A Voter's Lament

Neither the platforms of the major parties nor the statements of religious leaders gave Catholics any confidence in thei electoral choices

The period leading up to the 1997 British general election on May 1 was, without doubt, the most confusing parliamentary campaign I have ever lived through.

It was an election for which many Catholics had prepared throughout Lent in small discussion groups, in which they discussed a document issued for the purpose by the English and Welsh bishops. The document was widely attacked in the Tory Press (my own paper, the Daily Mail, ran a splendid rant against it by Paul Johnson); but in fact, it was based largely on the great social encyclicals, with which right-wingers have always felt uneasy--but then, so have left-wingers.

The bishops, nevertheless, came under low-level fire in Catholic circles (both left and right) for one controversial element in the document: their rejection of "one-issue politics." This was widely taken as a deliberate discouragement of the pro-lifers who thought that abortion was an issue on which voting decisions should be made. In fact, one direct result of the document was the formation by outraged Catholics of the pro-Life Alliance party, which was to contest over fifty seats.

The English and Welsh bishops were also--or so at any rate it seemed to some--implicitly repudiated by the Scottish Cardinal Winning, who accused the Labor party, and in particular its leader Tony Blair, of hypocrisy on the issue. The Scottish bishops, however, themselves issued a document generally taken to be pro-Labor on the social issues apart from abortion. But then, naturally the Scottish bishops denied that they had any such bias.

The issues were further muddied by the appearance, only three weeks before the election itself, of a document drawn up by an ecumenical body called the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland. This--unlike the Catholic bishops' statements--was a detailed policy document of the most rabidly left-wing kind, which completely ignored the collapse everywhere in the world of old-style tax-and-spend politics. Unemployment, it said, was a major scourge, the major issue of our times; Christians therefore ought to press for large tax increases in order to fund government spending on job-creation programs. This totally ignored the failure of such programs on the European continent, where unemployment was very much higher than in Britain--particularly in France and Germany--and the comparative success of the British economy, where unemployment had been falling steadily for some time.

What annoyed many believers (certainly it infuriated me) was to be told in the face of all this that if we were real Christians, who took our faith seriously, we would instantly abandon any belief we might have that relatively low taxation is the best way to encourage economic growth and thus to fight unemployment. We would then return to authentic Christianity which, we were now informed, told us that not only a reinflated public sector but also several other liberal nostrums--reform of the tax system, a national minimum wage, no means-testing of benefits, the restoration of the excessive trades union power destroyed by Margaret Thatcher a decade before, and the creation of a "national employment forum"--were the methods by which God justifies his ways to man and installs his Kingdom on Earth.

So there was little clear guidance for the Catholic voter from his bishops, and even less from the ecumenical world beyond. What was one to do? There was only one thing of which, throughout, I was certain: that I had to vote for someone. Nobody who fails to vote has any right to complain when he is badly governed, and I had absolutely no intention of foregoing the pleasures of grumbling about politics for the next five years.

But who to vote for? All my voting life, I had known, by the time the election was called, the answer to that question. All I knew now is who I could not, or at least would not, vote for.

First, the Liberal Democrats, the descendants of the old Liberal Party of Lloyd George and Asquith, which had been merged a decade ago with a non-socialist breakaway from the old hard-left Labor party of the early 1980s--the Social Democratic Party (SDP). It was been a Liberal MP, David Steele (later to become leader of the party), who in 1967 had with Labor Party support introduced an act which led to abortion virtually on demand. This was now the only party whose official party platform included a woman's right to kill her unborn child. The Catholic bishops, I knew, were I advising us not to go in for single-issue politics, but I really could not understand how--abortion being in the most exact sense a matter of life and death--it was not an issue apart, one that overrode all others. So that was one thing at least that I knew: I could not vote "Lib-Dem."

All the other parties claimed that abortion was a personal issue which they left to the conscience of individual MPs. But in today's politics in countries with a parliamentary system, it is only the leaders who count, especially when the government has a large majority, of the sort which Tony Blair always seemed likely to have. Unlike in the United States, where the system of rigid party discipline obtaining in Britain would be regarded with amazement, members of Parliament must vote with their party unless they are told there is a "free vote." Admittedly abortion would in theory be such an issue, but (and this was one of Cardinal Winning's complaints about the Labor party) this was a question on which Labor members were expected "freely" to decide to vote pro-choice. Except in some Catholic areas like the city of Liverpool, they would not have been selected as candidates unless they had quietly undertaken to do so. Every member of the Labor cabinet-in-waiting had a lamentable record when it came to voting on life issues: and Blair's was among the worst.

And in any case, even if one could leave life issues on one side, I had a feeling that a party which had been so very careful not to go into detail about its intentions probably had some nasty surprises up its sleeve. I was one of those non-Labor voters who in recent years had been gingerly voting Labor at local elections, but I had come to the conclusion that Tony Blair was a phony and a mediocrity. Nor could I admire his judgment: by their role-models ye shall know them, and Blair's tactics and much of his attitude to policy had been heavily influenced by his admiration for Bill Clinton. I could not escape the conviction and that he and New Labor will fail abysmally in government. (As I write here, I assue that by the time this article appears there will have been no earthquake under Westminster, and that as the pundits universally predict, there will indeed be a Blair government).

Given all that, the inevitable logic might seem to be that I should vote Tory. After all, their record in government was really not all that discreditable in every respect. We had low inflation, falling unemployment, sustained economic growth. So why not? The answer was that though I thought it likely that a Labor government will turn out to be a minor disaster, another Tory government would be a major catastrophe, particularly for the possibility of any future return to a sane and coherent Toryism. The Conservative party is ideologically and spiritually exhausted. It desperately needs, for its own sake and for everyone else's, a period in opposition so that it can rediscover its own core beliefs.

The Tories need to find a leader who is less embarrassed than John Major by what President Bush called "the vision thing." That does not mean that he (or she) should emulate the stomach-churning pseudo- Churchillian conference rhetoric of Tony Blair or the the gruesome "patriotic" rhodomontade of the Conservative Defense Secretary Michael Portillo, darling of the massed Tory ladies who cheer him to the echo at Tory gatherings.

But without vision, the people perish. The Conservative party is the party of the free market: but if it is no more than that, it is less than nothing. And in the end, even the market will not function without certain clearly and generally accepted ideas of social virtue. Nor does liberty itself, without the exercise of the individual conscience. And for virtues to be socially active requires the careful maintenance of the institutions and assumptions which nurture them.

These ought to be Tory instincts. The trouble for the Tories now is that there are simply too many ways in which they have undermined these institutions and assumptions for their way back to credibility to be at all an easy one. To take perhaps the most important example: for all the Tory rhetoric about being "the party of the family," they have weakened marriage and the family--above all by undermining their legal and fiscal foundations--more than any previous administration in British history. The vast new underclass that has become an actual threat to social stability is the result both of this destabilizing of family life and of a culture of welfare dependency which Thatcher vowed to uproot but which has burgeoned over the last two decades. Falling unemployment will help; but unemployment (though a scourge in itself) was never the underlying cause of our society's literal demoralization, as a comparison with the 1930s shows.

What was described in the loyal (but not uncritical) Daily Mail as a "deathbed repentance" on family policy, in the shape of transferable tax allowances for married couples with children in which one partner stays at home, came too late to do much to stem the hemorrhage in Tory support. The general feeling about any policy the Conservative party now announced was: "they have been in power for 18 years: if this is such a good idea, why didn't they do it before?" A widespread perception that our entire culture was in peril, underlined by a sense that the government itself was out of control--"in office but not in power" as former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont witheringly put it on his departure from John Major's Cabinet--was surely at the root of what had looked for some years now like the government's steady, irreversible, and terminal decline. In the end, overwhelmingly the most powerful feeling, even among traditionally Conservative voters, was that it was Time for a Change.

Now there will be a period of reflection. It is vital that the Conservatives should use it wisely, and not rush into a premature election for the Tory leadership. Margaret Thatcher defeated her predecessor Edward Heath more than twenty years ago because she represented new thinking. Now the Tories need a revolution in social policy no less radical than the Thacherite revolution in economics. Most importantly, they need to work out what policies will best reverse their own undermining of marriage and the family as the basic building blocks of our culture. The limited tax reform which scraped into their election manifesto by the skin of its teeth shows that already some of the old sacred policy cows are tottering. The fight for a policy for marriage and the family within the Conservative party will be, over the next five years, interesting to witness.

None of which solved my problem: for whom was I to vote on May 1?

I am currently writing about G.K.Chesterton, who passionately opposed the integration of nation states into supra-national political blocs: today, he might have voted for one of the parties opposed to Britain's further integration into Europe: the UK. Independence Party perhaps, or the Referendum Party. On the other hand, he would certainly have been for our times one of the most passionate opponents of what was almost inconceivable in his, the massive carnage of unborn life that so disfigures our civilization.

And as I was writing this, the news came through: that in my parliamentary constituency it had just been announced that I would have a pro-Life Alliance candidate to vote for. So at last my choice could be made. I would not, whoever became Prime Minister, have it on my conscience that I had voted for the government. But at least now I was able to vote for someone.