At about eleven o’clock the telephone rang. It was Ted Heath. He said: ‘I am ringing round all the Shadow Cabinet. I have come to the conclusion that Enoch must go.’ It was more statement than enquiry. But I said that I really thought that it was better to let things cool down for the present rather than heighten the crisis. Ted was having none of it. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘He absolutely must go, and most people think he must go.’ In fact, I understood later that several members of the Shadow Cabinet would have resigned if Enoch had not gone.
Yet for several reasons it was a tragedy. In the short term it prevented our gaining the political credit for our policy of controlling immigration more strictly. This was an issue which crossed the political and social divide, as was demonstrated when London dockers marched in support of Enoch. Moreover, in practical terms there was very little to choose between the policies of Ted and Enoch on the matter. Although it is true that as a result of the speech the official Conservative line on immigration became more specific, essentially we all wanted strict limits on further New Commonwealth immigration and we were all prepared to support financial assistance for those who wanted to return to their country of origin.
But the longer-term consequences of Enoch’s departure on this issue and under these circumstances extended far beyond immigration policy. He was free to develop a philosophical approach to a range of policies, uninhibited by the compromises of collective responsibility. This spanned both economic and foreign affairs and embraced what would come to be called ‘monetarism’, deregulation, denationalization, an end to regional policy, and culminated in his opposition to British membership of the Common Market. Having Enoch preaching to such effect in the wilderness carried advantages and disadvantages for those of us on the right in the Shadow Cabinet and later the Cabinet. On the one hand, he shifted the basis of the political argument to the right and so made it easier to advance sound doctrines without being accused of taking an extreme position. On the other hand, so bitter was the feud between Ted and Enoch that querying any policy advanced by the leadership was likely to be branded disloyalty. Moreover, the very fact that Enoch advanced all his positions as part of a coherent whole made it more difficult to express agreement with one or two of them. For example, the arguments against prices and incomes policies, intervention and corporatism might have been better received if they had not been associated with Enoch’s views about immigration or Europe.
At this time, as it happens, other Conservatives were moving independently in the same direction, with the notable exception of Europe, and Ted gave me an opportunity to chart this way ahead. The annual Conservative Political Centre lecture is designed to give some intellectual meat to those attending the Tory Party Conference. The choice of speaker is generally reserved to the Party Leader. It was doubtless a pollster or Party adviser who suggested that it might be a good idea to have me talk about a subject which would appeal to ‘women’. Luckily, I was free to choose my subject, and I decided on something more topical which might appeal to thinking people of both sexes: I spoke on ‘What’s Wrong With Politics?’
There is no better way to clarify your own thinking than to try to explain it clearly to someone else. I was conscious that there were great issues being discussed in politics at this time. Whatever else can be said of the sixties they were intellectually lively, even if too many of the ideas motivating change originated on the left. I took armfuls of books on philosophy, politics and history, White Papers, Hansard Society publications and speeches down to Lamberhurst. I had no one to guide or help me so I just plunged in. Like the proverbial iceberg, most of the work lay below the surface of the document I finally wrote.
I began by listing the reasons why there was so much disillusionment with politics. Some of these really consisted of the growth of a critical spirit through the effects of education and the mass media. But others were the fault of the politicians themselves. Political programmes were becoming dominated by a series of promises whose impact was all the greater because of the growth of the Welfare State. This led me on to what I considered the main cause of the public’s increasing alienation from political parties — too much government. The competition between the parties to offer ever higher levels of economic growth and the belief that government itself could deliver these had provided the socialists with an opportunity massively to extend state control and intervention. This in turn caused ordinary people to feel that they had insufficient say in their own and their families’ lives. The Left claimed that the answer was the creation of structures which would allow more democratic ‘participation’ in political decisions. But the real problem was that politics itself was intruding into far too many decisions that were properly outside its scope. Alongside the expansion of government had developed a political obsession with size — the notion that large units promoted efficiency. In fact, the opposite was true. Smaller units — small businesses, families and ultimately individuals — should once again be the focus of attention.
Apart from these general reflections, my CPC lecture also contained a section about prices and incomes policy. Although I stuck to the Shadow Cabinet line of condemning a compulsory policy while avoiding the issue of a voluntary one, I included a passage which reads:
We now put so much emphasis on the control of incomes that we have too little regard for the essential role of government which is the control of the money supply and management of demand [emphasis added]. Greater attention to this role and less to the outward detailed control would have achieved more for the economy. It would mean, of course, that the government had to exercise itself some of the disciplines on expenditure it is so anxious to impose on others. It would mean that expenditure in the vast public sector would not have to be greater than the amount which could be financed out of taxation plus genuine saving.
In retrospect, it is clear to me that this summed up how far my understanding of these matters had gone — and how far it still needed to go. I had come to see that the money supply was central to any policy to control inflation. But I had not seen either that this made any kind of incomes policy irrelevant or that monetary policy itself was the way in which demand should be managed.
Partly as a result, I suspect, of the attention I received for the CPC lecture, I was asked to contribute two articles on general political philosophy to the Daily Telegraph early the following year. In these I developed some of the same themes. In particular, I argued the case for the ideological clash of opposing political parties as essential to the effective functioning of democracy. The pursuit of ‘consensus’, therefore, was fundamentally subversive of popular choice. It was wrong to talk of taking the big issues ‘out of politics’ or to imply that different approaches to a subject involved ‘playing polities’. I applied this specifically to the question of nationalization versus free enterprise. But I could have done so on a range of other matters, not least education, which was soon to become my main political concern and where the ruthless pursuit by the socialists of comprehensivization was threatening not just Britain’s schools but long-term social progress. The fraudulent appeal of consensus was a theme to which I would return again and again, both as Leader of the Opposition and as Prime Minister.