Political commentary

Mrs Thatcher's mote

Charles Moore

'Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.'

Matthew 7, v.5

Mrs Thatcher only has a mote in her eye, so the words of the Gospel are

better addressed to her detractors. But one of the disadvantages about having a mote rather than a beam is that it is easier to ignore. Your rub your eyes a bit, and then try to forget about it and then before you know where you are, there is talk of 'major laser surgery'.

The general opinion of the classes paid to have opinions is that the Government is in- volved in just such a mote irritation predicament. Squinting past our own beams, we detect maladroit party manage- ment and a lack of direction. The Govern- ment has 'shown hubris' (Daily Telegraph), it is even, ultimate damnation, 'a govern- ment without a strategy' (The Times). It does nothing to remedy these defects, and then it is surprised when it very nearly loses the Penrith by-election.

The evidence produced to support these charges is first of all Parliamentary, especially the matters of hanging, MPs' pay, and the appointment of the new Speaker. It certainly was not very sensible of Mrs Thatcher to try to tell MPs who their new Speaker should be, since that, of all questions, is the most strictly Parliamentary and non-governmental; but the pay of Members and of ministers, which is related in the public mind with the pay of everyone else, could not be ignored by the Govern- ment, nor could the Government be ex- pected to endorse the greedier demands of its backbenchers. It lost, but with the ad- vantage of having made its position clear. As for hanging, the chaos was not the result of Government mishandling on the night or even in this session, but of a little game that Mrs Thatcher has been playing ever since she became Conservative leader. Anyway, I do not see how a new Government is ex- pected to control a new Parliament at once, especially when the whips have to spend weeks studying the rather grim passport photographs of 100 new Members.

All the same, there is a slightly lackadaisical air — what an old hand would call a sense of 'drift' — about the first few weeks of this Government. For this the most obvious explanations are probably the most nearly right. Politicans throw ab- solutely everything into elections. They think about them for years in advance, and when they approach, talk about nothing else and do nothing except work to win

them. Even after winning them, let alone after losing them, they are exhausted.

When the election is followed by a heat- wave, energies and judgment are weakened still further.

Then there is the 'honeymoon period'. This usually describes the indulgent attitude of the electorate towards the government which it has just chosen. But this time, when the voters have put in the Tories once more, the Government cannot complain of what they have found when they have 'looked at the books', and the electorate will not display the tolerance that it reserves for a newcomer. The Government, how- ever, does believe itself to be on honey- moon, basking in the electoral esteem whose disappearance it is reluctant to notice, and full of the newly married's natural desire to think about nothing but his own immediate pleasure.

So the Government is not in the mood for a strategy. What is a strategy, anyway? The Times wants one, but if it was called a Five-

Year Plan, it would be less interested. Peo- ple with strategies are rather like people who think that the way to convince pro- spective employers of their initiative is to explain in detail where they see themselves and the company in five years' time. They are just being presumptuous. We have it on the same authority that laid down the rules about motes and beams that we should take no thought for the morrow.

Certainly the evil of the present day is sufficient unto it. There is no need of peo-

ple offering My Plan for the British Economy any more than those offering My Plan for Personal Happiness. There is a need for a Chancellor who can reduce public spending at once. The extent of his planning will be to see what might push public spending back up and stop it. The existence of a full-scale plan implies the ex- istence of a finite and defined set of cir- cumstances. This never exists in politics.

What it would be nice to have, though, would be a sense that the Government knew what it was doing at any given time, and why it was doing it. There are areas where such knowledge is visible. Mr Tebbit, for example, knows what he is doing with the trade unions. He feels that it is more pru- dent to insist on them organising themselves decently than it is to deprive them of all their privileges. He expects that his in- troduction of secret ballots will perform this. He hopes that his insistence on voting for the existence of political funds will make unions less political and, even if it does not, will force the political positions of unions to be so moderate as to lead to a reconstituted party of labour.

Those are clear aims, and practical and finite ones. You might find equivalents in Mr Lawson. But what are the aims that animate Mr Norman Fowler's tenure of the Department of Health and Social Security (Towler Declines To Lead Revolt On Cuts', said the Guardian the other day, a cooked-up story on a par with 'Denis That- cher Not To Run For Regius Professor- ship')? What does Mr Leon Brittan want to do with the police? Why is Mr Cecil Parkin- son letting off the Stock Exchange? Does Mr Patrick Jenkin know why he is suppos- ed to be nasty to the GLC and the metropolitan authorities?

The aims of the Government do not need to be expressed in a very complicated way, but there does need to be some common thread to a Government's actions, just as the character of a man is considered in- coherent if his acts appear to work against one another. At the time of Macmillan, it was thought (wrongly) that such a coherence could be expressed simply in terms of method — 'Quiet, calm delibera- tion disentagles every knot'. Now the knots have become Gordian, and a government has to be determined to cut through them.

Although we have listened to a good deal about Victorian values and setting the peo- ple free, in most areas it is clear that the Government's aims are no more than negative. There is no doubt, for example, that the Government has used its correct emphasis on fiscal prudence as an excuse for not trying to cut taxes. That means that it has not tried to cut spending either. Nor has it made much effort to release business or individuals from the regulations that sur- round and hamper so many of their ac- tivities. In areas like education and health, it has insisted on existing freedoms, but done little to extend them.

How long can a government keep up its momentum if its aims are so modest? The natural tendency of any administration must be to succumb to whatever way previous administrations and present bureaucrats have devised for doing things, and to cease to think of the people out there for whom the whole business is supposed to be designed. The spending battles, for ex- ample, are still conducted on the belief that it is good for a departmental minister to win as much money for his department as possi- ble. Why should not each minister be forc- ed to finance each new expenditure that he devises with a cut in his own department? If Mrs Thatcher is going to allow her second administration to aim to do no more than hold the line, she will find that that line will be breached by new pressures from social security, pensions and unemployment. She will also find that her pronouncements, which people have tolerated in the name of necessity, will lose whatever interest and ap- peal they once had. People will want to know what they have got for so many years of exhortation and reproach. If Mrs That- cher stays still, England in 1988 will be very much as it was in 1979, which leaves her as the Callaghan of Conservatism.