WATCHING THE POLITICAL caricatures at the Tory Party conference in Blackpool last week, I recalled Edward Thompson’s lament that he belonged to ‘an emaciated political tradition, encapsulated within a hostile national culture’. Thompson described this country as his ‘reluctant host’, suggesting that those who oppose Toryism are a beleaguered minority.
I can well understand his sense of despair; millions of people all over Britain will have felt the same as they watched the precocious Peter Lilley and the unctuous Michael Howard competing for Armband of the Week. Their targets were the vulnerable: the old, the young, the disabled, single parents and those men and women who exercise and defend the right to work for more than a pittance, and in safety.
Under Margaret Thatcher and John Major much has been achieved in these areas. More than ten million British workers now live in poverty. A quarter of all British children are growing up in poverty. As in the early nineteenth century, new prisons are to be built to meet the predictable boom in petty crime.
Of course, there will be no new prisons for those who owe £23,000 million in unpaid corporation tax and £1,600 million in unpaid Value Added Tax; and for those who engage in City fraud amounting to £5,300 million every year. Lilley and Howard said nothing about the £12,000 million in public money lost in the privatising of the water, gas and electricity industries; and the decimation of the pits that means that foreign coal has to be imported; and the acceptable corruption.
Tory Britain is not a long way from corrupt Italy. Lo stile è diverso. Indeed, acceptable corruption is evident at every level of the Tory pyramid, from the selling of knighthoods (£500,000 in party ‘donations’; individuals usually no less than £50,000), to the ‘packing’ of health trusts with the acolytes and funders of the Tory Party, to the manipulation of official statistics, to the lying that is now part of ministerial duty, as the enquiry under the judge, Lord Justice Scott, has shown.
The Scott inquiry is an aberration. Meant as a device to silence parliamentary debate following the scandalous behaviour of ministers in the Matrix Churchill affair, it has provided a glimpse, no more, of the rottenness of state power in Britain, or how the system works. It has shown how the Government embarked on a cover-up in which it was ready to see innocent businessmen go to prison rather than admit that it had deceived Parliament.
In the witness box ministers have blamed their officials, and the officials have charted the extent of the lying. Margaret Thatcher has been directly implicated in approving arms exports to Saddam Hussein, while denying everything. John Major has also denied everything, in spite of the fact that he was the chief secretary to the Treasury who increased export credits to Iraq, and foreign secretary when the guidelines for trade with Iraq were being administered by William Waldegrave, his minister of state, and chancellor when Customs and Excise reported to his private office that it had begun investigating Matrix Churchill, and prime minister when he discussed with Alan Clark, a defence minister, the export of arms to Iraq. Appearing before the enquiry, Major uttered this gem: ‘One of the charges at the time was that in some way, because I had been foreign secretary, chancellor of the exchequer and prime minister, I must have known what was going on.’15
There may at times be a farcical ‘carry on’ element to Tory corruption, but corruption it is. And ordinary Tories apparently believe it is. In a poll taken by the Daily Telegraph, 64 per cent of its readers found the government most of them had voted for ‘disreputable’ and ‘sleazy’.16
Here, I disagree with Edward Thompson: I believe that Toryism as the ‘host culture’ is an illusion, albeit a powerful one. What it has, above all, is an unchallenged voice. For example, Thatcher was not a ‘unique political force’, as her mythmakers contend. What she did was to popularise petit-bourgeois reaction and to silence any opposing voice. Indeed, her greatest single achievement was the co-opting of British liberalism: from the liberal media to the Labour Party.
The liberal intelligentsia, in the press and academia, never seriously exposed Thatcherism by denouncing its tactics and decoding its language. Fraudulent notions of ‘freedom’, ‘choice’, ‘enterprise’, ‘modernising’ (as in Cruise missiles and the Labour Party), ‘family values’ and ‘reform’ were not only allowed to become common usage, but were adopted by those once proud of their liberal credentials.
Moreover, liberal celebration of the rigged ‘market’ was always assured; count the number of times the BBC refers to ‘economic reforms’, a propaganda term. In a recent Panorama, the falsehoods of the Government’s current assault on single mothers were reinforced with some of the most reactionary voices in Britain, dubious statistics from America and the reporter’s judgmental question: ‘Should we accept single mothers as the norm?’17
Who are ‘we’? ‘We’ are those who work to and speak for a Tory agenda while pretending otherwise. ‘We’ are the New Right. The present Labour Party leadership, who are Thatcher’s greatest triumph, are every bit as effective as Lilley and Howard. ‘We are the party of law and order,’ announced Tony Blair in Brighton, no doubt prompting Michael Howard to up the ante one week later.18 This is the essence of the relationship between the two party leaderships. Gordon Brown says he will not take Value Added Tax off fuel; Kenneth Clarke concurs. David Blunkett says there is ‘not enough productivity’ in certain London hospitals; Virginia Bottomley agrees and promises to close them. Barry Sheerman, from Labour’s front bench, urges the minister for defence procurement to sell more British arms to tyrants like the Emir of Kuwait; the minister assures him he will do his best. And so the pattern proceeds, with each side pushing the other along the same sectarian path.
For this reason the Labour Party conference was significant. The ‘broad church’ was finally demolished, and John Smith’s ‘triumph’ had nothing to do with the ‘democratic principles enshrined in one man, one vote’, but in the historic fact that Labour’s New Right is finally accepted by the media.
The official Tory, as well as the liberal, media understand the scale of the New Right’s achievement: that Labour has finally rejected Anthony Crosland’s argument, which spoke for the party’s once dominant old right, that ‘a concerted attack on the maldistribution of wealth should be part of Labour’s policy’. That last veil has now been dropped. At Brighton, the term ‘one member, one vote’ represented an attack not on the trade union establishment, but on the party’s remaining egalitarian values. In order to give John Smith his media triumph, trade union leaders reversed the democratic decisions of their rank and file. For example, 750 delegates of the Union of Communication Workers voted against Smith’s proposals. At Brighton, just nineteen delegates went against them.
It is this kind of collaboration that has served to blunt real political opposition in Britain. When the party conference voted democratically against the nonsense of keeping Trident, the leadership demonstrated its commitment to ‘democracy’ by ignoring it.
In my experience, Britain’s ‘host culture’ is a rich mosaic of multicultural life: of people who enjoy both their differences and their sense of community and owe no allegiance to an ancien régime or Toryism’s ‘modernised’ successor. Like Social Trends, a Guardian poll has found that Britons are now well to the left of all the ‘mainstream’ parties. Clear majorities believe that there is ‘one law for the rich and one for the poor’; that privatisation should be stopped; that there should be higher taxes; that it is more important to reduce unemployment than to control inflation.19 In other words, those who have ‘put out the people’s eyes’, to paraphrase Milton, have not blinded them.