Britain’s Conservative Party presses on

Press, 22 October 1980, Page 22

Britain’s Conservative Party presses on

PETER JENKINS, in the “Guardian,” London, commenting on the Conservative Party conference.

Press on . gardless was the theme of this year’s Conservative Party Conference and that doesn’t make much’ of a story. It doesn’t make much of a story be. cause none of us can say how it will end. Sir Geoffrey Howe pressed on regardless in his speech, although perhaps he was paying regard to the cheeky advice of Professor J. K. Galbraith, namely “please whatever you do, don’t give up, or Milton Friedman will be able to say ‘it would worked, if only you’d kept going’.” Sir Keith Joseph pressed on reg-.rdless and also Mr James Prior, along his somewhat different road. That was Mrs Thatcher’s message too.

Only wait and see — wait and see what happens when unemployment reaches three million, wait and see what happens when the entrepreneurial renaissance fails to materialise etc, etc, etc. One of the questions asked at Brighton this month was whether Mrs Thatcher can take advantage of the disarray on the Left and move the Conservative Party decisively into the Centre of British politics. Some of her colleagues, in their wetter moments, wonder whether it might not be possible even now to mitigate the harshness of -iew which underlies the Government’s monetarist policies with a “one nation” rhetoric.

The answer, I fear, is “no.” The law and order debate at a Conservative Party

So what is there to say?

Conference is invariably an instructive event and so it was this year. One young speaker came to the rostrum and delivered a caricature of the speeches we expect to hear rt Conservative Party Conferences — restore capital .mishment, and so on: as he got to the point of abusing “t-mC. do-gooders” the TV cameras cut away and there was Mrs Thatcher, applauding nicely. Vignettes of this kind confirm me in my »iew that political attitudes generally hang together. That is to say there is a connection between Mrs Thatcher’s belief in. for example, hanging and her belief that control of the money supply is an effi live instrument of social control. Con nant with such attitudes is the belief that detente is the international equivalent of, say, social work. Indeed, one could draw up a complete p Tile of th: Conservative Party

version cf what the Frankfurt School called the “authoritarian personality” whose most bizarre facet would be correlation of a love of animals (foxes and hares excepted) with the wish to see short, sharp shocks administered to human beings. Attitudes to authority seem to me to be at the heart of political differences and that is one reason why 1 don’t find it easy to understand why Labour Party people who don’t agree with, say, compulsory planning agreements are told “go and join the Tories." Attitudes to authority stem in large part from different views of human nature and the archetypal difference between Left and Right is between those w’ o regard man as susceptible to social improvement and the j who think that by an J . large, there’s not much that can be done for him.

It is a miserable fluke of history’,, the awful fact of our economic decline, which has led us to believe that the essential diff ences of political belief have to do with tedious questions of economic organisation. Thatcherism and Bennery are dismal mirror ideologi s. It wouldn’t be fair to lump together all the people who make up the Conservative Party or attend its conference and leas', of ’all to judge the party by its crime and punishment freaks. Nevertheless, there are fundamental differences between people whose instinct is to support the police, even if that means condoning abuses of the individual, and those whose instinct is the individual even if that means seme undermining of the morale of the police. However nothing so repels one from the Conservative Party than its callous attitude towards pris-

ons. Mr Whitelaw knows how awful and how serious the crisis in the prison system is. '.nd he told the conference that this was .the greatest challenge facing him as Home Secretary, but he still didn't dare fly far in the face of his party’s primitive and relributionist . instincts.

I overheard a conversation between two Tory grandees from the sticks who had. visited Mr Whitelaw's “shortsharp shock” centre, at Newhall in Yorkshire. Willie had put some wet in charge, the whole place was a nit of a skive, reminded them of a holiday camp, and so on. These are some of the attitudes which underlie the talk about "one nation” and all that Disraelian jazz and if we hear any of that from Mrs Thatcher, we might bear in mind her approval of nasty sneering jibes against people who try to “do good.”