The political scene in Britain is quite curious at the moment. The air of unreality hangs over it. No date for the general election has been announced and it is far from certain that it would be held some time this year. Yet the two principal parties have fired their opening shots in their newspaper advertisement campaigns. One day it looks as if there is really going to be a general election next autumn (October) and the very next day the prospect fades away leaving everyone guessing what Mr Macmillan is up to. It almost appears as if he is practising some kind of Pavlovian tactics on a mass scale on the Labour party if not on the whole electorate.
The term of the present Parliament expires only in October 1964. The Conservative government commands a massive majority of 99 in the House of Commons. The controversial policy of joining the European Economic Community on which the Labour party was demanding a general election is out at least for some years. No government with such a large majority in the House of Commons can be expected to concede that it has lost the support of the majority of the electorate just because it has suffered reverses in a series of by-elections. Why then should the question of the general election this year arise at all? It is interesting that this question has not even been posed here. The Prime Minister has the right to order fresh elections any time he likes before the expiry of the term of Parliament and that settles the issue.
Surprising
Another surprising aspect of the political situation is the continuing ascendancy of Mr Macmillan in the ruling party. Last year he appeared to have staked his political life on the success of the European venture. The gamble failed last January. Equally important, all the economic arguments that he and his supporters had advanced in favour of the venture have turned out to be non-arguments because British exports to the Community have continued to rise, and the prospects of expansion at home are far from bleak. Still the party follows him faithfully, almost obediently.
It is almost forgotten that only in last July Mr Butler was appointed Deputy Prime Minister amidst popular belief that the way was being cleared for him to succeed Mr Macmillan as the party leader and possibly as Prime Minister. One needs to be excessively faithful to Mr Iain Mcleod to recall that once he was regarded to be first in the line of succession. All the rumours of past months about Mr Edward Heath and Mr Reginald Maudling being close competitors for the highest elected office in the land have long been confined to the morgues of newspaper offices in Fleet Street. Mr Macmillan’s hold on the Conservative party is all the more remarkable in view of his age. He is past 69.
In view of the continuing uncertainty about the date of the elections (my own conjecture is it will take place in May 1964) it is premature to speculate about the result. Currently the controversy here centres round the ethics of the newspaper advertisement campaigns. Critics regard the two parties guilty of practising the technique of seduction and softening up so that at the time of the polls the electorate no longer worries about the issues involved but acts in obedience to conditioned reflexes. They fear that the newspaper advertisement campaign would in course of time be followed by one on television.
Influence
These techniques have been employed during the presidential elections in the United States for years on an extensive scale both for purposes of securing the party nomination and subsequent election. In this country they were used for the first time by the Conservative party at the last general election in 1959. It is estimated that the party spent £4,68,000 on the advertisement campaign. A group of industrialists synchronised its advertisement campaign against the dangers of nationalisation and spent one and a half million pounds oil it. Experts differ on the influence these two campaigns – the Conservative campaign ran for 27 months – had on the outcome of the election.
The Labour party desisted from following the Conservative example in 1959. Mr, Hugh Gaitskell said “the whole thing is somehow false” and added, “1 like to think that in a mature democracy people reach their conclusion on the basis of evidence and argument. I do not like to think that they vote as they do because something appeals to their subconscious”. The fact, however, remained that the Conservative party increased its majority for the third time in succession. Now Labour has joined the race for conditioning the minds of the electors.
Unfortunately for the Labour party the pace will continue to be set by the Conservatives. They are the richer party. The Labour party has provided £150,000 for the advertisement campaign. Its total election fund at the moment is around £600,000. These are sizeable figures but the Conservatives can and will mobilise a fund several times bigger, and already one hears of the big industrialists planning another campaign against nationalisation. It is not that they believe that the Labour party would go in for any mad adventure if it is returned to power, but that is beside the point. The suspicion that the Labour party would do so lurks among the floating voters and it can be exploited.
Whatever the impact of the rival campaigns it is interesting to notice that so far both parties are concentrating exclusively on domestic issues though it is in the field of foreign policy that the differences are not only sharp but also meaningful. In the case of the Conservatives it obviously makes sense to do so. After the collapse of their European policy they are left with only the myth of an independent nuclear deterrent to talk about and that might not be easy to square with the American insistence on British participation in the projected multilateral nuclear force of surface vessels carrying Polaris missiles. The interesting part of the story is that the Labour party is equally shy of foreign policy issues. Mr Harold Wilson has told his party that elections can never be won on that platform but they can well be lost.
It might be rash to draw from this reluctance on the part of the two parties to project foreign policy issues into the election campaign the general conclusion that the insular British are interested only in cultivating their own gardens. But it cannot be denied that a significant section of the youth is so disposed. The results of a questionnaire circulated by New Society, a weekly magazine, illustrates this observation. Well over 7,000 readers replied. Eighty per cent of them belonged to the professions and the academic world. They might not be representative of the community as a whole but they do represent the trend among the educated youth.
Seventy per cent of the replies denied Britain was still a great power and 79 per cent said that individual happiness was more important than national greatness. While in the past greatness was associated with the empire and military strength, 71 per cent said that Britain’s future depended on education and economic prosperity. While the majority of replies were indifferent to national greatness, 42 per cent expressed a feeling of nostalgia for the past. Except for two per cent, all rejected military power as a source of future greatness. Incidentally, an opinion poll by a national daily also showed that the vast majority of the people did not care for the independent nuclear deterrent.
The Issues
The replies on the whole gave precedence to domestic issues over foreign ones. Issues like strengthening the western alliance, Commonwealth relations and entry into the European Economic Community at some future date were all given low priority in spite of the fact that these questions have been commanding enormous space on the front and editorial pages of national dailies for over a year. Similarly defence and aid to underdeveloped countries did not appear to interest the readers of New Society.
This desire to avoid involvement with the world was not the result of any kind of xenophobia. General hostility to American films and television programmes apart (there are too many of them in any case) most foreign influences suggested in one of the questions were considered beneficial rather than harmful. This inward looking approach resulted largely from the general conviction that individual happiness was what mattered and that domestic achievements would determine the country’s place in the world. The replies tell quite a story about what makes young educated Britons tick. Their responses seem to be refreshingly sane in this power crazy world.
The Times of India, 25 May 1963