The roots of disillusion

POLITICAL COMMENTARY ALAN WATKINS

When they desire to place their economic life on a better foundation, they repeat, like parrots, the word "productivity," because that is the word that rises first in their minds; regardless of the fact that productivity is the foundation on which it is based already, that increased productivity is the one characteristic achieve- ment of the age before the war, as religion was of the middle ages or art of classical Athens, and that it is precisely in the century which has seen the greatest increase in productivity since the fall of the Roman Empire that economic dis- content has been most acute.'—R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society.

He was young, he was keen, his eyes shone, he was new to journalism, to party conferences and to the oratory of Mr Harold Wilson. And when at Scarborough in 1963 Mr Wilson had finished his speech on science and socialism, he turned to me and asked, pointing to the rest of our seated colleagues in the gallery: 'Why don't they stand up and cheer?' I remember muttering something to the effect that such demonstrative behaviour would be a clear breach of profes- sional etiquette, if not an actual matter for the Press Council. Looking back, I am not at all sure that in any case I particularly wanted to cheer. Brilliantly delivered though the speech was, at the end it left one with a feeling of dissatisfaction. Science was no doubt a laudable pursuit, the control of the results of science laudable also (though this was more arguable): nevertheless, this was not what socialism, or even the Labour party, was fundamentally about.

At the time, however, most observers con- curred that Mr Wilson had miraculously united left and right in his party, fired the imagination of the country and delivered a telling blciw at Mr Harold Macmillan's (shortly to become Sir Alec Douglas-Home's) government. Today the Scarborough speech is just another, even though the most characteristic, of Mr Wilson's pre- 1964 performances. But it is something more than this. It is one of the seeds of the prevailing disillusion within the Labour party. And it is so, not only because the criteria which the speech laid down have remained largely unfulfilled, but also because there is increasing doubt as to the criteria themselves. The Labour government has gone after false gods, and has not been conspicuously successful in catching them.

To say this is not to blame Mr Wilson exclusively. However, there exists a view of political history—not, by the way, discouraged by Mr Wilson himself—which would make it entirely reasonable to blame him. To this widely accepted though incorrect view we had better now turn. According to the theory, the Labour party was prior to the 1959 election a 'cloth-cap' party, hostile to new ideas and out of tune with the times. The party paid for its obstinately old-fashioned ways when it was massively rejected by the electorate. Subse- quently, so the story goes, Hugh Gaitskell em- barked on a gallant and almost single-handed fight to 'modernise' the party. He won on the bomb and lost, at any rate suffered a partial defeat, on Clause 4.

Gaitskell's fight was then carried on, in slightly different fashion, by Mr Wilson. Disre- garding what he called 'theology,' smoothing over instead of exacerbating conflicts inside the party, Mr Wilson emphasised opportunity, en- throned productivity, deified science and won the hearts of the men with the ballpoint pens in their breast pockets. In the phrase of the time, coined by Mr fain Macleod—it is still occasion- ally to be heard—he 'captured the centre.'

There is, admittedly, a certain rough truth in the above version of events. But a little of what politicians call research (as Mr A. J. P. Taylor

once remarked, an MP thinks he is doing research if he opens an old volume of Hansard)

is sufficient to show that it is also, in many respects, wholly misleading. In 1958, for instance, the Labour party, with the assistance of Mr Hugh Cudlipp, published a glossy pam- phlet entitled The Future Labour Offers You. Turn over its fading pages today, and the striking thing is not how old-fashioned the sentiments are but how modern—or, rather, how redolent of what was to become the small change of Mr Wilson's speeches in the early 1960s.

There are, to be sure, a few notably old- fashioned sections. In his introduction, for example, Gaitskell writes of 'democratic socialism in action'—a phrase which was to appear slightly out of place a few years later.

But on the whole the pamphlet (which was a summary of previous policy statements) antici- pated much of the Labour thinking of the 'sixties.

The key to the success of the next Labour government,' goes the pamphlet, 'is our plan for turning Tory stagnation into Socialist expansion. All our projects for better schools and hospitals, for a new deal for the young and the old, for rising living standards, must depend in the end on our success in achieving year by year a rapid expansion of production.' This passage could well have appeared in one of Mr Wilson's pre- 1964 speeches. Indeed, with a suitable substitute for the word 'Socialist' it probably did so appear. Again. when The Future Labour Offers You was published I happened to underline all those words and phrases which were reminiscent of the ad-man. Here, nine years later, is a selec- tion: 'in this age of the Sputnik ... out of touch with the needs of the modern age . . . outdated ideas . . . scientific progress . . . the age of automation and atomic power . . . out-of-date homes ... a new industrial order ... understand the modern world better than the Tories do,' and so on and so on.

Thus, whatever the reasons why Labour lost the 1959 election and however the party appeared to the electorate, there is no doubt that it tried to present itself as 'modern'—that is to say, the party attempted to base its appeal on growth, production, productivity and science: This is a point which Mr Anthony Crosland did not perhaps sufficiently acknowledge in his post- 1959 polemics; though as Mr Roy Jenkins put it at the 1960 conference : 'After the election, some of us thought not that we should change our principles, not even that we should change • our policy, but that we should re-state our aims in modern terms and should try to make ourselves less open to misrepresentation.'

The post-1959 policy that was in fact adopted, expressed first in Labour in the Sixties and then, in slightly modified form, in Signposts for the Sixties, did not differ substantially from the old one. Indeed, after Mr Ray Gunter had intro- duced Labour in the Sixties at the 1960 confer- ence it was Mr Crosland who reproved him for his lack of socialism : 'If I have a criticism it is that any decent left wing Liberal would have agreed with most of it. Phrases about "world government," "more spending on social services," "more money for hospitals," these are a kind of radical opinion. The remarkable thing is that he did not stress what was the dividing line, and that is a certain belief about class, and a certain belief about equality.'

Mr Gunter, however, is not a great one for drawing dividing lines. Still less is Mr Wilson. And at this conference, over two years before becoming leader, he was already strumming the theme which he was later to make peculiarly his own : 'This is our message for the 'sixties—a Socialist-inspired scientific and technological revolution releasing energy on an enormous scale and deployed not for the destruction of mankind but for enriching mankind beyond our wildest dreams.' And a year later, at Black- pool : 'What we propose in the social services, in housing, in education, will lay a formidable burden on our national resources, and we must not burke this issue; a burden too heavy for this nation except on the basis of a steady and directed expansion of our national production.' Mr Wilson went on to commend social justice to the conference on the curiously Stakhanovite ground that it would help increase production, rather than that it was a good in itself.

Yet, as I have shown, growth, production and the so-called scientific revolution were the principal elements in Labour policy well before the advent of Mr Wilson. What happened in the party can be summarised roughly as follows. During the period of the Attlee government Labour was preoccupied with the welfare state and the nationalisation of the basic industries, to say nothing of the problem of actually stay- ing solvent. In the middle and late 'fifties the party, under the influence of Mr Crosland's Future of Socialism, turned its mind more to social and egalitarian questions, a reasonable though not excessive rate of growth being assumed. But this period was short lived. Even before the 1959 election socialism was identified with the rate of growth.

This was a very foolish thing with which to identify socialism, for the elementary reason that in an open economy the rate of growth is something over which no government can have complete control. (Logically, Gaitskell's view, as adopted, expanded and improved upon by Mr Wilson, should entail complete nationalisa- tion.) Gaitskell, however, did possess a residual and saving egalitarianism. For a genuine moral concern about society Mr Wilson substituted a set of moral prejudices relating to 'candyfloss' and so forth. As Macaulay said of Southey, he did not make judgments but displayed tastes. Or, rather, he displayed distastes. He asserted a moral superiority for toothpaste without stripes over toothpaste with stripes. That most liberal of men, Professor Kenneth Galbraith, has a great deal to answer for. Like Milton, like Eliot, like Namier, like Dr F. R. Leavis, he had an effect upon his devotees which was little short of disastrous.

Down with candyfloss, up with growth! But when growth is shown to be diffi- cult if not impossible there appears a moral vacuum. It is this which accounts for the disil- lusion, and the seeds were sown well before 1964. How, subsequently, they took root'We shall have to examine in a later article.