Political commentary
Naught for Labour comfort
Stephen Fay
Abillboard on the Town Hall in Isling- ton, placed there by order of our
recently elected left-wing council underneath the pole from which their newly acquired Red flag flies, states that 18,260 (21 per cent of the working population of the borough) are unemployed. Yet this ex- ample of political consciousness-raising is singularly unsupported by visual evidence. As I walk about I see no ill-fed and ill- dressed people loitering to pass the time. The queue outside the labour exchange is longer than it was, but nothing in the looks or the dress of the men or woman in the line differentiates them from the 79 per cent of the people of Islington who have jobs.
It would be quite wrong to interpret this as an apology for Thatcherism, however, because unemployment, though not visible to the eye, in the capital at least, is real enough in people's minds. Recently my own children, both in their early teens, have ex- plained a passion for intensive revision at exam time, which they certainly did not in- herit from me, by referring to the difficulty they may have in finding work later in the decade. A contemporary of my daughter's, aged all of 13, had to forego her summer holiday abroad partly because her poor ex- am results are thought by her parents to en- danger her job prospects. This preoccupa- tion influences the choice of jobs too; the older daughter of a neighbour of ours deep- ly worried her father, who is a printer, by taking a better job with a merchant bank in the City. He beleives she is less likely to be declared redundant by the High Street bank where she works now.
These fears are illuminated by the out- pouring of statistics about the plight of children now leaving school. The Man- power Services Commission estimates that of the 1.1 million or so 16 and 17-year-olds looking for work now, only 527,000 will have found jobs by the beginning of September. Without inquiring churlishly in- to the methods of the Commission which produce such startlingly exact figures, that leaves 584,000 teenagers without work this autumn, adding still further to the cost of paying for unemployment, already running at £15 billion a year. The problem has even entered the language: the new acronym this summer is LTU, meaning long-term unemployed.
If the old rules of political behaviour still applied, the Government would now be in disarray, deploying desperate remedies, and spending tax-payers' money as though it was going out of fashion. Yet there is no evidence that unemployment has any more influence on politics than on the streets of Islington; the Red flag is limp on the flagpole. True, Sir Geoffrey Howe did en-
courage local make-work projects and job- sharing when he undertook his customary defence of his policies in the House of
Commons last week. (Readers might have noticed that the Spectator's Chancellor in-
troduced job-sharing a couple of months ago without any prompting from Mrs That- cher's Chancellor.) Unemployment is not expected to drop below three million for another 18 months at least, yet the polls show the Conservatives some 15 points ahead of Labour. This strange contradic- tion persuades some experts that the Prime Minister cannot lose an election, no matter when she holds it. Can this really be true?
After all, Mrs Thatcher's shortcomings are not confined to unemployment. The in- dustrial depression has caused a rise in government spending as a proportion of the gross national product: it was 41 per cent a couple of years ago; it is 44 per cent now. If anything makes Mrs Thatcher lose sleep, that should. The hope that tax-cuts might spur recovery, and create new jobs, lies in the debris of President Reagan's economic policy. Anyway, the burgeoning bill for social benefits gives the Treasury insuffi- cient room for a manoeuvre which would allow the kind of tax-cuts Mrs Thatcher had in mind in 1979.
Because of this gloomy prognosis, the Conservative Central Office is less sanguine than those commentators who concentrate exclusively on the polls; and when asked how they can possibly win the next election, the managers of the Tory machine point to a political phenomenon they have dis- covered: a preference for strong, indeed wilful, politicians when times are bad. (This is not noticeably the case in the rest of Western Europe, but evidence for the con- tention is, apparently, to be found in Australia.) There has unquestionably been strong, indeed wilful, leadership from Downing Street in the past four months, but the Falklands Factor is not expected, even by the most uncritical disciples of the Prime Minister, to last into 1983, now the most likely election year. As memories of the Falklands fade — and perhaps even, when the inquiry reports, turn a bit sour the unemployment issue should become starker. And does that lift the collective heart of the Labour Party? Not necessarily. `You can prove the Government's no good,' says one leader of Labour's im- moderate centre, 'but how can we prove that we can do better?'
The two obstacles to any notion that Labour can do better are Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill. (Poor Michael Foot; doing better seems to be out of his hands almost entirely.) The Parliamentary Party, or most of it, hopes that a procedural ploy might defuse Benn. After the party conference, Benn's chairmanship of the Home Policy sub-committee of the National Executive will be challenged, and if he should be unseated the more violent policies of the Left — like nationalising all the banks at once — would disappear from the party's election manifesto. But experience does suggest that Benn is unusually tenacious: what if he hangs on? The prospect is met by an unhappy shrug of the shoulders. None- theless, the political isolation of Tony Benn is at least conceivable, which is why Arthur Scargill is even more threatening to Labour. In Scargill's case, Labour suffers whether he wins or loses. If he manages to hector the miners into striking in pursuit of a ridiculous pay claim, their case will not be based, as it was so memorably in 1974, on the claim that they are unjustly exploited. For if Scargill and the miners succeed in grinding down the Government, the na- tional feeling of helpless anxiety such a vic- tory would create would do Labour no good. And if Scargill loses, his defeat would be another triumph for Mrs Thatcher's stubborn crusade against bullying trade unionism. Whatever happens, the unions will be the issue, rather than unemploY- ment.
I suspect that the Prime Minister will fur- ther deflect attention from the jobless by a bitter and highly xenophobic attack on the Common Market, which particularly incur- red her wrath by its unhelpfulness during her Falklands war. She might not eventually withhold Britain's payments to the EEC's budget, because the European Com- munities Act would need amendment if the Government were not to suffer humiliating defeats in the courts of both this country and the Community (and any attempt to amend the Act would split the Conservative Party in the Commons, where it remains stubbornly pro-Europe). But the threat to withhold Britain's contribution is not unlawful, and Mrs Thatcher is wilful enough to go on doing that for months. Her popularity would clearly not suffer were she to do so, and Labour would be hard put to criticise her.
All this would be precious little help to the unemployed. But it is a bizarre com- mentary on British politics at the moment that both Left and Right — and probably the Centre too — seem to be absorbed by other issues. The only explanation for this Is that a substantial proportion of the elec- torate may well have lost confidence in the ability of any government to provide jobs. If that is the case, it explains why Mrs That- cher could be returned as Prime Minister, even with three million unemployed.
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