Political Commentary
Mr Callaghan's mumble
John Grigg At a special meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party on 13 October there was a most significant exchange between the Prime Minister and Norman Atkinson, left-wing MP for Tottenham and recently elected party treasurer (a post he was never able to win so long as Mr Callaghan himself held it). After Mr Atkinson had said that the Government's policies would lead to a coalition the Prime Minister interjected: 'What makes you think I want a coalition?' Mr Atkinson explained that he was not saying that the Prime Minister wanted one but that his policies would force him into one. Mr Callaghan replied with a clear statement that in.no circumstances would he enter into coalition with the Tories. But he then seems to have mumbled a further remark which Mr Atkinson understood to mean that if he did not continue to get the necessary support from the party he would bring the Government to an end.
There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his statement about a grand coalition between the major parties. He would never contemplate such an arrangement, if only because he knows that it would not work. The familiar argument against it is that it works only in wartime, when the country has a single agreed objective and the instinct of partisanship gives way to the instinct of self-preservation. But even that is not the whole story, because in neither of the world wars was a grand coalition established at the outset. In both it came about only when the nation was faced with the possibility of defeat—in 1915 because of the Dardanelles and the shell scandal, in 1940 because of the Norwegian fiasco.
Mr Callaghan is a patriot, but he is also a good—some would say too good—party man. He would recoil from 'doing a Ramsay MacDonald' even if he felt that the results would be of advantage to the nation. In fact, he can reconcile his loyalty to the Labour Party with his patriotic duty, because it is more than likely that a 1931-style coalition would merely aggravate the nation's difficulties. It would be repudiated not only by most of the political wing of Labour but also, and above all, by the trade unions. The weakness of the State would thus be exposed even more glaringly, and with an even more devastating effect upon foreign confidence, since the government seen to be unable to govern would be called 'national'.
The term. however, is open to two other possible interpretations, and it is worth considering whether or not either has practical relevance to the present crisis. First, Mr Callaghan might give his administration the air of being national if he were to purge it of militant socialist ideologues and replace them by relatively uncommitted figures, such as Lord Goodman or Lord Bullock, with perhaps also one or two individuals from other parties, appointed not as party representatives but in their own right. This would be worthless, because few of the newcomers would have any power base and those who had would automatically lose it by agreeing to serve.
Another way of making the government national would be to announce a temporary moratorium on contentious measures and to introduce an emergency programme which the Opposition would feel bound to support. This is what Mrs Thatcher has offered, but for that reason alone it is not a serious option for Mr Callaghan. In the eyes of most of his supporters it would simply be a variant of the MacDonald betrayal. To carry even a majority of Labour MPs with him he has to make sure that his policy is not to attractive to the Opposition.
Granted that any form of national government is a mirage, how can Mr Callaghan stay in business? How can he reassure Britain's creditors and the foreign holders of sterling, while at the same time maintaining what he knows to be the only 'coalition' that matters to him, his contract with the unions? The Left in Parliament is powerless so long as the unions back him, but will they continue to back him if he does what will have to be done to save the currency and the economy ?
Left-wingers may be counting on his natural unwillingness to be the shortestserving Prime Minister since Goderich. The mumbled threat reported by Mr Atkinson may be seen as a bluff that can be called, because if Mr Callaghan were to bring the Government to an end he would presumably be ending his own career. Whatever might happen to the nation, the consequences to himself would almost certainly be fatal. (Incidentally, in an interview with Terry Coleman printed in the Guardian on 15 October, Sir Harold Wilson referred to Goderich as 'Billy Goderich'. Is he on Christian name terms with all former prime ministers, al ive a nd dead ?)
Mr Callaghan is probably not bluffing, because from his point of view one thing would be even worse than a premiership of record brevity, and that would be a premiership in which he was manifestly only a tool in the hands of extremists, and a premiership ending in total disaster. To resign with honour would surely be better than to go down in dishonour after reigning a few months longer without power.
His resignation would lead to an early, if not an immediate, election. (He could hardly advise the Queen to dissolve while
sterling was under daily pressure. In such circumstances he would have to resign in the knowledge that Mrs Thatcher would be sent for, and that she would then be free to take a few drastic steps before going to the country, either at a moment of her own choosing or after defeat in the House of Commons.) He can forcibly suggest to the troublemakers on his own side that their prospects in an election are not at all bright. The latest NOP opinion poll, showing a Tory lead of nearly 15 per cent, is a godsend to him, all the more so as it was based on interviews carried out after the party conferences. Most politicians are influenced by opinion polls, whatever they may say to the contrary, and Mr Callaghan can now point to objective evidence that Labour's leftward drift will, unless checked, be electoral murder to the party as well as economic murder to the country.
Moreover, this evidence will not have been lost on those trade union leaders. particularly Jack Jones, with whom it seems to be an article of faith that a Labour government must, at almost any cost, be kept in office. A further cautionary thought in the minds of trade union leaders is that most of their own members are far from enamoured of socialist policy, and that more public expenditure cuts would be less abhorrent to them than increased taxation. Mr Callaghan is one of the few politicians who might be able to appeal successfully to ordinary trade unionists over the heads of their leaders. (It is worth remembering that several union executives which decided to oppose the pay deal earlier this year had to change course when their members voted to support it, and that Clive Jenkins was prevented by his own executive from voting in favour of bank nationalisation at the party conference.) Mr Healey has said explicitly that further spending cuts may be ncessary, and Mr Callaghan has only committed himself against cuts on a scale that would, in his view, destroy the country's social cohesion. Obviously the ground is being prepared for further moves to reduce the borrowing requirement, and the chances are that Mr Callaghan will get away with them. But their effect will be no more than transitory unless he can show that his party, and more especially its industrial wing, has genuinely and permanently accepted the mixed economy and all that it implies.
He has started a national debate on education. Let him now also start one on the proposition that there should be no further enlargement of the public sector, and that the ideal of common ownership should be realised through co-partnership and industrial democracy rather than by the remorseless extension of Marxist socialism, however gradual. And let all non-Marxist trade union leaders support him. The doctrine could be presented as an imaginative updating of the party's traditional creed, rather than as an abject surrender to the IMF and Mrs Thatcher. It would also have the merit of saving Britain from ruin.
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