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.UnlikePowell, whose public performances could be magnetic, Heath was adesperately dull speaker and he never escaped the public s perception ofhim as a dry-as-dust technocrat, even allowing for the favourable presscoverage he received after winning the Sidney to Hobart yacht race at theturn of the year in 1969 70.Compounding the party s fears that Heathmight take the Conservatives to a third successive defeat, Labour s stand-ing in the polls began to improve after economic recovery became evid-ent in late 1969, reducing the Tories lead to single figures in the lastquarter of that year (Butler and Butler 1994: 252 3).These poll findingswere a deep disappointment to the Conservatives who had been workinghard in opposition to find a route back to power.In an attempt to restoretheir electoral fortunes, for example, the party had conducted the largestpolicy review in their history from 1965 onwards, with MPs, peers andoutside experts working on one or more of 23 policy groups, all overseenby Heath.But even these painstaking efforts failed to persuade com-mentators that the Conservatives were fully ready for office because theyleft important questions about the party s programme unanswered.Thecircumstances in which a Conservative government should intervenein the economy (in terms of supply-side reforms, wage restrictions orindustrial reorganisation) were left unclear.Nor was it apparent whetherprofitability and industrial modernisation would take priority over themaintenance of full employment as a policy goal under the Conservatives(Johnman 1993: 198).Perhaps most damagingly of all, there was no uni-fying theme apparent in 1969 to tie the various policy strands together ina coherent way or if there was, Heath was incapable of putting it intowords.As far as targeting voters was concerned, the party s research datasuggested that women, the skilled working classes and voters aged below35 were likely to be the floaters who might be detached from supporting· 187 · SB_C12.qxd 03/12/2004 15:17 Page 188SI XTI ES BRITAINLabour.Heath had also long been convinced that the next election wouldbe won on the centre ground.But with no obvious strategy in place forwinning the support of floating voters with centrist policies, a void wasleft that came to be filled with a more aggressively free-market andsocially authoritarian set of policies.The announcement that the Conservatives had shifted to the right intheir search for a way to connect with the electorate came at the end ofJanuary 1970.The occasion was a meeting of the Shadow Cabinet to dis-cuss forthcoming election strategy at the Selsdon Park Hotel in Croydon.Perhaps the press briefings that accompanied the meeting exaggerated theideological coherence of what was decided there.But it was no accidentthat, at a time of perceived breakdown in the authority of the state, theConservatives should use Selsdon Park as the departure point for a lessconsensual and more coercive policy programme.The centrepiece ofwhat emerged at Selsdon was the promise to restore law and order for the silent majority , a message that built on an ongoing Conservative cam-paign that charged the government with failing to tackle both crime andan increasing menace of violent protest.True, the Kray twins had finallybeen brought to justice in 1969, but their trial allowed the popular pressto stoke people s fears about the extent of gangland activity in the capital.Similarly, the demonisation of student and anti-war protesters as crim-inals and subversives for the past two years had added to the impressionthat society was stumbling towards lawlessness.The Conservatives de-clared that the time had arrived for the authorities to fight back. DemoClamp-Down if Tories Get Back trumpeted the Sunday Express. TheStainless Steel Tories was The Economist s cover-story title, neatly sum-ming up the Conservatives new hard-line image.The Guardian took adifferent view, mildly mocking the way that the law-and-order policiesannounced at Selsdon were driven by popular fears and stereotypes.Thetargets of the projected crackdown, wrote the paper, appeared to be: stu-dent unrest, political demonstrations, the Permissive Society, long hair,short hair and perhaps in time medium-length hair as well (cited in Hallet al.1978: 274).The authoritarian shift in Conservative thinking reflectedpopular anxieties (fuelled by politicians, press and moral entrepreneurs )that sixties liberalism had been pushed beyond acceptable limits by 1970.It was a signal that the time had arrived for the state to intensify its clamp-down on those who threatened the social order, and for the government· 188 · SB_C12.qxd 03/12/2004 15:17 Page 18912 u Labour crisis and Conservative recovery, 1968 70to give the police, courts and other state apparatuses the powers to doso.Thus the Tory programme that came out of the Selsdon Park meetingoutlined plans to extend the laws of trespass to cover demonstrations, tocurb workers use of the strike weapon and put in place tougher immigra-tion controls.Tax cuts and greater targeting of welfare benefits were alsopromised as part of a wider agenda for restoring personal responsibility.In the specific context of 1970 it was a widely seductive programme.Harold Wilson labelled the newly-apparent Conservative thinking thebrainchild of Selsdon Man , claiming that Heath and his colleaguessought to emulate the hard-faced Tories of the 1930s. Selsdon Man is notjust a lurch to the right , he said on 6 February, it is an atavistic desire toreverse the course of 25 years of social revolution.What they are plan-ning is a wanton, calculated and deliberate return to greater inequality.The message to the British people would be simple.And brutal.It wouldsay: You re out on your own (Wilson 1974: 954).Wilson s counter-offensive, however, was in some respects counter-productive.His com-ments portrayed the Conservatives as a party with a strong sense of moralpurpose at a time when in crucial respects the details of their programmelacked coherence.It soon became clear, too, that sections of the electoratewere more than ready for hard policies on immigration controls andpolicing.In the aftermath of Selsdon Park the Tories moved into a 10 percent lead in the polls.Better still for the Conservatives, for many longmonths the Labour government had been struggling to persuade evensome of its usually core supporters that it deserved to remain in office.There is no doubt that the Labour left believed they had a damningcase against Wilson s government by the late sixties.Their list of com-plaints about what Labour had done in office was recited like a mantra:the government had cut public spending, imposed wage freezes, rein-troduced prescription charges, conducted a damaging and over-longdefence of sterling, supported America in Vietnam, sold arms to theapartheid regime in South Africa and failed to act decisively againsta similarly repugnant government in Rhodesia.Labour, it appeared, hadbecome fixated on economic growth, national efficiency and the securingof popular consent for a new form of corporate capitalism [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]
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.UnlikePowell, whose public performances could be magnetic, Heath was adesperately dull speaker and he never escaped the public s perception ofhim as a dry-as-dust technocrat, even allowing for the favourable presscoverage he received after winning the Sidney to Hobart yacht race at theturn of the year in 1969 70.Compounding the party s fears that Heathmight take the Conservatives to a third successive defeat, Labour s stand-ing in the polls began to improve after economic recovery became evid-ent in late 1969, reducing the Tories lead to single figures in the lastquarter of that year (Butler and Butler 1994: 252 3).These poll findingswere a deep disappointment to the Conservatives who had been workinghard in opposition to find a route back to power.In an attempt to restoretheir electoral fortunes, for example, the party had conducted the largestpolicy review in their history from 1965 onwards, with MPs, peers andoutside experts working on one or more of 23 policy groups, all overseenby Heath.But even these painstaking efforts failed to persuade com-mentators that the Conservatives were fully ready for office because theyleft important questions about the party s programme unanswered.Thecircumstances in which a Conservative government should intervenein the economy (in terms of supply-side reforms, wage restrictions orindustrial reorganisation) were left unclear.Nor was it apparent whetherprofitability and industrial modernisation would take priority over themaintenance of full employment as a policy goal under the Conservatives(Johnman 1993: 198).Perhaps most damagingly of all, there was no uni-fying theme apparent in 1969 to tie the various policy strands together ina coherent way or if there was, Heath was incapable of putting it intowords.As far as targeting voters was concerned, the party s research datasuggested that women, the skilled working classes and voters aged below35 were likely to be the floaters who might be detached from supporting· 187 · SB_C12.qxd 03/12/2004 15:17 Page 188SI XTI ES BRITAINLabour.Heath had also long been convinced that the next election wouldbe won on the centre ground.But with no obvious strategy in place forwinning the support of floating voters with centrist policies, a void wasleft that came to be filled with a more aggressively free-market andsocially authoritarian set of policies.The announcement that the Conservatives had shifted to the right intheir search for a way to connect with the electorate came at the end ofJanuary 1970.The occasion was a meeting of the Shadow Cabinet to dis-cuss forthcoming election strategy at the Selsdon Park Hotel in Croydon.Perhaps the press briefings that accompanied the meeting exaggerated theideological coherence of what was decided there.But it was no accidentthat, at a time of perceived breakdown in the authority of the state, theConservatives should use Selsdon Park as the departure point for a lessconsensual and more coercive policy programme.The centrepiece ofwhat emerged at Selsdon was the promise to restore law and order for the silent majority , a message that built on an ongoing Conservative cam-paign that charged the government with failing to tackle both crime andan increasing menace of violent protest.True, the Kray twins had finallybeen brought to justice in 1969, but their trial allowed the popular pressto stoke people s fears about the extent of gangland activity in the capital.Similarly, the demonisation of student and anti-war protesters as crim-inals and subversives for the past two years had added to the impressionthat society was stumbling towards lawlessness.The Conservatives de-clared that the time had arrived for the authorities to fight back. DemoClamp-Down if Tories Get Back trumpeted the Sunday Express. TheStainless Steel Tories was The Economist s cover-story title, neatly sum-ming up the Conservatives new hard-line image.The Guardian took adifferent view, mildly mocking the way that the law-and-order policiesannounced at Selsdon were driven by popular fears and stereotypes.Thetargets of the projected crackdown, wrote the paper, appeared to be: stu-dent unrest, political demonstrations, the Permissive Society, long hair,short hair and perhaps in time medium-length hair as well (cited in Hallet al.1978: 274).The authoritarian shift in Conservative thinking reflectedpopular anxieties (fuelled by politicians, press and moral entrepreneurs )that sixties liberalism had been pushed beyond acceptable limits by 1970.It was a signal that the time had arrived for the state to intensify its clamp-down on those who threatened the social order, and for the government· 188 · SB_C12.qxd 03/12/2004 15:17 Page 18912 u Labour crisis and Conservative recovery, 1968 70to give the police, courts and other state apparatuses the powers to doso.Thus the Tory programme that came out of the Selsdon Park meetingoutlined plans to extend the laws of trespass to cover demonstrations, tocurb workers use of the strike weapon and put in place tougher immigra-tion controls.Tax cuts and greater targeting of welfare benefits were alsopromised as part of a wider agenda for restoring personal responsibility.In the specific context of 1970 it was a widely seductive programme.Harold Wilson labelled the newly-apparent Conservative thinking thebrainchild of Selsdon Man , claiming that Heath and his colleaguessought to emulate the hard-faced Tories of the 1930s. Selsdon Man is notjust a lurch to the right , he said on 6 February, it is an atavistic desire toreverse the course of 25 years of social revolution.What they are plan-ning is a wanton, calculated and deliberate return to greater inequality.The message to the British people would be simple.And brutal.It wouldsay: You re out on your own (Wilson 1974: 954).Wilson s counter-offensive, however, was in some respects counter-productive.His com-ments portrayed the Conservatives as a party with a strong sense of moralpurpose at a time when in crucial respects the details of their programmelacked coherence.It soon became clear, too, that sections of the electoratewere more than ready for hard policies on immigration controls andpolicing.In the aftermath of Selsdon Park the Tories moved into a 10 percent lead in the polls.Better still for the Conservatives, for many longmonths the Labour government had been struggling to persuade evensome of its usually core supporters that it deserved to remain in office.There is no doubt that the Labour left believed they had a damningcase against Wilson s government by the late sixties.Their list of com-plaints about what Labour had done in office was recited like a mantra:the government had cut public spending, imposed wage freezes, rein-troduced prescription charges, conducted a damaging and over-longdefence of sterling, supported America in Vietnam, sold arms to theapartheid regime in South Africa and failed to act decisively againsta similarly repugnant government in Rhodesia.Labour, it appeared, hadbecome fixated on economic growth, national efficiency and the securingof popular consent for a new form of corporate capitalism [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]