The Next Election

It is nearly as difficult to discover what will decide the next General Election as it is to predict its outcome. The party organizations, their leaders, and their platforms are all at the moment wonderfully elusive quantities, and the party conferences have suggested that they are likely to remain so for some time.

Harold Macmillan, as I tried to show in the first of these articles, has withheld assurance to the new Tory progressives that they at last hold the party's reins. His Cabinet changes have distributed the work load of critical decisions among a capable crop of men, but he has failed to supply the Government with a strong, central policy-making organism.

Nor is Labour much better off. At the Blackpool conference Hugh Gaitskell managed to persuade the delegates to adopt a moderate platform ("Signposts for the Sixties") and to vote overwhelmingly against the unilateral disarmament policy that they approved last year. The unilateralist left under Frank Cousins has growled that it will not be reconciled to defeat, and indeed Mr. Cousins has not done too badly. Although the majority of the party's National Executive is Gaitskellite, the minority is almost exclusively, extremely and intransigeantly leftist.

So he remains glued to Blackpool, while Mr. Macmillan holds deep discourse only with himself. And the result is that from neither conference emerges much sense of what is really taking place in Britain, of the changes that mean far more to the electorate than the issue-juggling on party platforms.

One of these changes lies in the distasteful and seemingly anachronistic region of class antagonism, which has been perhaps the most striking and most paradoxical social conflict of postwar England. Often enough this antagonism is jovially reduced to terms of differences in class mannerisms (as in a Punch series last summer), yet the behaviour of postwar politicians suggests strongly that it is still to be taken quite seriously.

The Conservatives, although they have been in power for a decade, are still considered the party of the well-to-do. They neatly evaded the problem of class in the Election of 1959 by running on a platform of material prosperity--implying rather crassly that if everyone were well-to-do, everyone's antagonism would disappear. This line has, of course, lost much of its appeal since Selwyn Lloyd's austere economic reforms, and Mr. Macmillan (who has grown vaguer and vaguer in the last two years) was content at the Brighton conference to substitute for "prosperity" a few irritating cliches about a "unified Britain."

Labour, which recruits its members from all classes, nonetheless suffers from its extremists for more or less the same reasons. Mr. Cousins would like nothing better than to lead a general strike, and, if he had the chance, to nationalize practically every major industry. At the moment when Mr. Gaitskell pleas earnestly for a classless society the leftists manage to sharpen and accentuate class differences.

The other question with which the conferences significantly did not deal is that of Britain's entrance into the Common Market. Both parties, in fact, appear to think that the electorate couldn't care less about the Common Market. At Brighton, Mr. Macmillan mentioned neither that the Government had been shockingly hesitant and inconsistent about applying for membership in the E.E.C. nor even that Britain could not join without sacrificing to some degree Commonwealth relations. At Blackpool, Labour refused to come to any decision at all; resolutions for and against were tabled rapidly, and there was an end to it.

The issues of class and of the Common Market will both affect the electorate profoundly, but of all the party leaders, Mr. Gaitskell alone seems to be aware of it. Mr. Macmillan retreats inscrutably into Downing Street; Jo Grimond of the Liberals congratulates himself on the results of by-elections, tears down the other parties, and constructs a preposterous domestic platform. "Nice people, the British," Mr. Gaitskell imagined other nations saying shortly, "easy-going, kindly, tolerant; they have had a glorious past. The only trouble is their stagnation--somehow they have lost out, lost their dynamic." His is a very palpable fear; but if the dynamic is to be restored it must be done by the parties.