundaries of Somerset, but he has never been a national hero, for all that. There are no statues of him outside the County offices of Avon, Merseyside, Cleveland. Cumbria or Humberside for us to deface. Look at him how one will, Mr Walker is no Julius Caesar; he is not even a Coriolanus. He is a sort of Billy Bunter figure, who has seen the plate of food taken away from in front of him before he had time to eat it.
Politicians of the left are sometimes inspired by the urge to change the whole face of society, in various disagreeable ways. It is obviously an excellent thing and most agreeable to see them frustrated. But Conservatives have no such excuse. Their inspiration is to keep things as they are, or at most restore the conditions which were familiar to them as children (lam sure this is why so few of my own generation, whose first memories are of the war, became Conservatives) and their only reason for offering themselves to the public at all must be an obscure urge to lead, to influence other people, to feel important. Which is why one cannot weep to see them frustrated.
It may also be the reason why the left
usually gets its way. When Mr Bernard Levin urges us all to stand up and be counted, to turn up and speak up at our union meetings, he ignores that whole part of human nature which makes democracy an absurdity. The President of the National Union of Students is a communist not because most students are communists but because only Billy Bunters can be bothered to stand against them. The system requires one to vote for a candidate, and this is plainly impossible. Conservatives may be less malevolent in their intentions, but they stand for modernisation, industrial efficiency, proletarian affluence, everything the true conservative most detests, and there can be no question of summoning up one's remaining Boy Scout energies in support of such a cause even if it is the lesser of two evils on offer. Nor do I believe, as Mr Levin hinted a few weeks ago, that the silent majority is forming itself into Bernard Levin Action Groups up and down the country. I will believe it after the first commando-style raid has set Myra Hindley free.
It is in this context, and thoroughly armed by the prejudices I have described, that one should judge Mr Peter Walker's Call to the Nation last Wednesday. Perhaps not many Spectator readers noticed it, as it appeared in The Sun. It provided a plan for the Tories to win the next general election in defiance of Mrs Thatcher, challenging her authority and appealing over her head directly to the electorate. Just like Enoch on race, Mr Heath on devolution. No doubt Mr Walker considered carefully before choosing his medium. The Walker plan to save the nation might have surfaced in Hughie Green's Opportunity Knocks or as a special supplement to Jimmy Savile'sJim will ftx it, but in fact it was the Editor of The Sun who eventually swallowed the bait.
In a nutshell, the idea is that Council tenants should be given the freehold of their dwellings as an inducement to vote Con servative. Earlier attempts by Mr Walker to sell them their houses cheap had failed — less than one per cent wanted to buy — so the new idea is to give them the house. Rents will count as mortgage repayments and be frozen, but after thirty years' tenancy the house will be theirs anyway. They can sell their interest at any stage. Thus for the first time the working class will be capitalised, it will have to look after its own repairs and the ratepayer will be saved vast sums in running losses and hence in interest on local authority loans.
It is a beautiful idea which would break the back of socialism for a decade and create such slums as have not been seen in England since the turn of the century. But will the workers buy it? I can think of about a hundred objections from their point of view, chief of which is that few have any desire to own their homes. As they wisely point out, they can't take it with them. But if the proposal were wrapped in cotton-wool and thoroughly soaped to look like a straight financial bribe — the modern equivalent of three acres and a cow — I feel sure it would work.
So the Conservatives would win the election with a comfortable majority — that is at least the lesser of the two evils. The effect on housing, as I say, would be entirely beneficial, with an abrupt end to further Council development and a huge stock of low-cost housing thrown on the market. At present one third of all families are Council tenants, according to Mr Walker, and the blow to their socialist mentality when they found themselves responsible for mending their own broken windows, unblocking their own lavatories and safeguarding their own property might possibly be as salutary as it would be profound.
Or it might not. They might realise that they were much better off before, and there is the rub. It may seem extraordinarily ,patronising to suggest that without Council supervision and maintenance many housing estates would degenerate into gypsy encampments, but I happen to believe it is the truth. A few do so even as it is. That is not, however, my strongest objection to the Walker proposal. It is a perfectly natural thing that people should be required to sleep in whatever sort of beds they may choose to make for themselves. My greatest objection is that if they were given a taste of the alternative to socialism, most of the workers of this country would choose socialism ever after; that, when it comes to the crunch, they don't give a fig for individual liberty, freedom of speech, selfadvancement or self-help in any form, and would much prefer not to live in pig-sties.
Even if I am wrong, the Walker Benefaction is something that can only be done once. It invites retribution from the socialists, whereby all domestic tenants would be similarly enfranchised. And a further, possibly minor disadvantage is that its adoption would necessarily bring Mr Walker out of the cold, robbing us of the pleasure of seeing him there. On the other hand, if Mrs Thatcher looks like losing the election, this may well be the one crucial moment in our history when such a gamble would be justified — North Sea Oil for as long as it lasts is surely too good a thing to be given to the socialists. If the worst came to the worst, I suppose Mr Walker could always be accommodated inside a Thatcher administration as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.
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