Where Heath failed, now boldness is all (from The Times 19/6/2010)
June 20, 2010 by David Torrance · Leave a Comment
Exactly forty years ago today Edward Heath became Prime Minister, against the electoral tide but equipped with considerable expectations. “Heath is the hero of the hour,” wrote Cecil King in his diary, “but how long will he remain so?” The answer, of course, was not for long. His troubled legacy is now a leitmotif for right-wing Conservatives; will David Cameron, they wonder, become another Heath, or another Thatcher?
Such judgments would, of course, be premature, although initial indications suggest that he will become neither. Cameron’s deft handling of the Bloody Sunday inquiry, so badly mishandled by Heath in 1972, is proof enough that he does not share Ted’s lofty disdain for the sensitivities of Northern Ireland politics, while the Prime Minister’s softly-softly approach to public spending cuts is ostentatiously non-Thatcherite.
Heath, it should be remembered, once looked so promising, particularly when it came to the Scottish question. His surprise commitment to devolution at the so-called Declaration of Perth in 1968 not only captured the political initiative (if not the whole-hearted support of the Scottish Tory party) but marked a genuinely far-sighted departure in British constitutional politics. “It would have been politically suicidal”, wrote Heath in his memoirs, to have done anything less.
But, to quote Saint Matthew, “by their fruits ye shall know them”. In government, Heath’s devolution commitment did not bear fruit, but was instead crushed by ministerial inaction and the weight of more pressing matters. The real trouble, as Philip Ziegler observes in his new authorized biography of Heath, was that “privately he thought that the Assembly would be at worst mischievous, at best a waste of time and money”.
Therein lies a valuable lesson for Cameron: not only should he implement the Calman Commission’s recommendations swiftly and decisively, but he should demonstrate his commitment to Scottish affairs by going much further. As it stands, the proposal to give MSPs control over 10p within each income tax band is both financially dangerous and intellectual incoherent; if one accepts that the Scottish Parliament not raising the money it spends is a problem, then there is only one logical solution.
Thus Cameron should be bold where Heath faltered. Full fiscal autonomy (or “responsibility”, as a business-backed campaign would have it) offers the new Prime Minister the tantalising prospect of killing several political birds with one stone: making good on his promise to devolve genuine power to Holyrood, making a new best friend of Alex Salmond and, in the longer term, silencing the troublesome duo that is the Barnett Formula and West Lothian Question.
Not only that, but Cameron would do well in taking personal charge of the reforms instead of leaving them, as Heath did, to his Secretary of State for Scotland, the eminently forgettable Gordon Campbell (who does not feature at all in either Heath’s memoirs or Zeigler’s biography). While Heath always felt ill at ease north of the border, Cameron – as his relaxed visit to Holyrood shortly after becoming premier demonstrated – does not.
So he should sell “Calman plus”, and sell it well, presenting it as a constructive Conservative move sheltering underneath a Unionist umbrella. It would also prevent Cameron from falling into a Heath-like sulk when it comes to the attitude of the Scots. Heath is said to have been furious when they returned a mere 23 Scottish Tory MPs at the 1970 general election. Cameron has just one, not to mention a Scotland Office conveniently stuffed full of Liberal Democrats. Calman, therefore, also presents an opportunity to wrestle Scottish affairs back onto Conservative territory.
It will not, of course, be that easy, and Cameron’s best intentions – like Heath’s in 1972/73 – could easily be overtaken by what Harold Macmillan called “events, dear boy, events”. The current Prime Minister faces economic challenges that make Heath’s pale into comparison, although there is little prospect of today’s Government being brought down by striking miners. Nevertheless, when political times are tough, time-consuming constitutional reform quite naturally drops down the prime ministerial to-do list.
All the more reason, therefore, for Cameron to be decisive where Heath was cautious, radical where Heath was technocratic. By pursuing comprehensive (and sincere) fiscal devolution, he could become the great reforming prime minister that Heath never was. By his legislative fruits Cameron shall be known, and nowhere is that more true than in Scotland.
DAVID TORRANCE
ENDS
Scottish Tories
June 15, 2010 by David Torrance · Leave a Comment
I WAS chatting to a Tory MSP recently whose comments bleakly encapsulated the fundamental problem with the Scottish Conservative Party. After giving me a lengthy, and often quite perceptive, analysis of the party’s failings in terms of leadership, organisation, policies and guiding philosophy, I asked what he was going to do about it. I was greeted with a blank expression and therefore the implicit reply: absolutely nothing.
And although the recent appointment of Tory grandee Lord Sanderson to chair a review of the Scottish Tory Party’s “structures, functions and operational activity” (not, as has been widely reported, its future direction) may appear to be a response of sorts, it is in fact an excuse to do nothing at all. The commission’s recommendations have already been decided; Sanderson and his compatriots (including Sunday’s desperate addition of Lord Forsyth) simply exist to add a consultative veneer to the whole shoddy process.
And was there a single peep from any of the sixteen Conservative MSPs at Holyrood, few (if any) of whom seem to have been consulted about Sanderson’s appointment? Not at all, or at least not on the record. As usual, they simply stood idly by and took what was doled out to them from Conservative Central Office, now housed in two dusty rooms on a dusty street in Edinburgh’s New Town.
In fact, the notion that these elected members have any degree of control of the party has been well and truly blown out of the water since the general election. Instead, the party chairman – the nice but ineffectual Andrew Fulton – and his colleague (and, in truth, his boss) Mark McInnes, director of the Scottish party, are now contriving to wield absolute power, over candidate selection, organisation and, to all intents and purposes, the MSPs themselves. It is no mistake that McInnes decided the membership of Sanderson’s commission, of which he is also secretary.
The lack of formal challenge to this power grab is astonishing. A recent election debriefing is a case in point. A Tory MSP tells me that McInnes provided the group with lots of devastating insights like “we didn’t do well because we underestimated the number of people who are anti-Tory”, while paradoxically predicting that next year’s Holyrood election would add a few more Members to their ranks. Except in Glasgow, where Bill Aitken was informed of imminent defeat and thus announced his retirement the following day.
Indeed, instead of concentrating minds, the 2011 Scottish Parliament election is simply prolonging Tory agony. It cannot, so the feeble argument goes, possibly do anything radical over the next few months because with another campaign imminent it would be politically unwise. The trouble is that this analysis will probably apply in the wake of each subsequent election result. After 2011 it will be local authority elections, after that the Euro poll, and after that another general election.
And thus the once-mighty Scottish Conservative Party stumbles complacently into further decline. The charming Annabel Goldie is now (and I have for long defended her leadership against its sillier detractors) irredeemably part of the problem. She is conservative with a big “C”, to the extent that she cannot contemplate change no matter how grim the context. She is clearly in denial, thus her astonishing proclamation shortly after the election that the Tory campaign “had won a lot of praise” as had her role within it.
It has also become embarrassingly clear that David Cameron, who has tried hard in Scotland since becoming leader in 2005, has simply given up on his ancestral land. The Scottish question, in his eyes, has been answered by stuffing the Scotland Office full of Liberal Democrats, and who can blame him. The once effective cry of “no mandate” from the SNP has been stifled, and the Prime Minister can get on with governing the rest of the country.
But it doesn’t need to be that way. There exists within the group at least a trio of sharper, younger MSPs who realise instinctively what needs to be done: chiefly an all-out drive for full fiscal responsibility (what could be more Tory?), a more radical edge to wider policy, and a change in elected (and, for that matter, non-elected) personnel which was only hinted at in a recent reshuffle.
Yet even within that group there is reticence, a fear of upsetting the applecart when it clearly needs to be overturned. Alas this is nothing new. Tories with a long memory will recall a similar period of angst in the mid-1960s, when declining electoral fortunes and organisational malaise led Young Turks like George Younger, Teddy Taylor and Alick Buchanan-Smith to take the party by the scruff of the neck.
I remember a depressing feeling of familiarity when I stumbled across a letter to Younger, about whom I was writing a biography, from a former Scottish Tory official called Ian McIntyre. Not only did he lambast the lack of an ‘effective or credible Chairman’ in Central Office, but attacked amateurish organisation and the party’s basic ‘lack of credibility’ in Scotland. ‘There comes a point beyond which’, he told Younger, ‘it becomes tedious and embarrassing to be associated with failure on the Scottish Tory scale.’
That was in 1966, when the Conservatives had lost four of their 24 Scottish MPs at a general election. Senior figures considered this to be evidence of terminal decline – oh what the party would give for 20 seats today! That result did, however, instigate action and by the 1979 election the party had increased its share of the vote, and even its number of MPs, following nearly two decades of drift and decline.
So it is not impossible to turn things around, although I doubt Tory MSPs or party officials even want to try. Oliver Brown memorably remarked that following the 1967 Hamilton by-election a shiver rang along the Labour front bench looking for a spine to run up. A shiver also runs along the Conservative benches at Holyrood, but has discovered no outlet; it shivers still, and will grow more violent and damaging until it does.
During a memorable exchange at Prime Minister’s Questions back in April 1983 Denis Healey accused Mrs Thatcher of being ‘frightened’ about the verdict of the electorate. ‘Afraid? Frightened? Frit?’ she stormed, deploying her native Lincolnshire dialect. ‘Could not take it? Cannot stand it?’ I’m afraid the same is now true of certain Conservative MSPs. They too are afraid, frightened, or indeed ‘frit’, and for that they have only themselves to blame.
DAVID TORRANCE
ENDS