Westminster politics

The state opening of Parliament in London this week formally marks the start of what looks like being the crucial session in the life of Margaret Thatcher’s government.  All the signs are that she means to go on as before, with more privatisation and anti-union laws and uncompromising opposition to European union.

None of this will go uncontested and for the first time the doings of the House of Commons will be exposed to the menace of television.  The question is whether her agenda is still relevant and her style acceptable to ordinary voters.

Last December the Tories won the Epping by-election and Labour were at 37% in the polls, seven points behind the government.  John Cole, the BBC’s political editor, nobly mixing metaphors, said Labour “didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of pushing it up the mountain” and must deal with the centre parties to have any chance in the next election.  Voters didn’t trust them to run the economy.

Perhaps there was a certain cultural determinism behind these reflections on John Cole’s part or simply that coming from Northern Ireland he is accustomed to the idea that the more right-wing party will always go on winning.  In any event the venerable pundit’s influence is limited by the fact that most people in Britain find his accent incomprehensible.

Since then everything has changed.  The position of the parties in the polls has reversed, with Labour well ahead and the Tories taking the multiple blows of the June [1989] European election defeat, the botched July reshuffle where Margaret Thatcher sacked everyone except Nigel Lawson and made John Major Foreign Secretary and the October 26 bombshell that made him Chancellor.

The Greens have come from nowhere and Paddy Ashdown’s Liberal Democrats and David Owen’s SDP have gone there, doing one another so much damage they no longer have the strength to bargain credibly with anyone.  There is a long way to go to the next general election, which may not be until mid-1992, more than two and a half years away, but for the moment Margaret Thatcher is back setting records for unpopularity.

Dail Eireann may accommodate five parties, but the House of Commons will not.  Those who approach Westminster politics as if it ran on proportional representation are bound to be disappointed.  The Greens are most unlikely to win a single seat at the next election while the SDP (with three MPs) will almost certainly be wiped out.

All those who are losing under the existing electoral system, which strongly favours the two main parties, look towards PR to solve their problems.  Increasingly this includes the left wing of the Labour Party.  Unhappy at Neil Kinnock’s abandonment of the long-standing pledge to nationalise the whole economy at some unspecified future date and the exclusion of their leaders, Benn, Heffer and Livingstone, from the Shadow Cabinet, they look to PR as a precondition to setting up a breakaway Socialist Party.

The Tories, with 44% of the votes in the 1987 election took 65% of the seats.  This huge disproportionate majority neuters not only the opposition parties but also secures Mrs Thatcher against almost all back-bench rebellions on her own side.

She can do as she likes, appoint whom she chooses.  It is as though Mr Haughey had come out of the June [1989] election with the same proportion of the vote but 110 seats in the Dail and named Sean Doherty Minister of Foreign Affairs.

But the electorate has worked out at last that under the Westminster system you either have two-party government or one-party absolutism.  The rallying of opposition is Labour’s strongest card.  As for PR, the cry of ‘justice for political parties’ finds no echo in the country.  Two is enough for most people.

The system gives rise to further oddities.  The second chamber, the House of Lords, has a permanent Conservative majority.  The Secretaries of State for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are all Tories, despite minimal support in these three places.

There is of course no Secretary of State for Southern Ireland though at heart the Conservatives have never really reconciled themselves to Irish “secession”.  He would have to be a high-ranking Tory Catholic, which would limit it Norman St John Stevas or Dr Gerard Vaughan.

The most accomplished parliamentarians are men like Tony Benn and Enoch Powell, who are at home in the cut and thrust of debate but look pedantic, oddball characters in a television-studio while Ken Livingstone’s relaxed, confidential style is ideal on Wogan.  To Powell a phrase like “the Queen in Parliament is supreme” is not a legal fiction but a shining ceremony in itself.

Margaret Thatcher comes across very badly in television interviews.  She usually appears deceitful, panicky and blustering, rather too obviously briefed on the best line of evasion to take beforehand.  To judge by the radio broadcasts she is more at home shouting over the background animal-noises of the House of Commons.

How do the two leaders compare?  Thatcher the prosecutor; against her Neil Kinnock has played the preacher and the results have been predictable - for five years she has got the better of him.

There is a horror of Nonconformist Protestantism in the fat prosperous counties of south-east England.  Kinnock’s moralistic oratory summons up for them a grim picture of the preacher in the pulpit of some stony whitewashed little chapel in the Welsh valleys, calling fervently on God and Mrs Protheroe.

Labour have still to fully shake off the image of being the party of austerity, of “pay-restraint” and Jim Callaghan telling the nation everyone should be in bed by 10.30, but they now field an impressive and youthful front-bench team.  Two Scots, Shadow Chancellor John Smith and his former deputy Gordon Brown led the fight-back, rattled and upset Chancellor and Prime Minister, breathing new heart into their own side.

Credit for sheer doggedness must go to Labour’s transport spokesman John Prescott.  It might be said the series of major disasters did his job for him, but in fact political issues don’t dramatise themselves.  His promptness pointing out government failures brought down Transport Secretary Paul Channon.

Kinnock took over the leadership in October 1983, aged 41.  Compared to the drab alternatives put up at the time he was the most obviously alive of the candidates.

He seemed to know what he believed in and why.

Since then Kinnock has served a hard apprenticeship.  He has tackled the issues of Militant, the small Marxist-Leninist organisation, the miners’ strike and the abandonment of the party’s commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament, all head on but without much sign of tactical skill.

The Westland debate early in 1986 gave Kinnock his chance to finish Thatcher.  His speech was a long rambling restatement of points Heseltine made in his resignation press-conference.  He sounded as if he barely understood them.

When he sat down Margaret Thatcher, aware always attack is the best defence, came shrieking back to say Labour’s defence policy “would leave Britain defenceless…”  Her general point capped his attempt to be specific.

Heseltine then rose and attacked Labour in identical terms.  No help for Kinnock from that quarter.  By this time Tory MPs were roaring.  Kinnock is said to have walked into the lobby that night remarking, “Sorry guys, I blew it.”

For three years it looked as though that might be carved on his tombstone.

Problems of style dogged Kinnock too.  He took his cue from Mrs Thatcher.  At first he promised a darting intuitive style of leadership but as he settled in he began to appear merely bumptious.

He seized the idea that winners project confidence while losers are defensive and developed his own brand of triumphalism.  He turned from nice guy to winking, leering, thumbs-upping embarrassment.

And he lost.

Labour won back just three seats in 1987 compared with the crushing defeat four years earlier, which it had been all too easy to blame on Michael Foot

There are still four hundred Tories to two hundred Labour MPs in the House of Commons.

So the problems confronting Neil Kinnock has been how to change from moralist to pragmatist without looking like a humbug.  Crucially he has now almost grasped that you can’t defend a country with a disarmament policy.  That may have convinced some in Whitehall he would be “a pleasure to work with” - which is hard to believe of Mrs Thatcher.

Her Cabinet is divided between Europe and America.  That was the breach that led both Heseltine and Lawson to quit.  In fact she seemed almost alone in her doglike loyalty to Washington.  Without Mrs Thatcher being there it seems almost all her colleagues would drift back in the other direction.

The big story this year and last year was the split between Thatcher and Lawson.  His heedless foot-to-the-floor policies of economic acceleration jeopardized the ‘necessary level of unemployment’ beloved of monetarists.

But the Lawson Boom was crucial in securing victory in 1987 and Mrs Thatcher dared not sack her Chancellor.  Instead she went the long way round and seems to have set out to make  life impossible for him.  Appropriately the breaking-point came over the EMS and hostility to it from Professor Alan Walters, the PM’s “part-time economic adviser”, who lives in America.  One of many links to the US New Right who seem to have significant influence on the Thatcherite agenda, particularly the commitment to scrap the NHS - known in America by the sinister name of “socialized medicine”.

When Lawson was in trouble late last year John Major was touted as the sensible candidate to take over as Chancellor while Cecil Parkinson - ‘the man who had a baby’ - a longtime Thatcher favourite was mentioned as the silly candidate.  That equation seemed to favour Parkinson but Major ended up holding  the baby.

However the bad news is the 1990 Budget is likely to be a tough one regardless, with spending-cuts and higher taxes.  That is obviously very bad news for Ireland.

Recession would change political priorities.  Probably it would kill the environment as a major issue, as happened in the Seventies.

A return to the punitive high-unemployment policies of 1981 in Britain is a grim prospect.  But who knows if Mrs Thatcher will still be making the short trip from Downing Street to the Commons twice a week for Prime Minister’s Questions next spring?

She has to go sometime and Michael Heseltine, the first Euro-martyr in British politics, is ideally placed to be an appropriate pre-1992 Prime Minister.  There is plenty of scope for drama from the panelled chamber of the House of Commons before then.

Oh, and John Cole thinks Labour “still have a stiff mountain to climb”.

11 November 1989