06.10.2004

Howard clutches at straws

Patrick Presland reports on the Tories' party conference - where Michael Howard was exposed as having no rounded programme whatsoever

A week is proverbially a long time in politics. Few more so than the one just past, which has seen the results of the Hartlepool by-election; Blair’s astonishing announcement, on the eve of more treatment for a heart condition, that he intends to serve a full third term before retiring to his new £3 million house in Connaught Square; and the United Kingdom Independence Party’s conference, at first triumphant, but then predictably spoiled by what some would call the arrogance and political stupidity of its rapidly fading matinee idol, Robert Kilroy-Silk MEP. All these events in their different ways impacted on the Conservative Party conference taking place in Bournemouth.

Of course, all career politicians pretend that by-elections do not matter - if their party has not done well. But by profession they are inveterate liars. That, in fact, seems to be part of the message from Hartlepool - that the two mainstream parties can neither be trusted to be honest nor competent, so perhaps it is time to give the Liberal Democrats a chance? Was it an anti-war vote? In part, perhaps, but the last poll I saw indicated that Iraq is now 12th on the list of things that matter to the electorate.
And Respect’s showing (a mere 572 votes - less than two percent on a quite decent turnout) suggests that this fringe party, which emerged from the Stop the War Coalition ‘mother ship’ and the political ambitions of George Galloway and the Socialist Workers Party, has rather limited chances in working class constituencies that do not have a significant muslim population. Crowing about coming a firm fifth and beating the Greens and the British National Party suggests a certain amount of whistling in the dark.

For an unpromising candidate (see Weekly Worker September 30), Jody Dunn actually did very well for the Lib Dems, turning a safe Labour seat into a quasi-marginal, reducing Labour’s majority from 14,571 at the 2001 general election to 2,033, a swing of around 19%. That should have been the big story, but the headlines focused instead on the fact that the Conservative Party (second in 2001) was squeezed into fourth place by UKIP. A truly dismaying result for any Tory, to be beaten by a motley collection of defectors - xenophobic, reactionary cranks and mad-heads, even more xenophobic and reactionary than the cranks who constitute the Europhobe wing of the Conservative Party itself.
Adopting the correct orientation towards UKIP became, therefore, a top priority task for conference.

The Blair story was by contrast good news. By embarking on the longest of long goodbyes, the prime minister could be seen as having unnecessarily turned himself and his administration into a sort of lame duck: if he does win the next election (which one has to say looks likely at the moment), he will inevitably remain deeply distrusted because of his lies over Iraq and the general perception that since 1997 Labour has been long on promises but short on delivery; will his health hold out, and why has he bought a house now? Whatever Labour intends concretely to achieve in a third term (and their conference really gave us few clues about that) will be overshadowed by media speculation and endless gossip about wrangles over the succession and so forth.

But it is still better to be a lame duck than a dead one, and dead is what the Tories, increasingly, look like. Seven years, two Labour landslides and four leaders later, they have not found even the semblance of a coherent strategic vision. No big idea capable of galvanising an increasingly torpid and disaffected electorate. To be fair, it is not entirely their fault. New Labour under Blair long ago snatched all the rightwing populist goodies from Thatcher’s stall. To place yourself to the right of the Labour Party is to risk rubbing shoulders with UKIP or even the BNP. Having dutifully watched conference for the first three days, I still get the impression of a party that is talking only to itself and the Westminster media. It is astonishing to note, for example, that The Daily Telegraph was the only Tory paper to put the leader’s speech on its front page. Howard evidently has a very long way to go before he can turn Blair’s discomfiture into votes.

And then there was the UKIP conference. With more than three million votes in the European elections and Stephen Allison’s 3,193 in Hartlepool, from a Conservative Party viewpoint they are beginning to look threatening, or perhaps we should say were? What some would call Robert Kilroy-Silk’s self-indulgent, self-obsessed and apparently deceitful attempt publicly to grab the leadership from Roger Knapman, together with his assertion that UKIP should “kill” the Tories by standing in all constituencies, even against Europhobe Conservative MPs, alienated the party’s biggest donor by far, the Yorkshire multi-millionaire businessman, Paul Sykes, who gave more than £1 million to UKIP’s Euro election fighting fund. He has now turned off the tap. Retired Kent bookmaker Alan Bown, another prominent UKIP donor, has promised to make good the shortfall for the time being, but a countrywide challenge at the next election is for the moment in doubt. Very good news for Tories in vulnerable marginals, though they still have the Lib Dems to contend with.

Sykes has lost no time in telling the Conservative Party that if they harden their policy towards Europe, they could get his money. But Euroscepticism, even Europhobia, is different from the outright hatred of all things European evinced by the leadership of UKIP and its rank and file. I have met the latter in some strength (50 of them turned up with their candidate in our town on a wet evening in June to debate the European elections). Most of them were elderly middle class or lower middle class types, still reliving the battles of World War II, and determined to save Britain from the threat of German domination now as then. But unfortunately they cannot simply be written off. UKIP is tapping into a gut feeling of profound disaffection with the political status quo. Were all 3,000 of the UKIP voters in Hartlepool, for example, senile, blue rinse devotees of Vera Lynn? I doubt it, and the Tories have to address this.

So much for the background issues which confronted conference. What about the meat and potatoes? The new logo said it all: an extra large torch, with lots of red, white and blue (‘time to reclaim the Union Flag from the extreme right’). The slogan was “Timetable for Action”; the repeated watchwords ‘trust’ and ‘accountability’.

Trust, of course, was an easy one. Just like you and I, the Conservatives recognise that something significant is happening in the attitude of the electorate to mainstream politics in general. We know that things are moving, but we cannot tell in what direction. Easy, therefore, and true, for Howard to say in his address that Blair was and is a liar about the intelligence case for going to war, though his language was more temperate. Of course, it was a good thing to get rid of Saddam Hussein, but Blair lied about the real casus belli.

So on what basis are we supposed to trust the Tories? A firm timetable of policy ‘initiatives’: some to be enacted on the first day they take power, others in the first week, the first month and so forth. Caution personified, the only promise Howard makes is to make no promises. But if ministers fail to meet their targets, they will be replaced. So what? Does anyone expect an incompetent minister of any party to resign of his own accord? The message is supposed to be ‘Action, not words’ and ‘We’ll do what we say’. And to make things easy for the thickest voter on the doorstep, Howard told his troops to go out and deliver a message containing merely “10 words”: “school discipline, more police, cleaner hospitals, lower taxes and controlled immigration”. Eleven words actually, if you include the conjunction, but what a pathetically wretched picture this paints of the Conservative Party’s utter failure to come up with something appealing. Three of the ‘policies’ contained in this mantra are just rip-offs from the already extremely rightwing initiatives of New Labour. Cleaner hospitals? Fine, but as a central plank of your 10-word slogan? And lower taxes, as we shall see from the caveats, means virtually nothing at all.

True enough, the “10 words” was just a gimmick really, though it must be depressing for Conservatives to realise that central office cannot even come up with a decent soundbite. We get a clearer picture if we look, for example, at the section of Howard’s speech dealing with law and order. When it comes to crime, he assures us, “the gloves will come off”. After all, in his relatively younger days he was a tough home secretary who presided over a fall in the crime statistics. There will be 5,000 more police recruited every year; more and bigger prisons; abolition of the right of prisoners to early release; reform/abolition of the Human Rights Act. Tough indeed, but in substance, if not in detail, we have already heard the same message from David Blunkett, whose actions, rather than his mere words, have already gone far beyond anything any former Conservative home secretary would have dared to propose - and to their bitter chagrin they know it. Apart from introducing capital punishment for double parking there is not much left.

In the run-up to conference there was much talk about tax cuts. Billions would be saved by sacking civil servants (presumably they would be offered less remunerative employment as prison officers, benefit-cheat catchers, and immigration department sleuths). One of the bribes proposed was raising the ceiling for inheritance tax to £1 million, as if the majority of the electorate had any prospect of benefiting from such a measure. But by the time Howard got on his feet it was a question of Gordon Brown-like prudence: “When I can, I will cut taxes.” The immediate targets of his benevolence will be - guess who? - the police, who apparently earn so much that they need to be relieved of the necessity of paying higher rate income tax.

The Conservative Party’s problem, as we have said, is twofold: how to distinguish themselves from what for the last seven years has in effect been the real, existing party of big capital: ie, the Labour Party. What can they offer to the ruling class that Blair and Brown are not already providing? Secondly, on what programmatic basis can they recapture the votes they have lost, particularly in that mythical swathe of the country called ‘middle England’ - votes lost not just to Labour and the Lib Dems, but also to UKIP. So far there is no answer. All they seem to do is mimic Blair, in the hope of stealing some New Labour thunder. Howard’s “10 words” remind us of Blair’s “five pledges” in 1997. Where Blair offered “a new style of government”, Howard says “we’ll be different” and expects us to believe him.

And in this conference season a new constituency has arisen: “hard-working families”. You got tired of hearing of them at Brighton, but Bournemouth was just as bad. What does it mean? Maybe the linking of “family” and “working” gives us a clue, if only implicitly defined in a negative sense. Evidently, the votes of those who for whatever reason do not belong to either category are not worth worrying about. So much for focus groups. If you are single, divorced or gay, if you have not got a job, then your participation in the electoral process is from this point of view seemingly irrelevant. What matters is winning back the mainstream floaters, Mr and Mrs Average. As one senior Tory put it, “The electorate is like a girl who’s been let down by a man. It’s going to take a lot to persuade her to trust another man again.” That such sublime sexism can still exist is a testament to unchanging Tory values.

Obviously, the one subject where there is some detectable ‘blue water’ between Labour and the Tories and putatively one where they could regain the affections of the “girl” is Europe. Here Mr Howard has been more explicit than in any other area - not just because he recognises the need to try and win back UKIP defectors, but because he also needs to keep his own Europhobes in check. He pledges that in the first week of a new Tory government he will set a date for a referendum on the European constitution. The Conservative Party will renegotiate fundamental parts of the existing European treaties. Out will go the social chapter - “a threat to British jobs”: ie, British capital hates it. Out will go the common fisheries policy and more besides. This stance is predicated on the notion that “If you want to bring powers back from Brussels to Britain, whatever party you’re from, come and join us”.
But quite rightly, whatever his real opinion, he dare not go any further. Europe has been the fault line which has divided the Conservative Party for the last generation and it remains fundamentally an unresolved and potentially destructive issue, only suppressed by the exigencies of a general election. One of the rare lighter moments at conference came when a plaintive William Hague was heard moaning from the fringe: “I said [in the general election campaign of 2001], ‘Come with me and I will give you back your country’, and nobody came”.

Looking back to last year, when poor Iain Duncan Smith (anybody remember him at all?), with his 17 carefully stage-managed standing ovations, was facing the axe, and conference turned into a macabre kind of beauty contest, in which an assortment of dull, grey men in dull, grey suits courted the favours of the assembled representatives, Bournemouth this year might turn out to have been a relative success, at least in terms of presentation. But there was little meaningful sound, certainly no inspirational fury and the whole thing certainly signified nothing. As any Tory with half a brain will tell you, on the basis of the current situation the best that the party can hope for electorally is to hold its current position and perhaps make some inroads into marginals. But that is tops. The idea of winning is just a mad fantasy.
As we have seen, however, much can change, even in a single week. But our job remains unchanged - to create a mass Marxist party of the working class, with a real socialist programme, in conditions which are moving significantly. The Tories are historically the most consistent and virulent of our enemies and it is good to see them in trouble. If, by chance, they perish, then we shall shed no tears, except those of joy, but the ruling class is already comfortable with the Tories’ ideological successors. Our strategic task remains to win our class from Labourism.