Sacred Cows and Common Sense by Tim Bale

Author:Tim Bale [Bale, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781840147698
Google: QNkMFRpHkxcC
Publisher: Tim Bale
Published: 1999-01-15T04:54:57+00:00

Conclusion

Devaluation had failed to take the pressure off sterling, making further government action inevitable. That prescription charges became so obvious a part of such a ‘package’ suggests that the procedures as well as the outcomes of politics are symbolic – not just to those watching from the outside but also to the actors on the inside. For the latter, putting together the package represented a regaining of control over events, a demonstration of responsibility, a drama of self-sacrifice – all of which adds up to an assertion of characteristically hierarchical values. Those same political actors were also involved in second-guessing the measures that would achieve the desired impression of governing competence. The ‘common sense’ that led to the reimposition of charges may have had much to do with cultural bias; but it was nevertheless re-reinforced in the public and the private spheres by those for whom the avoidance of a second devaluation, the taming (and even destruction) of Labour’s egalitarians and the supposed humiliation of its leader were consciously-pursued goals. Also important were the structural power of the Treasury to define the situation and the apparently appropriate responses, and the lessons drawn by ministers from Labour’s own governmental history – particularly 1931 and 1951.

Underlying such lesson-drawing, however, was the establishment of a hierarchical consensus among the members of the Cabinet – a consensus responsible for and reflected by the reimpostion of charges backed by means-tested exemptions. Some, including Jenkins, Callaghan, Healey, Brown and, more controversially, Wilson were already there, as were many less senior colleagues. Others, like Crossman, were always liable to move that way if circumstances seemed to demand it. But the capitulation of his fellow members of the so-called ‘Cabinet Left’ like Barbara Castle and Tony Benn is a rather more complex affair, a matter of increasing institutional constraint, a consequent vulnerability to ‘groupthink’ and possibly a longer (though in the event by no means a oneway) move from the egalitarian toward the hierarchical section of the Party. Labour’s historical opposition to health charges now acted less as a constraint than as a spur to those of its big-hitters who were determined, if not to split the Party or replace its leader, at least to distance it from its ideology and its past in the belief that only in so doing could they preserve British social democracy’s potential as a governing force.

The suggestion, then, that for Wilson and many of his colleagues, it was genuinely disappointing and ‘humiliating...to be forced to abandon policies they believed in...as the government discovered the economic facts of life’ (Lapping, 1970: 12) was – at least by January 1968 – far from the truth. Instead the abandonment of those policies, and particularly the provision of free NHS prescriptions, was, as Roy Jenkins privately admitted just before Christmas 1967, ‘necessary, not so much for the revenue but for their psychological impact on the Cabinet and the Party’ (Owen, 1992: 110, emphasis added). Having dealt in considerable detail with the former, it is to the latter – and particularly to its Parliamentary representatives – that we now turn.

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