Politics
Hague's manifesto nightmare
Published 18 September 2000
The Tories believe in Britain, we are told. But is there anything else ? Simon Heffer finds few clues in their latest offering
The Tories could not have wished for a better time to launch their draft manifesto, Believing in Britain, at the start of this month. The latest humiliation wreaked by the Dome was showing the Labour government in a helpfully bad light. The euro was falling to record lows on the foreign exchanges. Seething resentment about the price of petrol was starting to boil over into direct action. Two new books claimed to show the mutual loathing at the heart of new Labour, trailed by Mo Mowlam's eviction from public office. If ever a country needed a vibrant, principled opposition, it was then.
And yet Believing in Britain was thrown forcefully into the political pond, to make only the faintest of ripples. The Tory press were unimpressed. What many commentators saw as an opportunity to seize the initiative with some radical vision had instead come out as the dampest of squibs.
The mild tone of the document was at odds with the confrontational, plain-spoken attitude struck by William Hague the morning after its release. He took camera crews down to Greenwich, stood outside the Dome, and denounced the project with a force that will have reminded his supporters not only that he is still alive, but also that he retains some Conservative instincts.
Perhaps party members have some right to be so oppressive. The Tories' great revival of the spring of 2000 was not scuppered solely by the leader's silly announcement that he once used to drink up to 14 pints of beer each day. However, it helped to enhance a mood in which the Tories, who had briefly earned the right to be taken seriously, appeared to have forfeited it again. You can understand all too easily that "the colleagues" would want to keep a close watch on what was in the document that would, after all, form the basis of their programme for the next election.
Yet the notion that the Tories are still short on credibility has dire implications for this document. More sober-minded Tories may agree with the rhetoric of "believing in Britain", but wonder whether this Conservative Party can ever have the weight, or the intellectual toughness, to match such rhetoric with action. With devolution now entrenched, the real issue as seen by most Tories is not maintaining belief in a Britain that no longer exists in the form that they have always understood it: it is about standing up for the rights of the English. Hague's colleagues are sufficiently realistic, in private, to rule out victory at the next election: but they hope for a magic number of 265 seats, or more, in England. This would give them a simple majority of English seats, and mean that any legislation affecting England alone could be passed by a Labour government only with the help of Scottish or Welsh MPs. It could be a great opportunity for the Tories to embarrass Labour, but where it would leave "belief in Britain" is anybody's guess.
Far more challenging even than that is the headline item in the manifesto: the defence of British sovereignty against Europe. The draft document says that "the next Conservative government will insist on a Treaty 'Flexibility' provision so that outside the areas of the single market and core elements of an open, free-trading and competitive EU, countries need only participate in new legislative actions at a European level if they see this as in their national interest". Most Tories support this, as they will show when they will inevitably vote in favour of the document at the party conference next month. However, compared with enforcing such an insistence, staying out of the single currency would be a piece of cake. In the past (even once or twice under Margaret Thatcher), a lot of tough talk about Europe pre-ceded capitulation. Securing such "flexibility" will be easier said than done, in the teeth of opposition from 12 or 13 other governments.
Although the rest of the document has some ideas that have appealed to Tories - notably, the drastic reform of local education authorities and the promise to remove more red tape from business - it is in relation to health that activists and MPs have looked for more vision and found none. At a time when private health providers are running television adverts aimed at persuading working men in pubs to pay for a check-up, the absence of any "courageous" proposals on reforming the NHS has caused some disquiet. The Tory party is comprised disproportionately of women of a certain age. Either because of the voluntary work that many of them do, or because they or their friends are more likely to be hospitalised than, say, the average Tory MP, they know the NHS is on its knees. Although the party promises to encourage the private sector, its present ideas for sorting out the NHS are so much moving of deck chairs on the Titanic. On the wider issue of welfare reform, the picture is even bleaker. It is as if whole areas of thought have been ruled out.
Conscious of this, Hague's supporters have already begun to apportion blame. The drafting process was described by one insider as "a nightmare". It was written by Andrew Lansley, the party's chief campaigns organiser who sits in the shadow cabinet and ran the Conservative research department in the golden years of John Major. Individual spokesmen were allowed relatively little input. Lansley's handling of the process was described as "excessively bureaucratic". There was constant pressure, from Michael Portillo and others, for the document to be as "inclusive" as possible, which grated with the basic instincts of many colleagues, and pressure, too, from Portillo not to commit the party to the spending of a single penny more.
That last point ties in with the ditching of the tax guarantee. For many Tories, this renunciation of fiscal rectitude was the most depressing thing about the document. It betokened, for them, a refusal to contemplate the reduction in activities of the state that would once more take up the unfinished Thatcher revolution. This was interpreted as a sign not only of caution, but also of philosophical shallowness.
The prologue to the document, however, reads: "Believing in Britain is not a comprehensive list of Conservative policies, nor does it draw a line under Conservative policy-making. We have made many policy announcements in the past year and we will go on doing so." Certainly, if the Tories were to be constrained by what is in the document for the campaign expected next year, they would hardly have a campaign at all. The leadership should be warned that believing in Britain, in the specific or general sense, is not enough. If they are to impress their followers, they will need to believe in a few other things, too.
The writer, a Daily Mail columnist, is our Conservative Party correspondent
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