A lesson from Tory history calls for ‘fair play between all classes’ (The Times 17-7-2010)
July 19, 2010 by David Torrance
POLITICAL parties often lose sight of their own histories. The beleaguered Scottish Tory Party, for example, would do well to revisit the writings of a largely forgotten Conservative thinker. “Until our educated and politically minded democracy has become predominantly a property-owning democracy,” declared Noel Skelton in 1923, “neither the national equilibrium nor the balance of the life of the individual will be restored.”
With that paragraph Skelton – an obscure but nevertheless significant figure – contributed a memorable phrase and an enduring concept to the modern political lexicon. For Skelton, the Unionist MP for Perth in the 1920s and early ‘30s, the “property-owning democracy” was the cornerstone of what he called “Constructive Conservatism”, the most important component of the party’s “view of life”.
Later, this was interpreted to mean simply home ownership, characterised by Margaret Thatcher’s promotion of council house sales, although Skelton intended it to mean much more than that. He wanted individuals to have a stake in every layer of society, in government and industry as well as individual property. It was a remarkably influential idea. A trio of prime ministers – Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home – all pay homage to Skelton in their memoirs, while David Cameron is familiar with the phraseology, if not the man himself.
Skelton’s shrewd analysis of his political era also has much to teach the contemporary Conservative Party, not least its moribund northern outpost. Winning Perth for the first time in 1922, he told his constituents that the “future duty of Conservatives was clear”. “In a democracy their politics must be all pervading,” he said. “They must not only be Unionists on polling day but every day, and all the day.”
Skelton also realised that the party could not regard any system of government “as necessarily permanent or final”. If there was to be “some devolution, some alteration in the present system”, he said in the early 1930s, Scotland would “come to that new duty and that new responsibility not as a minor member, not as inferior to England; she will come to it with a full knowledge of Parliamentary life, and she will come because she is ready.”
He was, therefore, a Nationalist and a Unionist, Scottish and British, a useful political balancing act his successors have lost sight of, and much to their cost. “If Conservatives are not to fight with one hand tied behind their backs,” Skelton also proclaimed, “the active principles of Conservatism must be felt anew, thought anew, promulgated anew.” Not a bad mission statement for the modern Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party.
Skelton believed in a holistic approach to politics, or a coherent “view of life”. That means Messrs Sanderson and Brownlee need to think beyond organisational tinkering and a new policy initiative here and there. The Scottish Conservative “view of life” has to permeate everything the party does, both politically and in terms of presentation.
What does that mean in practice? Skelton was the first to recognise the need for Conservatives to move beyond their traditional association with privilege and wealth, and although the party has made great strides in achieving this since the 1920s the perception, particularly in Scotland, is very different. The next Scottish Tory manifesto should, therefore, emphasise what Skelton characterised as “fair play between all classes and the desire of each to farther the common weal”. Skelton’s progressive Conservatism worked in the inter-war era and can, with a little refreshment, work again.
David Torrance’s biography, Noel Skelton and the Property-Owning Democracy, is available now from Biteback Publishing.
Where Heath failed, now boldness is all (from The Times 19/6/2010)
June 20, 2010 by David Torrance
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
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
Thoughts from the Rose Garden
May 13, 2010 by David Torrance
In a way it doesn’t bode well for the security of the new Coalition Government. Yesterday I found myself in Downing Street filming a piece-to-camera for the STV programme “Politics Now”. Hearing that the first joint David Cameron/Nick Clegg press conference was about to begin in the Rose Garden to the rear of Number 10, I decided to chance my luck and join the throng of Lobby journalists queuing up to attend.
“Do you have a Lobby pass?” asked a Number 10 press officer. “Erm, no, I don’t,” I replied, hastily adding that I’d just called the press office and that they’d assured me it would be fine. “Wait over there,” was my curt instruction. “Are you with the foreign media?” asked another functionary. “No,” I replied (“not yet” I added, inwardly). Eventually, as it became clear Dave and Nick were about to appear, I was ushered into the Garden as another official cried: “No more! No more!”
The setting was vaguely familiar, no doubt from half-remembered 1995 images of John Major’s famous “back me or sack me” press conference, which also took place in the Rose Garden. Indeed, The Times journalist Peter Riddell later told me that Sir John’s bold move sprang immediately to mind as he watched the new Prime Minister and his Deputy. Only in England could a patch of land devoted to flowering shrubs bear witness to such political turning points.
And what a double act they proved to be. Strolling, almost nonchalantly, up to their respective podiums, the chemistry was obvious from their body language. The similarity of their backgrounds has attracted much comment, but it is a valid observation: they had the aura of two public schoolboys – reunited after a decade or so – finding that they still had much in common. Clegg could never have gelled with Gordon Brown; the outgoing Prime Minister simply wasn’t cut from the same cloth.
The Prime Minister’s language was clear, concise, and subtly evangelical. “We’re not just announcing a new Government and new ministers,” he declared, “we’re announcing a new politics.” It could so easily have sounded insincere, but somehow Cameron pulled it off. “It can be an historic and seismic shift in our political landscape.” Every word became loaded. When the PM referred to “our Liberal-Conservative Government”, it was hardly an accident that “Liberal” had taken precedence over “Conservative”.
Then it was over to Nick. “We are different parties and have different ideas,” he protested, clearly trying to pre-empt mischievous questions from the assembled hacks. “There will be bumps and scrapes along the way.” Indeed there will, but watching the pair of them it was difficult to foresee any tension between leader and deputy. Between and within their respective parties perhaps, but surely not between Dave and Nick?
One journalist wasn’t going to let them off so easily, reminding Cameron that he’d once replied “Nick Clegg” when asked to tell his favourite joke. The PM fielded this well, pointing out that everyone would have previous utterances thrown back at them, but Clegg seemed surprised. “Did you say that?” he asked; “I’m afraid I did,” replied Cameron bashfully. “Right, I’m off,” indicated Clegg, as if making to leave. “Come back!” quipped DC. Again, it could have been cheesy and contrived. Somehow it wasn’t.
It was easy to get swept up in all of this, and I found myself grinning involuntarily as I hovered behind the big beasts of the press pack, who were (quite rightly) more cynical than I was. Yet the double act was a convincing performance if this was, as Labour claimed, “a deal with the devil”, nothing more than a shoddy compromise borne of political necessity. If it is that, then it seems clear that the two parties’ respective leaders (at least) are prepared to give it their best shot.
Then they were off, walking in that same nonchalant manner back into Number 10, departing just before a few raindrops emanated from an overcast sky which, had it broken sooner, would have rained on the new Coalition’s parade and provided the media with a rather ominous metaphor for their evening reports. It could be the first of many lucky escapes for a fascinating new experiment, and an equally fascinating partnership, in British politics.
ENDS
Billy Wolfe
March 20, 2010 by David Torrance
There’s a fine obituary of the former SNP leader Billy Wolfe in today’s Independent, written by the Education Secretary Mike Russell. There’s also an obituary by me in today’s Herald, as well as interesting television accounts by Bernard Ponsonby of STV and on the BBC website. Finally, there’s a good account of the tributes to Wolfe – including a minute’s silence at the opening of the SNP pre-election conference this weekend – by Robbie Dinwoodie, also in the Herald.