Political commentary

A few pathetic fallacies

Ferdinand Mount

Logic is the first casualty in election campaigns. You can tell that the election fever is for real this time by the fallacies flying about like shrapnel. The politicians are off and running and you can scarcely hear yourself think for the fusillade of non sequiturs, false premises, ignoratio elenchi and reductio ad absurd urn being sprayed at the public by the somewhat less delicate representatives of our great political parties such as Mr Airey Neave, Mr John Pardoe and Mr Ron Hayward.

All talk of the Government hanging on till the spring and of Jim being a man who likes to play it long has dried up overnight. It remains theoretically possible for Mr Cal-. laghan to stick it out until March, hoping that the Ulster Unionists will be fogbound in Belfast for the vote on the Queen's Speech in November, but it is not a possibility that anyone at Westminster is very interested in contemplating just now.

The important thing, it kerns, is to put the boot in first. At the present rate of oratorical inflation, one expects any moment to hear Shirley Williams compared to the Beast of Belsen or Willie Whitelaw identified as the reincarnation of the Marquis de Sade. In such circumstances, it behoves those of us who still picnic at Aristotle's shrine to identify one or two of the grosser offences being committed against the laws of logic.

The Gestapo fallacy. This is the belief that as soon as any politician compares his opponents to the Gestapo, we are in for an unprecedentedly bitter, divisive and dirty campaign which that politician's party is likely to lose 'because the British people won't stand for that kind of thing.' It would be unkind to analyse too closely Mr Neave's analogy between the Labour Party and the Nazis. How long was he in Colditz for? But there is no reason to assume that he is committing electoral suicide. People may not care much for that kind of thing or at any rate may not wish it to be thought that they care for that kind of thing, but they mostly seem to regard it as 'just politics', a distasteful but inescapable part of the business. Many knee-in-the-groin artists have done rather well as vote-getters, Sir Harold Wilson for one.

But Churchill, we are told, failed to win the 1945 election with his Gestapo scare. The more remarkable thing would be if he had won it against all the political trends. Besides, how could we know whether or not his extravagant allegation might not have had some slight influence? We could hardly expect to have overheard housewives say ing, 'You know Winnie's got a point there. No smoke without fire, I always say. That Mr Attlee was in Hitler's pay, you mark my words. I know for a fact that his wife used to get her lampshades direct from Berlin.' In

the end, the tone of each general election. tends to turn out much like the tone of the

one before, containing tedium, equivocation and vulgar abuse in the usual proportions.

There is something equally suspect about the fashion for claiming that the broad casting of Prime Minister's question time is damaging the authority of Parliament — childish antics, sounds like feeding time at the zoo, my constituents are deeply shocked, etc etc. In that case, why do they keep on listening? Stranger still, why do two

• or three times as many people, up to one million of them, listen to Yesterday in Par liament which presents an entirely sober yet vivid account of the whole of the previous day's proceedings? Because it's on at a time when people are having breakfast or driving to work, that's why. .

The complainers about the yahboo-sucks side of Prime Minister's question time are, one suspects, the people who switched on hoping to hear legislators disgracing themselves — the equivalent of old ladies who complain about indelicate scenes they have had to stand on chairs to witness. Anyway, it would be much more disturbing if you heard people in Tesco's saying, 'I was deeply impressed by that Second Reading debate on the Industrial Reinsurance Bill (Scotland), weren't you, Doris? I singled out Mr Bruce Millan's contribution as particularly thoughtful and statesmanlike.'

The presidential fallacy. Every Parliament at about this time, the presidential fallacy pops up all over the place like ground elder. The election, we are told, will be decided by a head-to;head contest' between Mr Callaghan and Mrs Thatcher. Either his avuncular solidity will make her sound shrill, or her honest passion will expose his devious inertia, depending on your point of view.

As a corollary, we are told that the two gladiators will be irresistibly drawn towards a TV confrontation in which either Mr Callaghan will use too little make-up or Mrs Thatcher will use too much. At this point, we shall be reminded of Nixon's shaving problems. To support this argument, we are already being told that schemes for a TV confrontation are being floated which will inevitably leave Mrs Thatcher or Mr Callaghan looking foolish, either because he/ she /they accept or he/she/they don't. I forecast that a few weeks from now you will read in a throwaway sentence at the bottom of the page that these schemes have foundered, leaving all parties quite unmoved. This happens every time — and every time subsequent analysis shows that in the British system the personality of party leaders is important — but by no means all-important.

The Figgures fallacy is based on the supposed contribution of Sir Frank Figgures.

then chairman of the Pay Board, to Mr Heath's defeat in the February 1974 general election. After that election, a myth grew up among the Tories that they had been doing quite nicely until the Pay Board released figures which revealed that, far from being at the top of the wages league.

the miners were in fact 8 per cent below the average. This news, it was claimed.

appeared to many people to destroy the government's justification for holding out against the miners' pay claim. The Figgure.5

figures were thus said to have eroded the ground on which the Tories were fighting the election. A similar myth has grown un on the Labour side about the effect on the June 1970 election of the then disturbing £31 million trade deficit (these days we use that sort of money to pay the milkman).

This news was supposed to have mortallY damaged the government's claims of economic recovery.

Both sides now appear to believe Ow sionately that a single unflattering statistic

can turn an election. Mrs Thatcher is con' vinced that the Prime Minister will choose 12 October as the general election date because the previous month's figures for the

retail price index and the balance of trade do not come out until 13 October. The

Prime Minister would have only the unern; ployment figures to fear, and in that tick' August is the bad month, for that is when the school leavers come on to the register' while September and October might shov small improvements, because of the start °

the Government's temporary jobs schente. Now Mrs Thatcher may well be right in believing that the Prime Minister is thinking along these lines. He too may subscribe te, the fallacy —which is basically the fallacy° assuming that because opinions do seem change between the beginning and end° an election campaign, it follows that theY have been changed by concrete incident5 during that campaign, which is rather like explaining St Paul's conversion by the weather in the Damascus area at the tirne. What a campaign does is to concentrate voters' minds upon the prospect of electing a government in a way quite unlike the stint! answer required by an opinion poll. campaign casts .people's minds back ove'd the whole period of the Parliament an across a whole range of ideas and Pe„14sonalities. In both 1970 and February 19re the version of events put forward by 01 government just did not stand up to PO' longed examination. But the fear of the statistic is so stroll! that one can only sympathise with the deod sion of Sir Claus Moser, the popular an , gifted director of the Government's Cent-I."; Statistical Office, to head for the hills bein:0 the shooting starts. He retires in July to Rothschilds. There is gold in them thar