New attitude on political Right

Press, 29 June 1983, Page 12

New attitude on political Right

Representatives of conservative parties from 19 countries met recently in London to launch a new International Democrat Union. The president of the National Party, Mrs Sue Wood, represented New Zealand. Leading advocates of the new association are the British Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, and the West German Chancellor, Mr Kohl. Here, Gwynne Dyer in London assesses the new generation of Right-wing politicians in Western democracies.

One of the few good lines in Britain’s recent election campaign was delivered by Mr Clement Freud, a member of Parliament whose main previous claim to fame was doing dog-food commercials on television. “If President Reagan were alive today,” Mr Freud remarked, “he would have voted for Mrs Thatcher.” The implication that leaders like President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher are spectres from a dead past, resurrected to blight the present by some inexplicable accident, is a common attitude among those people whose views of politics were formed in the 1950 s and 19605. Back then, consensus reigned, and the conservatives who got elected were tame, reasonable people like President Eisenhower in the United States, Mr Macmillan in Britain, and Dr Adenauer in West Germany. The new generation who now dominate conservative politics in

Western democracies — not just Mr Reagan and Mrs Thatcher, but people such as Mr Menachem Begin in Israel, Mr Franz-Josef Strauss in West Germany, and Mr Jacques Chirac in France — are not accidental throwbacks to some distant past. They are a new phenomenon: a genuinely populist Right which holds its ideological convictions as firmly as the Left. Indeed, they are often more enthusiastic about their beliefs than the politicians of the socialdemocratic Left. In Britain, for instance, Mrs Thatcher managed once again to sell the electorate her vision of a Britain reinvigorated by the Victorian virtues and thereby achieving reincarnation as a leading industrial power, despite the absence of any evidence that her first four years in office had begun to accomplish this transformation. By contrast, the Labour Party and the Liberal-Social Democratic Alliance seemed throughout the

campaign to be peddling old formulas and worn-out ideas. In Professor Ralf Dahrendorfs unkind phrase: “They promise a better yesterday.” And so they were swept away by Mrs Thatcher’s landslide victory. It is not that the old formulas and ideas are necessarily inappropriate for the present situation. Indeed, countries that have stuck to the policies of the old CentreLeft consensus, such as Sweden, Austria and Norway, have generally weathered the long recession better economically than those where the new Right has triumphed. Yesterday was better, but ideas now seem to count for more than performance. In most Western countries, the radical Right has managed to seize the ideological high ground. Thus Mrs Thatcher can win re-election in Britain in spite of three million unemployed (and get about half the working-class vote). President Reagan is a good prospect for reelection in 1984, in spite of the highest unemployment in the United States since the 19305. It is, of course, quite common for voters to move to the Right during times of economic hardship. Political experiments are for times of prosperity, when people feel they can afford to take a few chances in the hope of getting something better, and generally believe that things will go on getting better.

However, that simply explains why conservative politicians can do well in a recession. It does not account for the kind of conservative politicians who now dominate the scene: people for whom, in Vernon Bogdanor’s phrase, “the cure is to be found not in managing the economy, but in a radical moral transformation.” For leaders like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Menachem Begin, everything is simple. My own nation is always right, other countries who oppose us are evil, and evil responds only to force. Economics is simply a question of private morality writ large: if we only work hard and balance our Budget (not that they necessarily achieve the latter), everything will come right. Self-discipline, self-reliance and moral rectitude are all that is needed. How do we know all this is true? God says so. At the basis of the new Right’s convictions, almost always, is a religious fundamentalism which sees the world in simplistic terms. The contrast could not be greater with the kind of conservatism that was typefied by men such as Eisenhower and Macmillan: a cautious, realistic conservatism that saw the world as an infinitely complex and morally subtle place, and dealt with it in an essentially managerial style. The great conservative parties of the West still contain many people of this out-

look, but they no longer determine the style. Conservative parties have always had a proportion of ideological warriors, but the fact that they are now dominant is probably due to a change in the electorate. Economic growth and changing patterns of employment during the last quarter-century have shifted a large part of the old manual working class in industrialised countries into the skilled working class and the lower middle class. Those are traditionally the classes that respond most readily to a radical populist approach. The parties have shifted their policies to suit the new market. In the United States in 1980, for example, Mr Reagan got a substantial share of the votes of traditionally Democratic groups such as northern Catholics and orthodox Jews, while in Israel Mr Begin depends heavily on the support of Oriental immigrants and his Labour opponents do better in the middle and upper-middle classes. The change is particularly clear in Britain, where since 1971 the non-manual working class — which tends to adopt the attitudes of the lower middle class — has grown from just over a third of the population to about 50 per cent. These voters are the bedrock of Mrs Thatcher’s support, and she tells them what they want to hear. Obviously, it works.