How the left has won
Patrick Cosgrave
Nowadays, one gets entirely different messages about British politics, and about what Is happening to the country, from the Conservative right and the Labour left. To hear the right tell it (and by the right I mean, essentially, Mrs Thatcher) the Labour left is all-triumphant, and needs only a majority in the next Parliament to complete the Socialist revolution. The story according to the Labour left is quite different: to them the millennium is as far away as ever. Indeed, if one is to go by what Mr Eric Hefter says, and what his faction argued at the preconference NEC meeting at Blackpool, the arrival of the millennium has actually been delayed by the antics of the Callaghan government. So, what has been — and what is — really happening? In 1973 Mr Tony Benn, contemplating the record of the then Tory government, and in particular its Industry Act (providing for hitherto undreamt of levels of subsidisation for industry, to be disbursed, it Should be added, at ministerial whim and Without reference to Parliament) began to talk to friends about 'Heath's spadework for Socialism'. To Mr Benn the important thing — and he emphasised and reiterated the point in his first major speech to Parliament, as Secretary of State for industry, after the February 1974 general election, When he swept all before him — was the acceptance by both parties of massive and sustained intervention by government In industry and, by extension, in the life of the citizen. That massive and sustained intervention is the cardinal fact of British political life today. The Prime Minister acknowledged as much in his speech to the faithful at Blackpool this week. How far the intervention should go, and what its consequences might be, has been a subject of intense debate in every sector of British politics for a decade and more. Since the Labour Party has been in office for nearly ten out of the last fifteen years it is reasonable and proper to consider the' argument in terms of their affairs.
There are two wings of the Labour Party, just as there are two wings of the Conservative Party. There is the left — Mr Mikardo, Mr He ffer, Miss Lestor and many others. There is also the right — Mr Jenkins as was, the late Mr Crosland, Mrs Williams, Dr Owen, and their supporters. Nowadays the right, much more than the left, questions the scale, the details, and sometimes the consequences of the intervention of government in our affairs. On the whole, though, it seeks victory only in detail. It has no argument of principle. It was not always so. In the Fifties Crosland most theoretically, Gaitskell most bravely, Jenkins most assiduously, sought to define and describe a tolerant, fair and just social democratic society. When Labour lost the general election of 1970 Gaitskell was dead. But the others were all in positions of considerable power and influence. They were none of them profligates. They did not want to circumscribe the freedom of the individual citizen. They wanted neither to waste the substance the nation possessed nor feed the dreams of spendthrift colleagues by printing money and thereby stoking inflation. Indeed Jenkins, who by 1970 could look back on a distinguished and successful period as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was particularly alive to the danger of living beyond our means, and feeding on daydreams rather than reality. After 1970, however, something went badly wrong. Profligacy and intervention became Labour's characteristics. How it happened, and how the record of the Heath government helped it to happen, is the theme of a remarkable book*. Nobody knows the ins, the outs and the intricacies of the Labour Party better than Mr Michael Hatfield of The Times. And the tale he has to tell — built, so far as I can see, from an intimate knowledge of virtually every Labour meeting of consequence from 1970 to late last night — is a frightening one, all the more so in that Mr Hatfield writes with concern, sympathy and regard for Labour and Labour's prospects.
Behind the dry and dusty record of comings and goings, meetings and resolutions, there lies an extraordinary story of human energy and human apathy. The pivot is to be found in 1971, when the Labour Party's Industrial Policy Committee took to itself a large part of the responsibilities of the Financial and Economic Committee and began to plan the party's economic strategy. Nobody on the right even noticed what was happening.
Sir Harold Wilson did not notice because he was busy writing his memoirs. Crosland did not notice because he hated committees, and rarely came to those of which he was a member. Mr Jenkins did not notice because he; too, hated committees, and resisted convening even those of which he was chairman. That paragon and preacher of the Labour left, Mr Ian Mikardo, did notice. He had planned it that way. He was, at one stage, a member of no less than six committees. He was an assiduous attender at all of them. And he was chairman of the party as well. The story of the house the left built, the story of how the left won in the Labour Party, is the story of the triumph of energy over inanition.
But the left remains discontented, and foreign observers — including representatives of the International Monetary Fund —regard the Labour Party as responsible custodians of the nation's affairs. Why this is so requires a further excursion into psychology.
With the exception of the Prime Minister's — any Labour Prime Minister's — poodle, Mr Foot, and the heir in waiting, Mr Berm, none of the most prominent Labour left wingers has gained office —or, if gained, have not held it long. The remaining Gaitskellites have died, or vanished abroad, or hold their jobs on the condition that they mouth the platitudes of the left, spend and print money, and do all the things required of them to speed the march towards that elusive millennium. In his Blackpool speech, indeed, the Prime Minister selected no less than five further areas of corporate State intervention: this was of greater consequence than his defeat over incomes policy. In the Labour Party the left have the power. Would even office content them?
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