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From Socialist Worker, No. 93, 19 October 1968, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Conservative Shadow-Cabinet and Edward Heath have emerged fairly triumphant from this year’s party Conference.
Against all the odds, they succeeded in reconciling the policies of big business with the social dissatisfaction of big businesses’ most reliable supporter small business, and the ‘county’ people.
But it wasn’t an easy victory and next time it will be a lot harder.
All existing political parties serve the state and thus the owners of society. It has been carefully built into the very framework of their existence.
But at times they are also forced from within to reflect certain class movements in society. This is the case with the Conservative Party at present and the upper layers of the middle classes.
Traditionally the leadership of the Conservative Party has never bowed down before its membership. In no period was this as obvious as when Harold Macmillan was leader.
As Prime Minister he was all the constituency backwoodsmen were against and the Parliamentary Conservative Party, Cabinet and big business were for: the end of imperialism and ‘the wind of change’ in Africa, the approach to the Common Market, the social policies of ‘you’ve never had it so good’.
He got away with it not only because God was in his heaven (the Conservative Party believes in its natural right to govern) but also because all was right with their world.
This has changed.
What has happened is that in the past two years there has been an immense acceleration of the rationalisation process in British capitalism. Among public companies (that is just the largest companies; the very small ones that are still private are not shown) the growth of mergers and monopolies has been enormous.
The small businessman and the rest of the upper layers of the middle class are witnessing their own destruction.
The vicars, the brigadiers and the county women cannot but help react as they experience part of the same social movement They react through the only ideology they have, nationalism and racialism, built on the individualism of their social existence. And they react through the only organisation that they have the Conservative Party.
It was during last year’s conference that Enoch Powell began his series of flash-point speeches at constituency meetings, pulling together issues to build a coherent (though contradictory and irrational) set of right-wing explanations, to voice directly the fears and prejudices the middle class holds.
This first speech was on Asian immigration from Kenya. From this he developed his position into Why are there social upheavals? (answer the students) and Why is there social distress? (answer the immigrants, the students and the foreign bankers).
In this attempt to create a simple ‘out-group’ explanation of the economic pressures on the middle class at present he was premature. This social class is totally reactionary at present.
It is caught between big business and the organised workers, and the threat of organisation in their own small businesses. But it is not yet ready for an organised, irrational, radical right-wing ‘philosophy’.
That is why last week’s Tory conference was a mixture of irrational prejudice and an attempt to find a rational economic solution to middle-class problems. The triumph of the Shadow Cabinet was that it couched the perfect big business remedy to the present economic difficulties in terms appreciated by small businessmen and other sections of the ‘petty bourgeoisie’.
Iain Macleod’s economic vision of an ‘economy of choice’, (‘a charge on spending rather than a penalty on earnings’) is totally reactionary in the ‘positive’ rational sense that the Conference was looking for.
With lower rates of tax and surtax and SET to be replaced by a value-added tax (which will not affect the ‘small trader’) it answers all the charges against the Conservatives for lack of policy and creeping ‘socialism’.
The burden of taxation will, through much higher prices, be shifted further on to those who pay nearly all of it already. Old age pensioners pay 50 per cent of their pensions on indirect purchasing taxes.
It is the most regressive tax system possible. A value-added tax will be of such dimensions that it will severely affect the purchasing power of the whole working class if it comes into operation. It is coupled of course with a ‘voluntary’ incomes policy.
This cut in the purchasing power of the workers will cut imports and increase exports. Big business and the state will thus be provided with the wherewithal to pay back the £2,000m. debt abroad, leaving ‘capital’ free to wander the face of the earth.
It will also provide for the righteous (those with merit, as proved by their higher earnings) to spit on the unrighteous (those with low earnings) and administer charity to them in the name of ‘help where it is most needed’.
This policy is precisely the one to rally the Conservatives on. But for how long?
The movement among the delegates at the conference springs from the constituencies and from the much larger middle-class movement. The attack on them from big business is not going to stop.
In struggles with their own workers and foreign competition, the owners of large-scale production are forced to attack the people nearest to them. The tremendous increase in political and economic tensions which produced the present round of mergers, re-organisation and ‘golden handshakes’, is not going to stop. And what happens then?
Last Friday, Enoch Powell proposed the abolition of all the main grants for big business (investment grants and those for development areas a saving of £610 million) and the abolition of the organisation which is at present master-minding the mergers, the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation). This with the abolition of housing subsidies (also an Iain Macleod policy) would enable tax to be cut by half.
By next year, or the year after, if the present shake-up continues, the constituency Conservative parties may well turn to demanding these policies and couple them with all the vicious racialism that they are capable of.
The vote for Heath's immigration policy was not a turn away from such a racialism. Never in his speeches has Powell advocated anything that wasn’t already official Conservative Party policy (even last May) i.e. negligible immigration and paid repatriation.
Mr. Edward Heath is left in the unenviable position of having to produce policies which give concessions to small business but are basically on behalf of big business. The financial plea the Tories made at last year’s conference for £2m from their supporters did not get the immediate response they had expected.
Heath is caught between offending the giants (and perhaps driving them into the arms of the Labour Party) and destroying his own party base. Heath, unlike Hogg, has no connections with this base. He was voted in from the Parliamentary Conservative Party.
The effects of any rationalisation of British industry are going to be very hard on the parasitic, prejudiced class that live directly or indirectly off the big owners. Mr. Heath has to produce positive policies for this reorganisation of industry (the depression of living standards is only half way there) and yet retain his own supporters, who never really supported him in the first place.
Because of the link between economic and social policies, he cannot allow the racialist feeling to get too far out of hand unless it rebounds on him in a series of small-trader economic proposals.
There is nothing incompatible in big business and racialism, but there is something very incompatible between big business and small business economic policies. And Mr. Heath knows it.
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