A saga of disillusionment

To Labour with love

A Labour Party candidate

The author, who was a defeated Labour candidate contrary, to put himself forward in the same intere in February, intends, despite indications to the St at the next general election.

Superficially the outlook of the present Government, Ulster apart, can be made out to be both promising and creditable. We are in fact living between crises: the first of which we have bought ourselves out of; the second of which, combining rising domestic and industrial prices with falling employment, will be that worse which the Government has manufactured out of bad in its passion to flutter in the warmth for a short season of peace. Accordingly the political outlook is devoid of promise and innocent of credit.

In the light of these perils we might learn something by tracing the events not of Mr Heath's mixture of reasonable ideas, bad luck and terrible excuses but of that secular decline of intellectual honesty and self-respect among most of its leading figures which has been the history of the Labour Party since the accession of Harold Wilson. Let me, then, recall from personal experience what the Labour Party seemed like to an open-minded young member fifteen years ago at constituency level, before examining what locally and nationally it has become, and how that change has affected this country.

The committee rooms of political parties have a peculiar quality, and for those of the Labour Party that quality is squalor.

It was, mark you, good-humoured and friendly squalor and in our case we had a couple of rooms, a pair of trestle tables with hairy hardboard surfaces, a quantity, of manilla envelopes, a greater quantity of dust, some files (under the dust), a trayful of cups and mugs, a kettle, a duplicator and an agent.

The Labour Party is poor and has comparatively few agents, and there is nothing in its condition which is likely to induce others to make them less few. Paid a salary which, if offered for comparable responsibilities elsewhere, would trouble the spirit of the serenest face grinder in the CBI, the Labour Party agent is grudgingly paid in the manner of a curate in a poor parish and required to function as the time demands either as office cleaner or generalissimo. Consequent upon being paid tenth-rate money, many Labour Party agents respond by being tenth-rate; the ones who are not, stay out of conviction and conscience, sheer oversight or long acquiescence in a habit-forming misery.

What applies to agents is true in a slightly different way about active members of the party. A middling ward party will hold monthly meetings, incestuous with the familiarity of .a very small circle; they will be full of a genuine imprecise goodwill. There rests upon the gathering a cloud of ineffectual niceness: none of us makes any money, none of us could make any money, none of us has any money, which does not mean that the socialism about which we fitfully talk has the least relationship to envy. We disapprove of _South Africa, are dubious about Russia; we run a bazaar. Come to think of it the similarities to the Church of England are enormous.

When the party crystallises at a slightly higher level the picture changes, the delegates to this committee contain the militants, for what that word is worth: a stout man with a pork-pie hat and a bandleader's moustache has a motion down for Conference and speaks to it in the stateless accent of the outer suburbs. He is against neo-colonial aggression, and against all the things which people who are against neo-colonial aggression are against: the bomb, the defence estimates, imperialism . . . he is predictable beyond all bearing, a perambulating echo of Tribune on a bad day. A cliché made flesh, with some luck and very little more ability, he will be selected and adopted in a winnable seat.

He has his faction, and in constituency parties this faction usually commands an uneasy majority, neither lucid enough nor brutal enough to feel happy in the Communist Party, but sour and assertive in a quite impersonal way on behalf of causes of which he has no personal knowledge and outraged on behalf of people for whom he has no affection. Outrage for him is an abstract thing, the Vietnamese and Algerian wars were the occasion for it. Without the outrage, which fuels him as it does Eric Heffer, he would be a little lost. In fact I have often wondered whether he and Mr Heffer finding themselves at the millennium, free from pass laws, Enoch Powell, the Pentagon, and all forms of defence, might not suffer from acute withdrawal symptoms.

Meanwhile back at the committee rooms our agent ran the campaign, single-handed against the shortage of money and transport, and the restrictions imposed by her premises and abilities. She conscientiously lost files, forgot to post the address, started meetings late, and generally trod on the toes of calamity without actually bringing it down on top of us. It is a measure of the threepenny-stamp-using, candle-end-saving Scrooge and Marleyism of Transport House's salary scale, that she was worth at least twice what she earned.

Not that everything which went wrong was the agent's fault. Not even she, could have known that at the crucial factory-gates meeting to be held outside the railway repair shops, which supported half the town and which Dr Beeching was (correctly) suspected of planning to close, the candidate, himself an NUR official, would be kept waiting for the first twenty-hive minutes of a half-hour meeting, while the alderman who was introducing him, denounced the Conservatives who controlled the council, for not having built as promised the town's second abattoir. It was not her fault that at most meetings only the faithful were preached to (and sometimes given doubts when the alderman appeared); nor that the Labour hall in our marginal constituency hadthe appearance of a laying-out room fallen on bad times; nor that the electorate, when canvassed, lied their heads off. This led to the universal delusion, common to all political parties about to lose a general election, that we were about to win it.

Our agent, who tempered her incompetence with a certain amount of despair, thought we would have 51 per cent of the vote; I who had

been out canvassing, thought we would do much better. I have since reached the.

conclusion that this compulsive untruthfulness to party canvassers reflects yet another of our English virtues. We cannot bear to cast in the canvasser's teeth our clear and specific reasons for supporting party. Y, so we say "Perhaps," 'and he hears, "I think so," and a wholly spur ious "Yes query" is born in the margin of the electoral register beside the name of one of party Y's most committed voters.

Commitment in the political sense, in the • pains and pleasures of which M. Sartre, that

lamentable and muddy Frenchman, has instructed us, had no rational place in our constituency. The politically committed person is supposed to realise himself, to distend the full blossom of his personalL, in combat, struggle, mental strife and so on. Not in England he doesn't. What that encyclopaedic bore had in mind for adversaries were the Monopoly-Capitalist, the Fascist Dracula, and the criminal adventurist element within-the-party-itself. It was the tragedy of the more zealous people in a local Labour Party, that the nearest equivalents to that triumvirate which they would have found in my youth would have been the local garage owner cum Conservative Association chairman, whose transport committee has just re-routed the by-pass in front of his new premises; the' biology master at my school who thought that hanging was too good for them; and in my view a criminally-adventurist town councillor whose reflex threats to nationalise the means of production, distribution and exchange, received the gratified attention of every Tory in town.

The Conservative presence in our constituency had its own qualities: I am speaking of a period fifteen years ago, when Tories really were Tories and brought their accents to prove it. There was very little nonsense, nor is there still at constituency level, of the "I hate apartheid as much as you do" and "the Conservatives' are a party of all the people" sort. Our Tories, whom it was part of my job to heckle, tended to a vein of mild self-parody in which irony drowned. They displayed the flag on the table, they started with the National Anthem, and they retained as Member the elderly Lord Lieutenant of a neighbouring county, a man handicapped with a minor defect of speech, which marvellously protected from proof, if not suspicion, a more substantial handicap of intellect.

"But what did you do in Parliament in the past five years, Sir Wilfred, if you only spoke twice?" "Sir Wilfred is involved in valuable committee work in the House," said the unpleasant solicitor, who was chairman. This was the universal and ritual excuse; in the case of quite a few MPs it is also the truth. There are capable and useful MPs in both parties whose personalities do not need regular sight in heavy type of "Smith lashes Tories" or "Jones in Commons uproar," and who eschew the characteristics lately distilled to their full fatuity in the person of Mr Dennis Skinner. These people work hard and devotedly in dealing with the legal and technical complications which will 'arise if some amendment is not made to clause 7, sub-section 5, over which parliamentarY counsel nodded, and the minister in second reading somnambulated. They do, but Sir Wilfred did not. I believe even now that, regarding Parliament as the best club in London, he made proper use of it, and slept there every afternoon.

In a sense though, while Sir Wilfred was no more than a kindly and ineffective human being, his presence in the House of Commons was significant. There have always been in Parliament, as in the trade unions, as in any organisation shbject to elections, as indeed in the country, great numbers of the inactive, the apathetic and the unconsulted. We have been taught by individuals who, thinking in slogans, wish us to, to call them the Silent Majority. The truth is that there are many such majorities in many spheres, and that the indifference they cultivate, part English shyness and not wanting to make a fuss, part idleness and part general anaesthetic, works for our good and against it. Against, it admits to prominence, and often power, exhibitionists, estate agents, young meteors, the sharp and the flash and the fly, and with them protesters, militants, the shrill voyeurs of a thousand outrages and the downright disaffected.

In its favour it has excluded from English political life until the day before yesterday, the mob and spontaneous demonstration, and even up to today the political private army and the Politician as hero. If our town was prepared to elect and re-elect an unchanging item on the menu of the hungry and devouring lobby, it was because we could afford to. The election Which I describe was the last to take place at a time when the English thought anything of themselves. We had perfected in George Mikes's term the view that one should not be unkind to the foreigner, it wasn't his fault poor chap. Other people, readers of the New Statesman (hard at their life's work of despising England), called us insular, arrogant and aloof. So we were, and how nice. We had in that year in which Sir Wilfred was returned yet again, the effortless superiority of a sleepwalker on a tightrope, it took Mr Macmillan, Mr Wilson and the dozen defeats and humiliations of the last deceased, dreadful decade to wake us. However we have fallen, as somnambulists will, and the effortlessly superior person of 1959 has become the nerveless, shrill invalid of 1974, the bland idiosyncrat, who felt that foreigners couldn't help it poor chaps, has become the crawling international conformist, trying With twenty-four-hour clocks, metre rules and dots to erase the shame of his identity. Another refugee from Central Europe, Arthur Koestler, seeking to praise England for its complacent, confident decency, called it a kind of Davos of the soul. Only a Central European could have been so nice as to say that, to appreciate the quite crucial value of the thousand negative virtues we used to have; and by the look of things the only decent Englishmen left are Central Europeans.

Meanwhile back in the Committee Rooms we were preparing for the arrival of the leader. As the leader was Hugh Gaitskell there was an element which would have liked to have held the meeting in Councillor Holt's back Parlour. A year later, in 106u the year of the CND and the Bomb, Councillor Holt, like the _ .

good pacifist he was, would nave nela any sucn meeting in front of a firing squad. In 1959 however nobody objected when I had my first and only idea in a dolorous campaign strewn With aldermen, abattoirs and poodles. The leader of the Opposition was to speak in the Co-operative Hall at 3 pm, which is as good a way of ensuring an audience of twenty-eight as the next. Meanwhile I had for days been foxing the poodles by giving up the doorstep for the loudspeaker van. Uttering party pieties through an amplifier had been a relief even if my personal combination of inherited South Lancashire accent and nasal catarrh must have got on the nerves of that untruthful electorate at least half as much as the Path d Pictorial, officer-to-men voice popularly believed to have been planted by us in the Conservative loudspeaker. It suddenly struck me at 2.25 on the day Mr Gaitskell was to arrive that the van Could actually be useful. We toured the town for half an hour solid from our estates to their suburbs, but chiefly concentrating on the Shoppers — "The next Prime Minister will be in the Co-op Hall at 3 o'clock," I said succinctly 400 times. Nothing I have said before or since has Worked so fast. When I was coming up. to 399, and the van was practically back, I noticed that the Pavements were blocked by crowds on the town's main road, and that these were the mere overflow from the overflow which. totally filled the substantial 3treet which held our hall, into Which in turn it was happily no longer possible to let anyone come. I am pleased to recall that episode as the one unspoilt success of the campaign, and as my Only unmixed triumph with that mechanism. I recall on other occasions and in other elections loudspeakers which did not work, loudspeakers Which being over-magnified, woke babies and lost votes, treacherous stop-and-start loudspeakers which were despaired of until they recovered in time to catch you swearing at the gent, and one hideous hollow-sounding affair ",fl, own to me as Radio Aceldama, which related urslarnentable candidate who held Peace and the

Ked

r Army in nicely balanced esteem, inaccura

`elY, but not unjustly, as a simulacrum of Dracula calling from his coffin; but I have had such joy of one of those instruments the day we brought thousands to the C Hall.

The turning point of our election for me, wa."' Hugh Gaitskell. Even now I find it difficult to remember him without sorrow, and certainly the Labour Party lost in him an extraordinary combination of qualities: lucidity, an insistence on arguing precisely from A to B to C, like a good don before dons began to organise riots, cut discs and come on television. This was never a popular approach at political meetings which demand and largely get a kind of 'sloganthink,' half platitude, half libel, which assumes the whole business of government to be a Manichean encounter, unencumbered by reservations, subtleties or practical administrative problems. Gaitkell's donnishness and precision were certain to be defects in his early days as leader, since no hungry sheep like to look up and have the shortage of winter fodder explained to them. But this taste of explaining, and for arguing that one's own side has 70 per cent of the case, was the only way to hold back, for government in this country, the receding tide of public attention, interest and respect, which has left the parties stranded on the sands of their own invective.

No one is suggesting that politics have gone simply into a decline, anyone who thinks that should read pre-war Hansards to see the quantity of aldermanic tudge which was uttered while unemployment lingered and Hitler was adjusting the world. There is no call, either for a return to the oratorical debating of Churchill, Gladstone or Bright (with intercontinental ballistic missiles in the sky, who needs the Angel of Death?), and although I would devoutly like to see a little literacy restored to the speeches of our masters I know better than to ask.

Wnat troubles me about contemporary politics is not merely the gimcrack performances of those politicians who risk bringing the word technocrat into as great a disrespect as 'company director' or latterly 'consultant' (if you let a television producer into serious politics you must expect good television not good government), but the contemptuous assumptions about the public for whom slogans are deemed to be good enough. People may sometimes be mugs, and specious talk about technology in the mid-'sixties may have impressed them, but we have all taken to the dirty business of mass persuasion too happily to suggest that we do not want them ever to be anything but mugs. Both political parties at this moment are very short on respect for themselves or other people.

When we met in our local Labour Party fifteen years ago, nobody was quite clear what the future should be, and neither, at that time, were the members of the Conservative Party or the two leaderships. Some of us had certain ideals loosely connected with equality and with the accomplishment of concrete material ends; you could have boiled down my convictions to `Health, Houses and Drains.' What seemed at that time truly at an end was the frenetic crusade and siege atmosphere of the 1930s. In 1959 it was neither honest nor credible to play at crude top-hat-versus-cloth-cap politics. Ironically, the press actually managed to overstate this three-quarter truth, and to discover in the Triumph Herald motor car the facile, glib image it wanted for the new classless, contented Britain it then proclaimed. In doing so it missed vital points which certainly troubled fastidious, exact undoctrinaire reformers like Gaitskell. Our new prosperity existed in pockets. Decay and second-rateness of a kind insufficiently spectacular to launch a crusade, and sufficiently comprehensive to demoralise the people who lived in it, existed everywhere else.

No tabloid journalist, asked to think about one matter, can fairly be asked to take in another, which, without confounding it, nevertheless contradicts it. The road houses, shop fronts, family cars, wage bonuses and foreign holidays of Birmingham were all that could be digested fifteen years ago; the off-licences, co-ops, bicy des, redundancies, and weeks at Whitley Bay of people living in Wallsend represented too complex a picture, and insufficiently glamorous a misery, to receive attention, as they had in the 'thirties. Even as failures the decayed towns of the 'regions' did not really make the grade.

Circumstances like these involved for the Labour Party the damnably difficult job of getting power in the country to heal Scotland, Wales and the North, while saying those truths, which in the prospering marginal London suburbs and Midland boroughs must have seemed manifest nonsense. As a twenty-year-old nonideologue, I wanted Labour to win because it was on the side of people who needed its reforms, but it would have been amazing if Labour had won. The Triumph Herald image was at least partly true, and the underpaid in Scotland, Wales and the North, who would always vote Labour, were defeated by a coalition of the permanently comfortable and the Tory Southern Counties and of the newly prosperous Midlands suburbs, who had no immediate reason to complain of Conservative government. Although our town was on the wrong side of the Trent, it was relatively solvent at the time, and although the country had enough pits and shipyards trembling between life and death to make it the terminal ward of England, we were all right. So the baronet defeated the trade unionist; indeed that year baronets were defeating trade unionists all over England.

There were two responses possible where a reasonable, rational, un-extravagant case had been bettered by the bland engines of publicity: One could give up for dead the people in Wallsend and Rotherham, voting Labour because they needed to economically, and, outraged by the wickedness of Rugby and Uxbridge, who had voted where they conceived their interests lie, one could retreat into a corner, give oneself up to the socialist equivalent of bible study: the contemplation of Clause 4 of the constitution, and those two weekly papers which are the Talmudic accretion to the Torah of socialist certainty; and one could, like the late Mr Richard Crossman, comfortably contemplate a decade of Tory government. Alternatively one could try to get in.

By saying in plain terms that we should seek power, like the demon West Germans by dropping a Marxist rubric in which very few people literally believe, Gaitskell struck a deep gushing well of unction in the arid desert of the Labour left. By standing out a year later against that fatuous herald of the adolescent's decade, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, he becartie evil itself to some, worse than Hitler to John Osborne (as he then was). To have roused against you every second household in Hampstead, the' enlightened weeklies, the London School of Economics, lecturers in teacher training colleges, the signatories of letters to the Guardian, quite apart from the quisling fringe of the Labour Party, ought to have been certain disaster for a Labour leader; the man had been, as the Bible put it, "a divisive influence." In fact Gaitskell's confrontation with his Fifth Monarchy Men, .a confrontation of which Mr Wilson is in terms of personal courage, incapable, temporarily eut away the Labour Party, which we knew and loved, and had addressed envelopes for, from the whole canting lilac establishment, that shrill agglomeration of sanctimony and agitprop called the Labour left. Anyone whb.does this must be all right, we thought, and I stand by the 'we.' The last poll before Hugh Gaitskell's death gave Labour what for those days was a considerable lead with the mere electorate.

I have talked about this man and his attitudes partly for themselves, and partly because they stand in such stark contradistinctiorrzto the events which followed.

If Gaitskell by kicking the left, and by sticking to his donnish precision about economics ultimately did the Labour Party no end of good in Walsall as well as Gateshead, his herr temporarily also did well. It was true that Mr Wilson made his entry like Fortinbras with all the opposition on the floor: no CND, no Common Market row for the moment, and if the effects of the Selwyn Lloyd squeeze went on much longer, no Conservative Party. Mr Wilson began as he meant to go on. If it was true that the difference between the two parties, though substantial, was too sophisticated for the idiot public to understand, the idiot public would be given an all-night show. Some of the items might be thought a little old-fashioned, a ventriloquist, a pea and thimble man, a threecard trickster and a northern comedian, but they were very well received. Of all the charges that can be laid against Mr Wilson the most serious, apart perhaps from the long, wrong maintenance of sterling at catastrophic parity, is the abasement, if not the erasure, of intelligent political debate, in which a citizen can take part without losing his self-respect.

(To be concluded) Next week, the author takes his disillusionment further along what he calls 'The Road to Wedgwoodbennistan.'