The Path to Power

over the years.

Such activity, though, was insignificant as regards the overall position of the Conservative Party nationally. Looking back, one can see that there were two alternative strategies for the Party to have followed. Either it could have accommodated the collectivism of the times, though seeking to lessen its impact where possible, trying to slow down the leftward march through our institutions and to retain some scope for individual choice and free enterprise. Or it could have fought collectivism root and branch, seeking to persuade national opinion that 1945 represented a wrong turning from the country’s destined path. In fact, it sought to do both. Voices were raised in favour of a radical onslaught against collectivism, but in opposition the predominant view was that pragmatism represented the best path back to government.

The Party document which came nearest to embodying the pragmatic approach was The Industrial Charter, which appeared in May 1947. In a sense, it was no new departure: indeed, continuity and consensus were its underlying themes. Just as the wartime 1944 Employment Policy White Paper represented a compromise with Keynesianism — combining the emphasis on counter-cyclical public spending to sustain demand and employment with more orthodox observations about efficiency, competitiveness and mobility — so The Industrial Charter represented a compromise between corporatism and free enterprise. The Industrial Charter defended economic planning, industrial ‘partnership’ and workers’ ‘consultation’; but it continued to emphasize the need for fewer controls, fewer civil servants and modestly lower taxation. And this tension continued in the Conservative Party throughout the 1950s and sixties. The Industrial Charter gave us all something to say, and it kept the Party united. But such documents hardly made the pulse beat faster. Nor were they important in returning the Party to power. It was, in fact, the economic failures of the Labour Government — in particular the February 1947 fuel crisis and the devaluation of sterling in 1949 — rather than Conservative Party initiatives which turned the political tide in our favour.

Documents like The Industrial Charter gingerly avoided the real battleground on which socialism ultimately had to be defeated. In the end, Churchill was right. Whether socialism needed a ‘Gestapo’ as it did in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, or just those banal and bureaucratic instruments of coercion, confiscatory taxation, nationalization and oppressive regulation employed in the West, ultimately depended only on the degree of socialism desired. In diminishing economic freedom, the socialists had embarked on a course which, if pursued to its ultimate destination, would mean the extinction of all freedom. I had no doubt myself about the truth of this proposition. But for some Tories it was always a difficult argument to take. The traditional economic liberalism which constituted so important a part of my political make-up — and which Edmund Burke himself embraced — was often alien and uncongenial to Conservatives from a more elevated social background. It was, after all, none other than Harold Macmillan who in 1938 proposed in his influential book The Middle Way to extend state control and planning over a wide range of production and services. Other Conservatives were inhospitable to theory of any kind. They took J.S. Mill’s appellation ‘the stupid party’ as a compliment. Not surprisingly, therefore, the most powerful critique of socialist planning and the socialist state which I read at this time, and to which I have returned so often since, F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, is dedicated famously ‘To the socialists of all parties’.

I cannot claim that I fully grasped the implications of Hayek’s little masterpiece at this time. It was only in the mid-1970s, when Hayek’s works were right at the top of the reading list given me by Keith Joseph, that I really came to grips with the ideas he put forward. Only then did I consider his arguments from the point of view of the kind of state Conservatives find congenial — a limited government under a rule of law — rather than from the point of view of the kind of state we must avoid — a socialist state where bureaucrats rule by discretion. At this stage it was the (to my mind) unanswerable criticisms of socialism in The Road to Serfdom which had an impact. Hayek saw that Nazism — national socialism — had its roots in nineteenth-century German social planning. He showed that intervention by the state in one area of the economy or society gave rise to almost irresistible pressures to extend planning further into other sectors. He alerted us to the profound, indeed revolutionary, implications of state planning for Western civilization as it had grown up over the centuries.

Nor did Hayek mince his words about the monopolistic tendencies of the planned society which professional groups and trade unions would inevitably seek to exploit. Each demand for security, whether of employment, income or social position, implied the exclusion from such benefits of those outside the particular privileged group — and would generate demands for countervailing privileges from the excluded groups. Eventually, in such a situation everyone will lose. Perhaps because he did not come from a British Conservative background and did not in fact ever consider himself a Conservative at all, Hayek had none of the inhibitions which characterized the agonized social conscience of the English upper classes when it came to speaking bluntly about such things.

Hayek was unusual and unpopular, but he was not quite alone in root and branch criticism of socialism. I also read at this time and later the polemical journalist Colm Brogan’s writings. Where Hayek deployed philosophy, Brogan relied on withering irony and mordant wit. In 1943 in Who Are ‘The People’? Brogan wrote the unthinkable — namely that it was precisely the ‘progressive’ Left which had created the circumstances for Hitler’s rise to power and been most thoroughly duped by him. The progressives did not by and large come from, and had little real claim to represent, the ‘working class’. They applied the most blatant and culpable double standards when it came to the Soviet Union. The real interest which they represented was that of a burgeoning bureaucracy determined to exploit every opportunity to increase its numbers and enlarge its power. In Our New Masters, which appeared in 1947, Brogan widened his attack on socialism. He refused to see the 1945 election result as anything other than a collective loss of common sense.

[The people] have been deceived, most certainly, but they wanted to be deceived… they have voted against that modest expectation in life which is all that a sober public man can ever strive for. They have voted to eat their cake and have it, to save it for a rainy day and to give it away. They have voted for high wages and low production and a world of plenty. They have voted like the courtiers of King Canute who planted his seat before the encroaching waves and commanded them to retire by authority of the royal and unimpeachable will. The people are able to fill the seat with the sovereign of their own choosing. Nobody denies their right. But the tide keeps coming in.

Brogan therefore saw the disillusionment with Labour, which was already manifest at the time he wrote, as being the socialists’ inevitable nemesis for raising so wildly expectations which no one — let alone they with the wrong policy prescriptions — could fulfil. As Brogan said in a classic attack: ‘Wherever Sir Stafford Cripps has tried to increase wealth and happiness, grass never grows again.’

But Brogan also saw socialism as a force for disorder and disintegration, a kind of poison threatening to corrupt the whole body politic, and the Labour Party as ‘a feeble and querulous thing, equally unfit to govern because of the intemperance of its mind and the childish unreality of its view of life’. They were sentiments which many of us felt, but which it generally seemed imprudent to express with quite such vigour.

The tension between these two possible approaches to resisting collectivism — gradualist and radical — would be played out throughout my time in active Conservative politics. But the specific issues which meant most to me in these early post-war years concerned foreign rather than domestic affairs.

I was in Blackpool visiting my sister (who had gone there from the Birmingham Orthopaedic Hospital) when I learned from the radio news on that fateful 6 August 1945 that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. It had been known for some time that we were on the eve of a breakthrough in the technology of weapons of mass destruction. My own academic study and the fascination exerted on me by issues relating to the practical application of science probably meant that I was better informed than most about the developments lying behind the manufacture of the atomic bomb. The following year I was able to read (and largely understand) the very full account contained in Atomic Energy for Military Purposes published by the United States. Yet — cliche as it may be — I was immediately aware on hearing the preliminary reports of Hiroshima that with the advent of the A-bomb ‘somehow the world had changed’. Or as Churchill himself would put it in his majestic memoirs The Second World War: ‘Here then was a speedy end to the Second World War, and perhaps to much else besides.’

The full scientific, strategic and political implications of the nuclear weapon would take some years to assess; moreover, like the science involved, they would continue to change and develop. But the direct human and