11.04.2001

Whither the Tories?

William Hill's is currently offering 9/2 against the Conservative Party gaining an overall majority in the coming general election; the Labour Party is 8/1 on. The odds speak for themselves. This is a one-horse race. It is, of course, conceivable that some sudden and drastic reversal of fortune could overtake Labour in the next eight weeks, but the overwhelming probability is that Blair will get his second term.

The question, therefore, is not whether Labour will win, but by how much, and the answer to this question will decisively determine the fate of William Hague and will also have a major impact on the future make-up and political orientation of a Tory shadow administration. Conventional wisdom in the bourgeois media is that if Labour retains a majority of 100 seats or more, then Hague will be dead in the water; 70-100 will still almost certainly trigger a challenge for the leadership; only if he can bring Labour's majority down to less than 70 is Hague regarded as safe in his job.

It will do him no good, but, on the basis of historical precedent, Hague could argue that it is a rarity in British politics for an incumbent party to be thrown out after just one parliament. In the post-war period this has happened only once - in 1974, when, in the aftermath of a miners' strike that brought about a three-day week and a state of national emergency, Ted Heath asked the electorate, "Who rules the country?" and got the answer he did not want.

Hague might also point to the fact that when, in 1997, greatness was unexpectedly thrust upon him, it was in the wake of the worst Conservative defeat since 1906. Half the parliamentary party was wiped out. Scotland and Wales were left without a single Tory MP. Even in England, 75 of the Tories' 94 metropolitan county seats went to Blair. By any standard, it would take more than one parliament to recover from such a traumatic and demoralising debacle.

What, if any, grounds has Hague for optimism? It is certainly true that the electorate has shown itself to be very volatile. Last year's fuel protests constituted a genuine crisis for New Labour, whose aura of invincibility and omnipotence was shattered by a fall in the polls for the suddenness and severity of which you have to go back to 1992 (Britain's withdrawal from the ERM) or 1978 (the winter of discontent) to find a parallel. The point, however, is that the Tories failed to transform their temporary advantage into a lasting improvement.

The same can be said in relation to the ongoing crisis over the foot and mouth epidemic. By mid-March, thanks to Labour's inadequate and incompetent response to the emergency, its lead in the polls was reduced from 17 to around nine points. Even partisan observers would concede that Hague has consistently outdone Blair in his handling of the situation, effectively setting the agenda, demonstrating a better grasp of what needs to be done, and a more assured feel for the needs of the rural communities.

Yet by April 3, a Guardian/ICM poll showed that the gap had once more widened to 15 points (Labour 49%, Conservatives 34%), and a Mori poll published in The Times a few days earlier put Labour a full 19 points in the lead - on 50% against the Tories' 31%. Unsurprisingly, the Tory share of the vote in rural areas had risen; the divide between country and town had widened. But that is little cause for comfort in Smith Square. Of course, polls can be wrong. They consistently overestimated Labour's lead in the European and devolved assembly elections, and even in the 1997 general election, but in the latter Labour still romped home with a landslide 174-seat majority. For Hague, the message is a pretty dismal one, especially with only 60% of his own supporters regarding him as first choice for prime minister (Guardian/ICM).

Labour's main fear, needless to say, is centred not on any threat from the Tories - still widely perceived as not providing a viable alternative government at this stage - but on worrying signs of growing apathy and disillusionment among its core supporters. In the European elections, on a wretchedly low turnout of just 29%, the Tories won 36% of the vote against Labour's 28%, despite the fact that in eve-of-election opinion polls Labour was reported to be ahead by a full 24%. It is profoundly improbable, however, that such a situation will be replicated on June 7. Many old Labour voters may indeed vote with their backsides, or - we hope - change their allegiance to the Socialist Alliance, but they will not do so in sufficient numbers to unseat Blair and give Hague the keys to No10.

What of the Tories' programme? In essence, much has remained unchanged since the 1999 Blackpool conference, which inaugurated The common-sense revolution, a ragbag of neo-Thatcherite, populist nostrums, with its "five guarantees to the British people", that constituted a logical, sharply rightward extension of Blairism.

Foremost among the "guarantees" and still at the centre of the Tories' election strategy is the question of tax, with proposals to abolish tax on savings and dividend income, restore the tax benefits derived from marriage and take some 650,000 people out of the higher rate income tax bracket. Shadow chancellor Portillo has already committed the party to some £8 billion of tax cuts over three years. He maintains - incredibly - that the Tories will not make up the shortfall in tax revenue by slashing Labour's declared public spending plans on services such as health and education, but by making "savings" elsewhere: i.e., a 'blitz on benefits' embodied in the crusade against "shirkers and scroungers" contained in the "can work, must work guarantee". Objectively, this policy just gives a bit of neo-Thatcherite spin to reactionary, anti-working class measures already being put in place by New Labour. Shorn of its pretensions to "common sense", it is meant to be the long desired revenge of 'middle England' against the 'layabouts' whom decent tax-paying folk keep in a life of idle luxury.

Paradoxically - at least in terms of the perceptions assiduously fostered by Downing Street and Millbank - we have a reversal of the situation which helped keep Labour out of power in the 1980s. This time it is chancellor Brown who is all prudence and rectitude, the Tories who are cast in the role of madcap spendthrifts, whose tax plans risk ruining the economy. The other probable lynchpin of the Tories' 2001 campaign, an assault on Labour's abysmal failure to honour its manifesto commitments on improving the public services, looks like being buried in a welter of accusation and counter-accusation about fiscal responsibility.

In general, pandering to the most reactionary manifestations of saloon bar resentment and prejudice - the endless bandwagon-jumping populism, which has characterised Hague's leadership as a whole - looks like setting the tone for the Tory campaign. His pledge to "save the pound", which runs counter to the mainstream of opinion among big capital, is more about crude chauvinism than economics. His dire warning - in connection with illegal immigration and the problem of asylum-seekers - that Britons risk finding themselves living in a foreign land if Labour is re-elected, and his promise to 'give us back our country' are as desperately xenophobic as they are ludicrous.

John Townend MP recently described immigrants as a threat to our "Anglo-Saxon culture" - endorsing Enoch Powell's "river of blood" speech in the process. His colleague Christopher Gill likened asylum-seekers to "rats in a bucket". Such talk was taking things too far in terms of the anti-racist consensus, but Hague declined to discipline them on the grounds that both men are to stand down from Westminster in a few weeks time.

Hague's formidable task is clear: to recapture the middle ground so successfully appropriated by Blair in 1997, the ground where British elections are supposedly lost and won. At last year's conference, the slogan was 'A Conservative Party for all'; the rhetoric was all about "inclusivity", symbolised by John Major's call that the Tories should now be speaking to "the people outside the circle of rising prosperity - the black and brown and yellow Britons" (The Guardian October 3).

But all the talk of unity could not disguise the fact that here is a party still riven by profound tensions and contradictions between, on the one hand, the correctly perceived need by the left of the party to project a more 'moderate' and 'caring' one-nation Conservatism and, on the other, a rightwing, deeply ignorant and reactionary populism. This is to say nothing of the profound ideological, indeed sectarian, gulf that still divides the party over Europe and may still spell its ultimate destruction.

During the campaign, a facade of unity will no doubt be maintained, but a serious defeat on June 7 will be the catalyst for some kind of resolution of the contradiction. Either the left will succeed in turning the party back on to a mainstream course, or the right will take another lurch in the direction of transforming what was once the preferred party of the bourgeoisie into little more than a backward-looking, xenophobic, sect.

Should Hague be obliged to fall immediately on his sword, or face an early leadership challenge, the outcome cannot be foretold. Who, in 1997, predicted that Hague would win the contest? In the red corner, the Tory left's leading contender looks like being Michael Portillo, who has now completed the process of reinventing himself. Gone is the hard-line Thatcherite 'tankie', with his embarrassing passion for the SAS. Now he is a 'caring' Conservative with a tender conscience, who beats his breast about having committed the mortal sin of "little Englandism", and protests his commitment to "rich ethnic diversity", respect for gays and lesbians and even the cause of those poor asylum-seekers, many of whom "come to Britain in fear of their lives". Some say that by "coming out" Portillo has ruined his chances, but he at least has the merit of looking like a plausible future prime minister.

The same cannot be said for one predicted occupant of the blue corner, shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe. The 'darling of the activists' is not only rightwing, authoritarian and moralistic; she is also magnificently mad - witness her strutting, rabid diatribe at Bournemouth last year on the subject of cannabis-users. If it is true that some leading figures in the party genuinely see Widdecombe as a viable Tory leader, then that is eloquent testimony to their own worrying dissociation from political reality.

Speculation about the identity of the next Tory leader is an amusing diversion but is beside the point for the time being. The real question is, what will happen on June 7? Only once in this century has a party suffered two consecutive landslide defeats, and that was in the 1920s, when, interestingly, the old Liberal Party was in the process of terminal disintegration. In terms of historical precedent, the Tories must expect to regain some of their lost ground, but how much?

A second serious setback, in the shape of another huge Labour majority, raises the question of what extra-parliamentary avenues the Tories might be tempted to take in order to save themselves from the spectre of permanent marginalisation. We have already seen them trying to use constitutional questions, the countryside and Northern Ireland as vehicles for bringing extra-parliamentary pressure to bear on New Labour, pressure intended not so much to reassert the Tories' own hegemony, but to negate and destroy what Blair has achieved thus far, by stirring up a reactionary revolt.

Blair's revolutionary rewriting of the monarchical constitutional system from above has made significant strides in his first term. Scotland and Wales have their parliament and assembly; the Lords have been emasculated - there may still be some gestures of defiance, such as the recent rejection of Labour's fox-hunting bill, but there is no longer any serious threat of an 'ermine revolt' orchestrated by the hereditary peers, of whom a mere 90, not all of them Tories, remain.

Hague's response to Labour's constitutional changes has been a repellent form of English nationalist rabble-rousing under the guise of concern for the union. Take his keynote speech, Strengthening the union after devolution, addressed to the Centre for Policy Studies in the summer of 1999. Draping himself simultaneously in the union jack and the flag of St George, Hague gave a schizophrenic oration: on the one hand, extolling the virtues of the union; on the other, launching a hypocritical jeremiad on the "ugly and dangerous" phenomenon of English nationalism.

Attacking Blair for refusing to tackle the "unfair position of England" in the light of Scottish and Welsh devolution, Hague pointed to "an emerging national consciousness ... Try to ignore this English consciousness or bottle it up and it will turn into a more dangerous English nationalism that can threaten the future of the United Kingdom ... recognise its value, and it actually strengthens our common British identity" (Daily Mail July 16 1999). Maintaining that "the drums of English nationalism are already beating", that "doing nothing is not an option" and that anomalies created by New Labour's devolution represented a "ticking time bomb beneath the British constitution", with evident relish he spoke of "an English nationalist backlash" (ibid.).

To detonate this "time bomb", Hague or his successor could focus on thorny questions of representation and taxation in relation to Scotland. We shall be told (accurately, as it happens, since Scotland is one region that receives proportionately much more than average from the treasury) that billions of pounds of 'our money' in the form of centrally raised taxes are being sent to Edinburgh and used by the Scottish parliament to finance programmes that benefit only the Scots. Playing on understandable resentment and jealousy in the Border counties of England would be an obvious tactic.

A natural corollary of 'Scottish taxes for Scottish spending' is 'English votes on English laws'. Of course, Hague has balked at suggesting the creation of an English parliament within a federal monarchy system, but that is the implicit logic behind his position and may yet find a Tory advocate. The Tories will make an effort to recoup their loss of Scottish seats in Westminster, but is their heart in it? If, by playing the Scottish card, they were to stimulate a Sassenach-hating nationalist, or separatist backlash, it would be a price well worth paying in terms of damage to Blair's project.

The intensity - and the tactical effectiveness - of last autumn's Jacobin outburst by farmers and hauliers, backed up by widespread public support, took everyone, including the Tories, by surprise. In retrospect, there must be many in the Conservative Party who now see Hague's statesmanlike posturing and dithering during that period as a stupidly missed opportunity. They will not want to make the same mistake again.

Anybody who thinks that fox-hunting is the main issue for the Countryside Alliance is a fool. Composed predominantly of natural Tory voters and supporters, it can and will be harnessed to mobilise hundreds of thousands in extra-parliamentary protest against Labour's neglect of the interests of small farmers, farmworkers, rural businesses and small businesses in general.

Even if the foot and mouth epidemic is brought under some kind of control by June, its after-effects will be dire and prolonged. As we have already seen, the statistically insignificant rural lobby can punch far above its weight, and any Tory with half a brain will ensure that issues relating to compensation, restocking and reinvestment are pursued not just in parliament, but on the streets of the capital.

The peace process in Northern Ireland dropped off the front pages of the media some time ago, but we should not forget that many issues, such as the decommissioning of weapons and the future of the RUC, remain unresolved. In a sense, the Tories' abandonment of bipartisanship on the question of Northern Ireland - exemplified inter alia by The Daily Telegraph's campaign to 'save the RUC' - is a paradigm of their turn towards combining parliamentary opposition with overt extra-parliamentary agitation and signals a willingness to forge alliances with the most reactionary elements of Ulster unionism. Needs must where the devil drives.

For us, it is self-evidently axiomatic that the Tories - or, for that matter, Blair's New Labour neo-Thatcherites - have nothing whatever to offer our class, except efforts to salvage capitalism. Under their rule, a fully rounded life for working class people will always be out of the question. But were a political crisis to arise out of a constitutional collision between a freshly-elected Labour Party and the twice-beaten Tories, it might well open up opportunities for truly mass activity towards that end.

Today, we in the Socialist Alliance are united on the basis of a common manifesto and election campaign. Good. But if we are to grasp the opportunities and take on the challenges of tomorrow, life itself demands that we should do everything in our power now to unite in one combat party of the working class.

Michael Malkin