When exactly did blasphemous arguments become politically unacceptable? I thought disagreement was the essence of democracy. What’s the point of an election if it’s not between vastly different points of view? Indeed, it has been clear for generations that the population is most likely to engage in the political process when these disagreements are heated and when people believe that they are likely to have serious consequences for their own lives. So can we stop – or rather, can the media stop – behaving as if the occasional sparks of genuine irritation and exasperation that have enlivened the Tory leadership debates somehow discredit those involved? If Rishi Sunak really believes that Liz Truss is offering an irresponsible economic fantasy when she claims that tax increases are unnecessary, then he is absolutely right to be angry. If Liz Truss believes that Rishi Sunak’s insistence on tax increases would stunt economic growth and push the country into recession, then she is right to be outraged by his defense of them.
This is not a tea party. This is a debate on the most pressing national issue of the moment. When, as the more unimaginative narrators put it, “sparks flew” during these “blue-on-blue skirmishes,” they tended not to be personal or gratuitous. (The closest it came was Sunak’s sarcastic question to Truss about which of her previous associations – the Lib Dems or the Remainers – she most regretted, which she successfully dismissed without resorting to obscene malice.) Yes, there was some ickiness. back channel maneuvering but that’s pretty standard stuff in a leadership campaign and yes there were some blatant and blatant attempts to discredit Penny Mordaunt. But I say again that if her former colleagues sincerely believed that she should not become prime minister, then they have the right to say so. It’s a tough but fair policy.
So let’s move on to the supposedly controversial issue of the heated debate itself. Listening to all these seasoned political correspondents gasp in horror at the “unprecedented” level of animosity this intra-party row has produced, you’d think they knew nothing about the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, maybe some of them don’t, so let’s take a history lesson. The Conservative Party, which repeatedly triumphed in elections during the first of these decades, has been torn by bloody infighting for most of it. The main battle was between the Thatcherites and the Moks, who were the party’s top brass. They saw her as vulgar, spreading an outrageous, unorthodox economic theory concocted by dubious non-British intellectuals. Her cabinet (it was noted with undisguised anti-Semitism) consisted of “more Estonians than Etonians”. Her privatization project, in which backward, failing, striking nationalized industries were broken up, was famously described by Harold Macmillan (who put the “great” in grandee) as selling off the family silver. Then came the fatal party rift – a hint of things to come – between euro-enthusiasts and guardians of British sovereignty, which ultimately brought her down. Those of us who lived through those vicious times, riddled with snobbery and self-righteous arrogance, can only marvel at the mildness and civility of today’s argument.
In the 1990s it was Labour’s turn to split – and it was over a point that was a founding principle of the party. Clause IV of Labour’s 1918 constitution committed them to “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”. This means not only state ownership of industry and the distribution system for the goods it produces, but also a command economy in which state authorities control the levers of financial exchange. This program was, of course, never fully implemented under any Labor government, but it was considered a sacred statement of intent – until Tony Blair reinvented his party as New Labor and waged a totem death-fight to scrap it. Clause IV would almost certainly never have been implemented by any parliament, but the importance of this change created a bitter split with the left – and much of the trade union movement – that was never reconciled. And that, boys and girls, is the real thing: an intra-party power struggle that leaves bodies on the ground.
While we are engaged in this attempt to reconstruct what really happened in the past, we might remind those who think that Mrs Truss is delusional if she presents herself as the new Thatcher how her remarkable predecessor was viewed , when she was a candidate for leadership. Mrs Thatcher was despised by whole sections of the party (not just the upper class fanatics) because she and her team were determined to oust Edward Heath – who was then, believe it or not, revered as the very model of modern conservatism. He had made an ill-fated attempt to deal with the disastrous industrial relations crippling the country, leading to the return to power of Harold Wilson’s Labor Party. But more importantly, he was the architect of Britain’s entry into the then common market, which the Tories, who were seen as far-sighted, strongly approved. Mrs Thatcher was regarded, until her astonishingly successful leadership challenge, as an undistinguished education secretary whose most famous achievement was the abolition of free milk for pupils. Ms. Truss has a much more impressive record at this point in her career. But most pertinently, Thatcher’s personality was seen as lethal: her raspy, raspy voice and snappy manner would surely repel working-class voters and be a gift to Labour. And what happened? In the office, the lack of heat proved to be a cover for hard steel. She looked the unions and the Russians in the eye and didn’t blink. She led the initial breach of the Red Wall. In the end, she was respected (even by her opponents) more than she was liked – and in the end, that’s what matters, especially in a time of crisis.
Add Comment