POLITICS
The date which matters before the date of the general election
ANDREW GIMSON
Mrs Thatcher wishes to eradicate socialism from Britain. To do that, she wishes to win elections. But to win elec- tions, she wishes the Labour Party to be the main opposition.
To campaign against the Labour Party is relatively easy, because it is, well, socialist. The Alliance parties may be socialist too, but they do not look it. They are most easily attacked not as Social Democrats or as Liberals but as Labour's sidekicks, the expression used by Mr John Biffen in a speech on Friday of last week. On the same day, Mrs Thatcher, Mr Tebbit and Sir Geoffrey Howe attacked the Alliance us- ing the same line of argument. Mrs Thatch- er pointed out that the Liberals kept the last Labour government in power, and that the SDP's leaders served in it.
This attack neatly avoids any need to do the Alliance parties the honour of examin- ing their policies. But it only works so long as they are in third place. In terms of votes, the Alliance parties very nearly moved into second place during the 1983 general elec- tion. They almost caught up the Labour Party, achieving the best result, expressed as a proportion of votes cast, by any third force since 1923. Next time they might do better.
In that case, why not call a general election now, while Alliance support is in the low twenties, far behind Labour? The answer, even without taking into account the poor Conservative showing in Green- wich, is that the Tories are in nothing like as strong a position as they were in April 1979 or May 1983. In these two months, just before the general elections of those years, Gallup polls gave them 50 per cent and 49 per cent of the vote. If the next campaign is anything like the last two, the Tories run the risk of losing about five per cent during the course of it, while Labour falls back two or three per cent and the Alliance gains seven or eight.
Such calculations will make Mrs Thatch- er reluctant to call a general election unless she is ten points ahead of Labour, and Labour at least ten points ahead of the Alliance, conditions, met in the victorious years of 1979 and 1983. While the second condition is satisfied at the moment, the first is not. The opinion polls suggest that the Tories have, at most, a slight advantage over Labour in the upper thirties. Presum- ably the attacks of the last few days on Mrs and then Mr Kinnock are meant to widen that advantage. The tactic is a doubtful one.
I would not have thought ten thousand swords must have leapt from their scab- bards to avenge even a look that threatened the Prime Minister with insult. She is better able than Marie-Antoinette to look after herself. But last week Sir Marcus Fox mustered, if not 10,000 swords, at least 100 signatures of Tory MPs on his three Commons motions alleging that Mr Kin- nock is unfit to be Leader of the Opposi- tion. A vice-chairman of the 1922 Commit- tee does not set about such an operation, or put his name to it, without some indication from on high that it would be welcome. Although the Speaker then in- tervened, and the two Chief Whips issued a statement agreeing to do their best to restrain 'personal abuse and attacks on the integrity of individuals', the intention was clear, to get at Mr Kinnock, just as Mrs Currie was clearly trying to get at Mrs Kinnock. Mrs Kinnock is, incidentally, a stronger candidate for the role of Marie- Antoinette. She is not yet reputed to have made a silly remark about cake, but she may already be married to the last leader to uphold an old order based on traditional ideas about social class.
The trouble with this assault on the Kinnocks is that if it works, it may work mainly in favour of the Alliance parties. They become an even more obvious refuge for voters who dislike the sight of politi- cians throwing mud, at each other. They can, moreover, ask why, if the Tories 'Oh well, that's show business.' consider Mr Kinnock unfit for office, they have allowed him the privileges of an opposition leader, such as creating 'work- ing' peers, while at every turn trying to deny these to Mr Steel and Dr Owen.
What the Tories require, to create a substantial lead over Labour while doing nothing to benefit the Alliance, is a strategy based more on the Government's virtues than the Official Opposition's faults. Mr Lawson is not 'lucky' to have scope in his forthcoming Budget for tax cuts, as if the figures had worked out well by chance. His room for manoeuvre, still rather modest as a proportion of public ' spending, is the fruit of nearly eight years' effort, effort hindered and undermined by all the special-interest groups in the coun- try, whether the civil service or the CBI or the farmers or the coal miners or the middle classes with children at university.
At the forthcoming election, it would be splendid if the Alliance parties were to attack the Government for failing to do more to stop these groups enriching them- selves at public expense. Some Social Democrats attacked the Government for being too soft during the miners' strike, and there have since been wider attacks on the extraordinarily indulgent treatment given to monopolists in privatised concerns such as British Gas, but these are isolated cases. Socialism is still too deeply embed- ded in Britain for the Government to be in danger of being outflanked to its right. The Conservatives are the only party whose dominant faction believes in the restraint of public spending, and concomitant reduc- tion in state intervention, as a positive virtue rather than, at most, an unpleasant necessity. In his Budget, Mr Lawson will be able to tell all taxpayers that after a time, virtue is rewarded. The great difficul- ty of reducing the part which the state plays in our lives, that it hurts special interests severely long before it produces any per- ceptible improvement in the lot of people at large, will begin to have been sur- mounted.
The precise date of the general election will depend on a careful analysis of the opinion polls, but the date of the Tories' opportunity to seize the political initiative, and build a decisive lead, is already known: 17 March, Budget day.
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