Mr Crosland's clarion call
POLITICAL COMMENTARY ALAN WATKINS
'It still remains the case,' said Mr Anthony Crosland at Norwich on Saturday, 'that Socialism demands a higher level of essential social spending than does Conservatism.' How are we to interpret this remarkable speech, which actually goes so far as to mention the dread word Socialism? Was it a short- or medium-term attempt to win a greater share of the budget for education than might have been the case had it not been delivered? Or was it a more general call for the Labour party to return to the true faith? Or was it, again, in some sense a personal bid by Mr Crosland for a position of greater power inside the Govern- ment?
To deal with the last question first: Mr Crosland has always strenuously denied, and there is no reason to disbelieve him, that he is ambitious, as the word is normally under- stood in politics. That is to say, he has no particular wish to become Prime Minister or leader of the Labour party. He would no doubt like to become Chancellor of the Exchequer at some stage in his career, but that is a rather different matter. However, this does not mean that personal considerations were absent from Mr Crosland's mind when he decided to make his speech. Indeed, there is a paradoxical sense in which it was Mr Crosland's lack of ambition that impelled him to say what he did say; and to understand this we must have a look at the relations between him and Mr Roy Jenkins.
For years and years the names of Mr Cros- land and Mr Jenkins marched together through the political columns. To mention one was to mention the other. Nor was this unreasonable. Though there were, and are, substantial differences between the two, these were more than outweighed by the similarities; and, after all, they were friends. Following the 1964 elec- tion, however, a perceptible change came about in the way in which newspapers, and even politicians, referred to the two. There was a tendency to treat Mr Jenkins as the senior part- ner, as an inevitable Labour Prime Minister of the future, and the natural candidate for any top job in the Government that might be going at any given moment. And this tendency was not discouraged by Mr Jenkins. On the contrary, with his personal aide, Mr John Harris, by his side, he positively helped it on its way. For example, during the 'Torrey Canyon' affair last Easter the impression was somehow conveyed to and by the newspapers that, after Mr Jenkins had taken control, everything was going abso- lutely splendidly.
The result of this and similar stories was that a feeling, not so much of antagonism (which is too strong a word), as of coolness developed between Mr Crosland and Mr Jenkins. On me Crosland's side, this coolness had at least two elements. First, there was an understandable attitude of pique at all the publicity Mr Jenkins was receiving. Secondly, and more seriously,. Mr Crosland considered that, through his obvious ambition, Mr Jenkins was throwing the Government out of balance. There was (Mr Crosland believed) not the remotest chance of Mr Harold Wilson's being displaced in the foreseeable or even the unforeseeable future; and it was much better that everyone should* accept this and get on quietly with his Work.
However, Mr Crosland's policy of indus- triously doing good by stealth evaded, or avoided, several important questions. Not the least important question concerned the Govern- ment's economic policy. It is no secret that Mr Crosland is in flat disagreement with Mr James Callaghan's, and Mr Wilson's, method of run- ning the economy. But in public he kept quiet. It was Mr Jenkins who, in a speech to the London Labour party a few weeks ago, emerged as the 'growth' man. As far as Mr Crosland was concerned, this was almost more than flesh and blood could stand. And it seems that he seriously considered making a similar speech, but desisted.
As things have turned out, he was right to wait and select a slightly different topic. For the weakness of Mr Jenkins's London Labour party speech was that it talked about growth in general terms, without going into the tiresome details of what might be necessary to bring it about, such as (say) devaluation or import con- trols. It is difficult to see how, if Mr Crosland had chosen to make a similar speech, he could have been very much more specific. The merit, in political terms, of the Norwich speech is that it accepted the general framework of Mr Callaghan's economic policy, and argued within that framework.
This brings us back to our first question, which concerned education's share of the budget. It also brings us to the relations between Mr Crosland and Mr Callaghan. Now Mr Callaghan, it will be recalled, was in 1963 the candidate whom Mr Crosland favoured for the leadership of the Labour party. There is no reason to suppose that, if Mr Wilson fell under that famous bus, Mr Crosland. would take a different view today. This may seem surprising, even illogical: but politics are like that. What- ever the more lofty-minded may tell ,us, per- sonalities matter just as much as, if not more than, policies. And the fact is that, next to Mr Wilson himself, Mr Callaghan is the most for- midable personality in the Government.
True, Mr Callaghan is capable of being a
little on his dignity at times. It is difficult not to be so when your policies are clearly failing, and the date of being in balance still recedes like a ghostly ship in the mist. A few months ago, in The Late Show, Mr John Bird did an imitation of Mr Callaghan. The gist of the sketch, as far as I remember, was that, though we 'might not be in balance today, or at the end of 1967, or even at the end of 1968. at some , point we would be. The time would surely come. There would be jam tomorrow. The light at the end of the tunnel, though as yet not visible to the unaided eye, was there all the same. ('You say I said we would be in balance by the end of 1966, Mr Day? Well, if I said that I really was being rather naughty.') This merely illus- ' trates that, in politics at least, nature almost invariably triumphs over art.
Oddly enough, however, relations between Mr Crosland and Mr Callaghan remain good. As I write, it is impossible to say what the out- come of this week's Cabinet meetings will be. Housing is still the favoured candidate for generous treatment. Expenditure on roads, des- pite, perhaps because of, Mrs Barbara Castle's practice of thumping the table, is the least popular. Education (though the picture may have changed by the time this piece appears) comes somewhere between the two in the popu- larity stakes.
Yet the manner in which the cuts are made as between the various services, though important enough, is not the most important aspect to this week's events. The important thing is that the cuts are being made at all. It is the third succes- sive July in which this is happening. Mr Callaghan, of course, will try to make out that the cuts are part of a continuing and sapient review of Government expenditure; that, in- deed, they are not true cuts at all, but restrictions on future spending. More plausibly, he can argue that they form part of his and Mr Wilson's plan for winning the general election: which, as I indicated some weeks ago, is that any little spare cash lying around should be spent by the voters and not by the Government. As Mr Callaghan put it in his Cardiff speech, people want to hear the jingle of half-crowns in their pockets.
Earlier, I mentioned as a merit of Mr Cros- land's speech its political realism, in that it did not cry 'growth': it accepted the situation in which we find ourselves. Its second merit— and this is a highly unusual combination—was its idealism. It provided the first coherent attempt to oppose the Wilson-Callaghan electoral strategy. And it gave some hope, not merely to established admirers of Mr Crosland such as Mr David Marquand, Dr David Owen and Mr John Mackintosh, but to a wide spectrum of the parliamentary Labour party. In a way, this is a highly comic situation. Until quite recently there was no leading Labour figure so unpopular with the party stalwarts as Mr Crosland. He was rumoured to dislike the tea-room and was occasionally to be observed drinking wine. Worst of all, he was an intellectual—the dirtiest word known to Trans- port House. How different today! Why, there are even those who compare him to Aneurin Bevan and his stand over rearmament—which is surely excessive on all sorts of counts.
The situation is paradoxical in another and less frivolous way. For in the revisionist con- troversies following the 1959 election Mr Cros- land incurred the hostility of many, including Mr Richard Crossman, for appearing to be prepared to jettison so-called socialist principles simply in order to win an election. There was something in this charge (though I have set it out over-simply). But it can no longer be sus- tained. Mr Crosland has come out firmly in opposition to the attitude that elections must be won whatever the cost. He is the first minister fully to have realised the extent of the cynicism now afflicting both the Labour movement and, in a different fashion, the movement's leaders. And it is in this realisation that the real signi- ficance of his speech lies.
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