28.03.2002

Tories relaunch - again

Maurice Bernal reports

May 2005. Iain and Betsy Duncan Smith on the doorstep of No10 Downing Street. The Conservative Party, albeit by a whisker, is back in power. Before readers conclude that I have gone barking mad, let me just say that, in the light of New Labour's current difficulties and of last week's relaunch of the Tory Party in Harrogate, to borrow a phrase from Tony Blair, it might not be a bad idea to 'think the unthinkable'. Let us hope it is just a fantasy, for such an event would certainly be a nightmare scenario for those in our movement whose politics do not go beyond choosing the lesser evil. Were there an election tomorrow, it is a racing certainty that Labour would achieve a third consecutive victory, but most probably on a much reduced majority. Many of the marginals gained and then held in the two landslide victories of 1997 and 2001 would be in real danger of changing hands. That, more than anything else, perhaps explains the extraordinary scenes we saw in the Commons on March 25. At the despatch box was Stephen Byers, looking like one of those hunted foxes that his party is so keen to protect. His unenviable, indeed impossible, task was to explain why the government was about to give shareholders in the former Railtrack up to £500 million in compensation for their now worthless equities. He could hardly tell the truth: ie, that this deeply unpopular U-turn had been forced on the DTI and the treasury by an ultimatum from a powerful clique of city bankers and investment managers, whose backing is absolutely essential if Blair's PPF initiatives are to have any chance of getting off the ground. Behind Byers, row upon row of Labour backbenchers sat in sullen silence. Those who spoke did so only to criticise the secretary of state, whose days must surely now be numbered. On the same day, Consignia announced 15,000 redundancies - the first tranche in what may amount to some 40,000 job losses among postal workers. Thousands of post offices are to be closed. The ministry of defence stated that 750 jobs were to go in naval dockyards and that thousands more jobs in the sector were to be handed over to private companies, who will no doubt carry out their own 'rationalisation' by shedding labour to increase profitability. For Labour, it was a bad news day that no amount of spin could do anything to change, and there have been plenty of such days recently. Before we look at the Tories, let us just quickly consider whether this is simply a case of 'midterm blues', or whether there is some genuine shifting of the tectonic plates under what seemed like such a stable political landscape. An ICM poll published in The Guardian on March 21 showed support for Labour down three percent to 43%, cutting its lead over the Tories to nine percent, compared with 17% only a month ago. On March 24, The Sunday Times published another poll, conducted by YouGov, which had accurately forecast the outcome of the 2001 election. This poll showed Labour's lead reduced to just seven percent. These falls seem to suggest a generalised disillusionment with the government's performance. Given the pivotal role played by Blair himself in New Labour's success, it is interesting to note that his personal popularity has plummeted among Labour voters. Some 63% of respondents to the YouGov poll thought that the prime minister should either step down immediately or at least before the next general election. He is perceived (correctly) as being deeply enmeshed with big business, and his globe-trotting antics, together with his role as George W Bush's poodle in warmongering against Iraq - against the background of crises in the public services which he seems unable to tackle effectively - have done him no good at all. At Harrogate, the Tories were understandably in good heart. Under Iain Duncan Smith's steady, if plodding, leadership, they are almost beginning to sound like a political party once again, rather than like a terminally inward-looking sect of geriatric xenophobes. Speaking of geriatrics, the announcement, almost on the eve of conference, that, due to ill health (for "a series of minor strokes"�, read Alzheimer's disease), Lady Thatcher would be retiring from public life, was particularly felicitous. Duncan Smith was able to say a warm 'thank you and good night', before embarking on a radical change in the party's direction that, in the unlikely event that it is followed through, will mark some kind of watershed. It is a mark of how far Blairism has taken us that the Tories seriously think it possible to outflank New Labour from the left - at least in terms of rhetoric, by espousing a slightly new variant of 'one nation' Tory populism. The keynote of conference and of Duncan Smith's March 24 speech was that the Tories must now embrace 'caring' or 'compassionate' conservatism - an oxymoron if ever there was one. The inspiration was twofold: the success of George Bush in peddling this particular garbage on his route to a dubious presidential 'victory'; and an 'emotional' experience in Glasgow. Whereas Portillo found his road to Damascus in working as a TV reporter and hospital orderly, Duncan Smith underwent his conversion on a visit to the run-down Easterhouse estate. His earnest description of the very real squalor and deprivation he found there had an inescapably emetic quality about it, coming as it did from the leader of a party that has always faithfully represented the interests of the powerful and the privileged and has been the most consistent and bitter enemy of the working class. "They think we are not like them; they think we don't care about them,"� he said - and how right "they"� were, and still are, to think so, after 18 years of Thatcherism; after the ultimately futile and exhausted Major interlude, and the repellent reactionary populism of a desperately confused, or just plain desperate, William Hague. "The way we live our lives should be the way we practise our politics: as decent, honest, tolerant and generous people. We need to be passionate and positive about the things and the people we are in favour of, not just the things we are against"� (The Times March 25). Time to cast off the Victor Meldrew image and embrace "passionate, positive and generous ideas"�. Time for an end to 'yah-boo' politics. The target for all this generosity is not primarily the middle classes, whose mass desertion sealed the fate of the Conservatives in 1997 - for Duncan Smith their hard-headed self-interest can be relied upon to lead them back into the fold, once the Blair project is exhausted and the economy turns down - but the most vulnerable and needy in the community: ie, the lowest echelons of the working class itself. " I want to give people power to change their lives "� We have to find a better way for all our sakes, but particularly for those whose need is greatest "� to make this country theirs as much as it is ours, that is a mission fit for the new century"� (ibid). Even the hardened speech-writers at Central Office must have found it difficult to avoid hysterics when they penned this cynical guff. When it comes to Duncan Smith's bitter denunciation of New Labour's failures and broken promises, there is much we can agree with, because what he said was true: "They seek headlines, not policies. Slogans, not solutions. This isn't a government: it's an advertisement"� (The Daily Telegraph March 25). But who, in their wildest imaginings, could think that the Tories would be any different? And besides, we have been here before. In the aftermath of the party's first catastrophic landslide defeat in 1997, the new leader, Hague, blamed it on the "arrogant, selfish and conceited"� nature of his party, which was, in his own words, perceived as "harsh, uncaring and greedy"�. The age of "caring conservatism"� was inaugurated for the first time, with a call to "listen to Britain"� (The Guardian October 5 1997). The product of this implausible conversion to humility and compassion, of all this 'listening', was unveiled in 1999 in the form of The common-sense revolution, no more than a ragbag of neo-Thatcherite, supposedly populist, nostrums. A bombastic, bloated and intensely backward-looking document, with its "five guarantees to the British people"� and its 60 policy initiatives, it laughably endowed all the most prejudiced and reactionary opinions of the home counties' saloon bar ideologue with the status of political wisdom. By the spring of 2001, in the same hall at Harrogate, in full froth mode, Hague drove the final nail into his party's general election coffin by playing the race card and, in a tirade against 'bogus' asylum-seekers, conjured up a vision of Britons waking up to find themselves living in a foreign land. That, and his ludicrous 'we have x days to save the pound' campaign, surely marked the nadir of the party's fortunes, and its headlong rush into political irrelevance. Hague had to go. Portillo's 'modernising' bid for the leadership, with his touchy-feely embrace of drug-users, and sexual and racial minorities, was much too strong meat for the party to stomach. Enter the safe pair of hands, with a commendably consistent anti-European record to reassure the old guard. One year later, it seems that Duncan Smith - primarily under the influence of Francis Maude and David Willetts - is taking the Tories down the Portillo road, but without the latter's gushy histrionics. That the membership seem willing to follow him betokens not just the lack of any viable alternative (another Hague-like lurch to the right would be pointless and self-destructive), but the hunger for power that motivates all in politics and has always been the hallmark of the Tories. That the once arch-Thatcherite, shadow chancellor Michael Howard, should junk his former idol's passion for tax-cutting and the sauve qui peut economics of the 1980s is a sign that the party has grasped the point that public services constitute a potentially fatal Achilles heel for Blair. Not that, as yet, the Conservative Party has come up with anything concrete that differs markedly from the mix of public and private funding (with its consequent loss of jobs and deterioration in working conditions), which both major parties now see as the only way out of the crisis. But what about Europe? Surely, many will argue, Duncan Smith's resolute 'never' on entry into the euro spells ultimate oblivion for his party? Will not a referendum on the subject open up all the old wounds and lead to a new outbreak of civil war? True, in an article published the week before Harrogate, he restated his commitment: "We must keep our currency. It is the only way we can be masters of our own taxes, mortgage rates and spending on our schools and hospitals. I will never allow EU membership to mean Britain loses control over its own destiny. While I lead the Conservatives, I will always fight to keep the pound"� (The Daily Telegraph March 18). At Harrogate itself, he boasted: "When Tony Blair finally has the courage to call a referendum on the single currency, we will fight him and we will win"� (The Daily Telegraph March 25). Ironically, it was a final mad outburst from Thatcher, in the form of her new book Statecraft, that brought the matter to a head only days before conference began. By effectively stating that it was time for Britain to start pulling out of Europe, she caused Duncan Smith acute embarrassment. But in a survey of 100 Tory constituency chairmen conducted by The Times, more than two thirds rejected Thatcher's position as outmoded, a majority calling on Duncan Smith to distance himself decisively from Lady Thatcher in order to show that the party really is changing. This result does not accord with the stereotype of Tory backwoodsmen. It is almost as if they had finally been able to make the break from the stranglehold of Thatcher's and Hague's visceral Little Englander chauvinism. It is now she who is no longer 'one of us'. Duncan Smith looks likely to take a much more pragmatic stance, indicated by the fact that he is relaxed about allowing members of the shadow cabinet and MPs who differ with him over the euro to campaign in the opposite camp if they so wish. Thatcher's claim that the EU is "fundamentally unreformable"� is probably still shared by many Conservatives, perhaps even by Duncan Smith himself, but so long as he is leader, there will be no question of arguing for withdrawal, which all agree would be political suicide. In any event, there is some truth in Thatcher's point of view, in so far as, without really radical reform of the CAP, industrial policy and much else besides, the prospect of a successful integration of the 13 applicant states who are queuing to join the EU is zero. Thus far, Duncan Smith has succeeded in his dogged efforts to put the European question to one side. In the unlikely event of a referendum before the next general election, you could argue that he has less to lose than Blair. If the vote were for entry, the boil would have been lanced and Duncan Smith would make pious noises about the democratic will of the people; if, on the other hand, the vote were 'no', he would have won and Blair would be in a very difficult position. The Conservative Party inevitably faces a daunting task. 1997 marked its worst defeat since 1906. Only once in the 20th century did any party suffer two consecutive landslide defeats, and that was the Liberal Party on its way to disintegration. But the Tory Party has successfully reinvented itself before and could do so again. In the next three years or so Duncan Smith must somehow convince both his own party and the country that the Conservatives not only constitute a viable party of opposition, but also are fit to take up the reins of government. He needs no reminding that the party will need a swing of more than 10% just to achieve a majority of one seat in the next general election. Some 40% of those who voted Tory in 1992 defected to New Labour or the Lib Dems. How to win them back? 'Compassionate conservatism' is a transparent and cynical attempt to dupe the working class and it may seem, to us, impossible that the electorate could be taken in by such rhetoric or be prepared under any circumstances to return the Tories to power. History, however, suggests otherwise. The economic and social miseries of the later Wilson and Callaghan years, produced a rank and file rebellion against the trade union bureaucracy. The Labourite programme of social contracts and concordats turned to dust (the Social Democratic split of Jenkins, Williams, Rodgers and Owen also cleaved off a huge slice of Labour voters, reducing it to a party of crisis throughout the 1980s). Under these conditions Thatcher and the Tories with their market programme of economic renovation could and did achieve hegemony. Arrogance, incompetence, corruption in the form of 'sleaze' and manifest disunity brought about by the popular upsurge against the poll tax and EU integration were the four factors that brought the Tory Party to its worst defeat in 90 years. All the first three are already present in abundance under Blair's New Labour; the fourth is yet to come, but there are already stirrings in the ranks. Without suggesting that history will repeat itself, for the Tories there is at least a faint glimmer of hope. For us, it is self-evident that the Tories - or, for that matter, Blair's New Labour neo-Thatcherites - have nothing whatever to offer our class, except more oppression and misery. In the present situation, we do, however, have some grounds for hope of our own, with the possibility that opportunities for mass activity may once again, after a long period, be opening up. Today, we in the Socialist Alliance are united on the basis of a common manifesto on which we will fight in the forthcoming local elections. Good. But if we are to grasp these opportunities and take on the challenges of tomorrow by presenting a real and viable socialist and democratic alternative, life itself demands that we should do everything in our power now to unite in one party of the working class. Strike against both our enemies with a single fist.