Political Commentary
The survival strategy of Harold Wilson
Patrick Cosgrave
Mr Harold Wilson, as is well known, is manic depressive. (To say that, by the way, is in no sense insulting, nor meant to wound: Baldwin and Churchill, to mention but two major political leaders to whom the Prime Minister likes to compare himself, were also manic depressive, and Churchill was the worst case of the three.) Since the European referendum, according to those close to him, Mr Wilson has been in a manic phase, justifiably and genuinely delighted with the result achieved, and correctly attributing the fact that the Labour Party came through the whole business intact to his own brilliant tactical sense. He is now more genuinely in charge of the Government than ever before, not least because, • being euphoric, he feels himself to be so.
For Mr Wilson, it should also be remembered, is a man of considerable timidity. It is quite some time now since he learned to put on that wise and calculating old face, puff heavily on the pipe, and create an atmosphere full of cunning, manoeuvre and dominant deviousness, just at those very moments when he had no idea what to do, or when he was quite simply scared that any move of his might split the Labour Party, or cause important members of it to be nasty to him, in the way Mr Hugh Scanlon was in 1968, when Mr Wilson, having acted openly and courageously, received a drubbing he will never forget. Given all these characteristics.— and given, which is equally important, the immense experience WIr Wilson now has in handling what he fondly calls the Labour Movement — it is hardly surprising that he moved crabwise towards an economic package.
What is astonishing is not that he has managed to impose an incomes policy against the will of many of his colleagues, and in spite ,of the experience the country has had of these devices before — though all that is remarkable enough — but that he has persuaded the Labour Party tacitly at least to accept a high (in Comparison to recent years) and steadily rising level of unemployment. Of course there will be a good deal of fuss over unemployment at the Party Conference, and Mr Michael Foot, in spite of apparently failing strength, will have to pull himself together for the speech of a lifetime. But Mr Wilson will get through it all pretty well unscathed: he has nobbled Mr Foot, he has nobbled Mr Jack Jones, he has nobbled public opinion, and he has nobbled the left in Parliament. And all that gives him a virtually unassailable power base, at least for a year or so.
Those on the Conservative right who went along with the Shadow Cabinet's advice to abstain on the principle of the Government's latest economic package did so for two main reasons. First, they are convinced that the package will fail, for no serious efforts are being made to reduce public expenditure sharply enough to eliminate (or at least greatly cut) its inflationary effect. Therefore, they believe, the whole policy will collapse in ruins in a year or so, and the wizard will at last be finally and completely discredited. Second, however, they agreed that it would be wrong — it would be bad public relations — for the Conservative Party to oppose the package.outright, whatever Tory convictions about its demerits were. In ' addition, it was feared that, if the Opposition whips recommended a vote against there Would be a three-way split in the party, one group voting against with Mrs Thatcher, one perhaps supporting the government, and one abstaining: almost certainly Mr Edward Heath and a few faithful retainers would be in one of the latter groups. Perhaps the Conservatives chose the least damaging course of action; but the fact remains that abstention suited the Prime Minister very well, and it is a course which inhibits vigorous Conservative criticism of the various stages of implementation of the Government's policy, for the Opposition cannot hope to strike with its full power until the policy is clearly seen to falter.
And what, after all, does Mr Wilson's policy consist of, if not a half-baked hotch-potch of all the failed programmes of restraint of the last decade? From incomes policy right through to the somewhat spurious appeal to everybody to make an effort to pull Britain up by her bootstraps the latest measures are not markedly different from all the measures tried before — save, to be fair to him, the programme of drastic deflation which Mr Roy Jenkins pursued some years ago, with very considerable courage, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Mr Wilson's last government. It is now clear that the strategic error of Mr Heath's government was to panic in the face of a rising level of unemployment which was one of the delayed consequences of Mr Jenkins's measures, and so began a course of economic disorientation which led to its ruin.
Yet, subtly and carefully and smoothly Mr Wilson managed on television last week —
more effectively than any other senior politician has done in recent years — to put across the message that, whoever was to blame for the nation's economic plight, it was certainly not the Government. That lie has been told again and again, by Labour as by Conservative ministers, and yet government spending and government borrowing have both continued to rise, despite occasional cuts, and inflation has, as a consequence, gone on rising. Such is the battered morale of the country that a reduction of the rate of inflation — even to, say, 20 or 15 per cent — would be regarded as a major triumph, destructive though such a rate would nevertheless be.
Further, Mr Wilson has persuaded the public, and many trade unionists, to accept that the state of the nation is so grim that comparatively large-scale unemployment will have to be tolerated. In particular, it is clear that he has drawn the teeth of the militant coal miners who destroyed Mr Heath's government. And he managed to do all this because he waited sa long to introduce his package: had he tried earlier to impose even the very limited measures of restraint which he now has imposed he would almost certainly have failed. Only when the cold. finger of unemployment touches the shoulder of a trade unionist does he begin to see the virtues of not consistently pursuing his own interests at the expense of the interests of the community.
There are still a number of gaps in the strategy, notably in the field of public spending, and in such commitments as that to keep British Leyland alive. But Mr Wilson and Mr Healey are both intelligent enough to see that their package is no more than a.slight variation on those which have gone before, and also that their permitted levels of public expenditure are still far too high. They know, too, that a sharp increase in the level of unemployment is a necessary part of any successful battle against inflation: as the monetarists have consistently argued, the choice is between increased unemployment now and — if inflation is allowed to proceed . unchecked — massive unemployment later, so a policy designed to put more people out of work is in no sense to be denounced as inhumane.
The grand question for Prime Minister and Chancellor alike is whether the present increase in unemployment is the product of inflation or,of recession. In other words, is the present increase — and the increases that will follow it — healthy because it will fine the economy down in an anti-inflationary direction; or is it unhealthy because it is the first sign of that breakup of the national economy which inflation was bound eventually to produce. Has Mr Wilson, therefore, moved too late?
While this question is being resolved the Opposition will have to wait and keep its nerve. Of course, there is no possibility that this new strategy of the Prime Minister's will really work, unless it is followed by other measures: but politics is a cruel business, and Mr Wilson could yet find himself in a position where the policy is appearing to work, and in which he could appeal for yet another electoral mandate before failure becomes apparent. In those circumstances there would be considerable temptation for Mrs Thatcher to play the unemployment card which she has, greatly to her credit, so far refrained from doing. To put together a genuinely coherent and appealing Conservative alternative to Mr Wilson's package will now be an extremely difficult task, especially when one realises that Mr Wilson, having appealed for a year for Britain, has gained one for himself.
Previous page
