Free Radical

by Cable, Vincent

  This left the Liberals, who were, by contrast, friendly, welcoming, sensible and unpretentious. They signed me up. Though small in number, they were buoyed up by a recent by-election victory in Orpington which had, for the moment, stilled the ridicule of the bigger parties. The leading lights – Jo Grimond and Jeremy Thorpe – were clever, witty and devoid of the pomposity and self-importance that enveloped almost all Tory politicians, however liberal-minded. Unlike most leading Labour figures, they seemed to feel it was worth their time talking to us. The leading undergraduates, who included Alan (Lord) Watson and Chris Mason, later leader of the Lib Dems in Strathclyde, were good debaters and a match for their opposite numbers in quality, if not quantity. There was, moreover, a coherent and attractive set of beliefs, which Grimond articulated at national level: the Liberals were classless and had no bias towards organized labour or big business; they captured the growing concern over disappearing civil liberties; they had enlightened views on race, were internationalist in outlook, and offered an alternative vision of the future – in Europe – to Britain’s fading and failing colonial role. I recognized too, in the belief in worker participation and share ownership, a model that seemed to work well in my native York. In practice, as in any party, there were ideological undercurrents, notably between those who advocated ‘economic liberalism’ – Grimond himself and Richard Wainwright, the Yorkshire MP who spoke on economic matters – and a group clustered around an Ipswich candidate, Manuela Sykes, who wanted to move to the left and also to associate the party with CND. But these were not, then, serious divisions.

  The main problem with the Liberals was smallness. There were only six MPs, two of whom held their seats only because of local electoral pacts with Labour. Large parts of England, like York, had not had Liberal councillors or MPs for decades. The unfairness of the voting system was a plausible explanation and generated endless debates on the merits of different kinds of proportional representation, but this did not get us very far. I also discovered that small organizations attract people who feel more comfortable in small organizations, where they can shine and give expression to their idiosyncrasies. They clashed with people like me who were ambitious for the party (and ourselves). Jo Grimond held out a vision in which the rigidities of the British system were breaking down and tribal loyalties were dissolving, but this seemed to be happening on a geological timescale, and I, for one, was impatient.

  One advantage of small organizations is that for ambitious and energetic people promotion can come rapidly. At the end of the first year, I was made editor of the Liberal Club magazine, Scaffold. I gave it an editorial and design makeover and printed vast numbers of copies, but paid little regard to the cost or the practical problems of marketing. After three editions, with mounting losses, the magazine had to be closed. Undeterred I went on to become the Club’s President, committed to achieving rapid expansion of the membership. Since people more persuasive than I had failed to realize this objective through organic growth, I decided on an aggressive strategy of mergers and acquisitions. I looked around for other small political clubs, whose political outlook was close to the Liberals, to acquire or merge with. One was a liberal Conservative splinter group called PEST, and I wrote a pamphlet for them advocating a liberal approach to immigration (the co-author, David Wright, became British ambassador to Japan in due course). Its founder, however, was essentially a mainstream Tory who later became chairman of the 1922 Committee, Sir Michael Spicer, and he had no interest whatever in handing over his vehicle to me and the Liberals.

  More promising was the Campaign for Democratic Socialism, founded by groups of young Labour Party social democrats, led by Dick Taverne and Bill Rodgers, which had an undergraduate offshoot. My own views, which were coalescing around the transatlantic social liberalism of J. K. Galbraith and the ideas of a new generation of Labour political thinkers like Anthony Crosland, found an echo there. However, my proposal for merger was treated with disdain by them and my Liberal members were outraged. I jumped before I was pushed. In retrospect, I perhaps deserved some credit for anticipating the Liberal/SDP merger by a couple of decades, though, in reality, I had been a reckless political neophyte who spread confusion among the Liberals and achieved nothing. I also overlooked a more patient political strategy being developed by another Cambridge contemporary, Bernard Greaves, which involved a long march through local government based on ‘community politics’.

  While this minor drama was being played out in the micro-politics of undergraduate life, there were big changes afoot nationally. Thirteen years of Conservative government were coming to an end (‘thirteen wasted years’ was the Labour campaign slogan). Now politically homeless, I fell quite easily into the embrace of Harold Wilson’s Labour Party, whose pitch could well have been designed to appeal to people like me. Although supposedly from the left of the Labour Party, he did not use socialist jargon. His accent was reassuringly northern. He talked a lot about science and the untapped potential of the ‘white heat of the technological revolution’. A clever, ex-grammar-school boy, he tapped not just into working-class solidarity but into a wider antipathy to the public school toffs who were supposedly running – and ruining – the country and perpetuating the rule of the ‘old school tie’. In Cambridge there were plenty of loud, posh voices advertising this class, which aroused both envy and hostility among those of us who were not part of it. Wilson was widely accused of exaggerating his working-class roots with hints of attending school in bare feet; but for those of us who had grown up on the slippery slope between the lower middle class and the working class he was reassuring.

  The Conservatives, unaccountably, chose a belted, chinless earl as their prime minister. While my Tory friends assured me that Sir Alec Douglas-Home was not as dim or amateurish as he appeared, he seemed to embody everything that was wrong with the country. It was not entirely clear what Wilson was for, but it was clear what he was against. And that was enough for many of us. I enthusiastically campaigned for Labour when the party turned Cambridge into a marginal seat in 1964, and then for Alex Lyon in 1966 when he broke the Tory hegemony in York.

  The main forum for political debate was the Cambridge Union. It has become fashionable to decry the Union (as well as the Oxford and Scottish equivalents) for its pretentiousness and the juvenile banter that often passes for debate. The level of juvenile banter, it has to be said, is often not much higher in the House of Commons, on whose debating format the Union is based. It was, moreover, in the 1960s the training ground for a whole generation of national politicians, mainly Conservatives, who came to dominance in the eighties and nineties. Not merely politicians, but future QCs and judges too, experimented there with the adversarial system of debate. At its best, it brought out an ability to communicate with, and respond to, a live political audience. The House of Commons does that, unlike almost all legislatures in continental Europe and North America. The theatrical qualities and communication skills demanded of politicians in a television age are now somewhat different, but not wholly so. In any event, after hearing my first debate, I could see the outline of a ladder that I intended to climb.

  The President in my first term was Brian Pollitt, son of the former UK Communist Party leader and a communist himself. He had a dominating presence, not entirely due to his being a mature student, and an intellectual clarity that shone among the muddled young minds. Although this was the height of the Cold War, the romanticism of the Cuban revolution, Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinism, and the technocratic optimism of his Soviet Union created a climate in which revolutionary Marxism– Leninism was treated with some respect, even if in reality very little of the British electorate actually voted for it. Pollitt was also an example of the tendency of the Union to magnify people who were inconspicuous in other contexts; I later encountered him as an academic studying the Cuban economy in Glasgow, where he was happily anonymous.

  His politics apart, Pollitt managed to pack out the place, which generated an often electric atmosphere.
Perhaps I was unduly impressionable, but I have not, since, heard leading British politicians speak as well as Richard Crossman opposing the reunification of Germany, or Iain McLeod defending the winding-up of Britain’s African empire. On such occasions, debates could generate real, sometimes alarming, passion. The debate on the Middle East, for example, pitted the university’s mainly undergraduate Jewish students against mainly postgraduate Arabs and a few of their left-wing allies. The politics of the most recent atrocity would be played out much as it is today. It was the first time I saw raw political hatred publicly expressed, and there was ugliness too in the supercilious response of some of the neutrals, enjoying this cockfight between two Semitic tribes.

  Pollitt excepted, the dominant personalities were mostly Conservatives. There was a batch of recent Presidents – Michael Howard, Michael Tugendhat and Leon Brittan – who re-emerged from time to time. But the two future stars whom I saw at close quarters, and followed to the presidency, were Ken Clarke and Norman Lamont. Clarke, at that stage, had not developed the rounded political personality that later made him so formidable and likeable. His speeches were delivered too fast and seemed to have been scripted in Conservative Central Office. His term as President was generally deemed to be very dull, little more than a parade of B-list Tory celebs.

  Norman Lamont, whom history has treated much less kindly, was – at least in that rarefied context – an impressive performer. He had grasped the obvious point which most of his contemporaries – and most politicians today – overlooked: that the quickest way to lose a live audience is to read from notes. His speeches were carefully researched and faithfully memorized, allowing improvisation with growing confidence. I copied his technique. Unlike his fellow Tories, most of whom seemed to have emerged immaculately conceived from the womb wearing blue rosettes and reciting the party line, he flirted with danger both politically and privately. The Cabinet minister who emerged from an off-licence with a black eye after meeting a left hook from a girlfriend’s husband was recognizable even then. Since we were in the same college I got to know him a little. Even in the mid-1960s he was questioning the middle-way Butskellite, One Nation orthodoxy of the Tory leadership and, though he was a notoriously lazy economics student, he had a genuine passion for the subject and I recall a long conversation in which he vigorously defended the 1920s gold standard, a variant of which destroyed his career thirty years later.

  Most of the other personalities and ex-Presidents disappeared into semi-obscurity (though some, in judges’ robes or top jobs in the BBC or business, have probably had more influence than the politicians). One memorable character, who is now known mainly in the world of academic sociology, was a diminutive Welshman called Christie Davies. He profited from a couple of simple but powerful insights. One was the power of humour. He collected jokes and manufactured others and demonstrated that telling one funny story was worth more than hours of dull worthiness. His other contribution was to recognize the power of accurate social observation: seeing the world as it is, rather than as we want it to be. He later combined these two into a magnum opus on the sociology of humour. As a student he specialized in the counter-intuitive: a Conservative who refused to observe dress codes; a campaigner against the admission of women to the Union who befriended radical feminists like Germaine Greer. Then a postgrad, he tutored me in my final year and taught me a lot. We met again, very recently, when he was emeritus professor at Reading.

  The controversies of student life were mind-bogglingly petty and must have been incomprehensible to the outside world. Much outrage was generated by the ‘oppression’ of a group of pseudo-policemen called proctors who had the power to impose fines for not wearing gowns or climbing into the college late at night. There was a desperate rearguard action to keep women out of the Union and all-male colleges. The anti-feminist dam broke in the Union and threw up some talented women politicians, the best of whom, a beautiful left-wing firebrand called Sheena Mathieson who was Vice President in my term, subsequently opted out of political life. Another, Ann Mallalieu, who was the first woman to attain the presidency, became a Labour peer and champion of fox-hunting. I endeavoured to turn the Union into a broadly based student union on provincial university lines, which aroused as much hostility as my attempt to merge the Liberals and Social Democrats and was unceremoniously rejected. The inevitable then happened and a student union grew up in competition with the Union.

  About the rest of my period in office, perhaps the less said the better. I was determined to avoid the experience of the previous summer term when Ken Clarke’s boring speakers had emptied the place. I decided that the best way to get bums on seats in an exam term was to entertain or shock and lined up a succession of comedians and gangsters. Fortunately for my future reputation and the blood pressure of the Union clerk, Mr Ellwood, the Kray twins did not turn up after having accepted the invitation, though the self-styled leader of Britain’s Black Power movement, Michael X, did. He was later hanged, in Trinidad, for a grisly murder. My concluding debate, ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down’, was an attempt to define my philosophy on life, and at least it attracted a good crowd and made the punters laugh. And I relished the brief celebrity status, being the object of gossip in the university newspaper and certain of attention at parties. One animated conversation with an attractive blonde proved more significant than I realized at the time. We met again thirty-six years later, both remembering the conversation, and are now happily married.

  Although I allowed myself to be side-tracked, I did understand that the main purpose of being at university was to achieve a decent degree and, having been allowed to change courses, concentrated at the end on mastering the second half of the economics Tripos. As with natural sciences, the economics faculty saw itself as being at the centre of the known universe, which, at the time, it probably was. My contemporaries benefited from exposure to three Nobel Prize winners – Meade, Stone and Mirlees – and others, like Joan Robinson, Kahn and Kaldor, who probably ought to have been. Keynes was God and his apostles dominated the department. While we were all encouraged to bask in his reflected glory, there were two damaging consequences of the cult of Keynes. One was that the university increasingly lived in the past, ignoring the post-Keynesian challenges to macroeconomics and treating rival ideas being developed in Chicago by Friedman, Buchanan and others as the product of some kind of evil empire. A second was that economics became unhelpfully politicized. Keynes was a Liberal and, like other great thinkers, no doubt believed lots of different things during his lifetime. But at Cambridge he became an icon of the left – even, bizarrely, of the Marxist left. (A similar, if opposite, fate overtook Adam Smith, in whose name I later taught in Glasgow.) And while it inflated our own sense of importance to see our lecturers rushing back from London where they were building a five-year plan for the Labour government or administering price and wage controls, all of this proved to be a worthless cul-de-sac which did their (and Keynes’s) reputations no good.

  One of Keynes’s most quoted aphorisms was that all men of affairs are the slaves of some defunct economist. If so, mine was James Meade. Meade was a former classicist of great modesty who would punctuate his lectures with apologies for being so boring. Actually he was, but he was also wise, and those who could stay with his meticulously logical verbal constructions achieved as good an understanding of theory as it was possible to get. He could reduce complex arguments to their simple essence, and his short book, The Intelligent Radical’s Guide to Economic Policy, was one of the most sensible policy manuals I ever read: its main message being that while there are good reasons why governments should intervene in markets and in the flow of international trade, they should, in practice, do so sparingly.

  While my more career-minded contemporaries immersed themselves in mathematical economics and econometrics, I opted, for reasons of both cowardice and curiosity, for more exotic and seemingly less demanding specialisms, which were, nonetheless, to have considerable impact later: development ec
onomics; a comparative study of China and India (a somewhat eccentric analysis provided by a Conservative historian who waxed lyrical about the British Raj and by Joan Robinson, whose visit to a Chinese collective farm led to a Maoist hagiography of outrageous naivety, apparent even to the students); and Soviet economic history (by the great, but somewhat partial, Maurice Dobb). As for most of my contemporaries, the question of whether communism – or socialist planning more generally – had been an economic success or failure was for me important and unresolved.

  I decided one summer vacation to take a train trip to the eastern bloc to find out. Intourist tours did not, and were not designed to, provide unfettered access, but some was better than none, and the period between Stalin and Brezhnev was relaxed, especially in Hungary. There was a jarring contrast between the endless triumphalist visual and verbal propaganda and the modest (but not impoverished) standards of living; the celebration of spacemen and the crude technology employed on building sites; the trumpeting of universal solidarity and the racist behaviour we saw casually dished out to Asiatic soldiers; the official disdain for Western materialism and the endless requests in the streets of Moscow to peel off our jeans in return for black-market roubles. I was to return, fascinated, to the Soviet Union the following year, en route to India on a far more ambitious journey.

  This meandering between subjects, and continents, between politics and study, proved rewarding. I gained the first serious job I applied for, an Overseas Development Institute/Nuffield fellowship to work in the Kenyan Treasury, the professional experience of a lifetime.