Modern Liberalism

[p. 65]

Jo Grimond
(The Hague, 8 March 1980)

[p. 67]

[p. 69]

Born:	In St. Andrews on 23 July 1913.
Education:	Eton and Oxford (politics, philosophy and economics).
1937 until the war:	Practised as a barrister in London.
After the war:	Director of personnel of UNRRA's European Office, covering Malta and the Middle East.
1947-1950:	Secretary of the Scottish National Trust.
Since 1950:	Member of the House of Commons.
March 1950-November 1956:	Liberal Whip.
November 1956-January 1967:	Leader of the Liberal Party.
November 1961:	Appointed Privy Councillor.
Since 1967:	Trustee of the Guardian and Manchester Evening News.
1960-1963:	Rector of Edinburgh University.
1970:	Elected rector of Aberdeen University and chancellor of the University of Kent.

Doctor honoris causa of the Universities of Kent (1970) and Birmingham (1974).

Chubb Fellow of Yale University.

[p. 71]

Interview with Jo Grimond

1. The Primacy of the Individual

Bolkestein: In one of your publications you have written: ‘Today in Britain the importance of men and women is more and more attached to their rôle.’ Is this something that has occurred recently?

Grimond: It has been growing in Britain for some time. It was given a great impetus by the war. The war inevitably extended the activities of the state. As in all countries, a lot of people were in the army or navy or indeed in all sorts of other public services. These were hierarchical and people began to think of themselves as private soldiers or lieutenant colonels or civil servants of one rank or another. Rank, organisation, hierarchy and the career structure became very important to people. An additional factor after the war has been inflation. Inflation in Britain is not only monetary, it is general. When I was a boy a whole lot of people were perfectly content, having reached a certain stage in life, to continue where they were. I was brought up in the town of St. Andrews, where there is a small but ancient university. Most of the professors, having become professors at St. Andrews, remained there for the rest of their lives. So indeed did a lot of other teachers. Nowadays, everybody in a university is always putting in for some other job, hoping to climb up the ladder or at least go somewhere else for two or three years. Then there is the actual monetary effect of inflation. In the old days again, money retained its value from year to year and no one was particularly worried about going up a structure. Now, of course, unless you get an increase in wages or salary every year you get left behind. This makes it necessary to fight for it, to join unions and other organisations and to clamber up some ladder so that you may get higher pay. I don't know

[p. 72]

which came first: whether these factors led to a change of attitude or the change of attitude led to these factors. Certainly now there is a change of attitude and people do look at one another far more according to their rank and what organisation they belong to.

This is obviously very bad for Liberalism which must basically believe that all people have certain common qualities and a common equality. It is a curious paradox for in a way, of course, we have become more egalitarian. In other ways, however, schools now indoctrinate children with the view that they must join a particular profession and that once in it they must play within the rules of their profession. As a Member of Parliament, I receive every day memoranda from all sorts of organisations: long, argued memoranda saying that they must have more resources. Now in Britain we are not creating any more resources but every organisation is clamouring for more and they each have their large bureaucracies, whose job it is to get them more. Children leave school and enrol in these organisations and then leave it to the bureaucracy of the organisation to fight for more money, even though it is not worth any more.

Bolkestein: You have also written: ‘We must reassert the primacy of the individual as a moral creature capable of developing his talents and making his choices within a community.’ That is not an easy thing to do.

Grimond: It is very difficult but to follow on from what we were talking about, it is undoubtedly the power of organisations which is gravely damaging Britain. The sad thing is that the individuals know this but will not reassert themselves. For instance, if you take our strikes and you talk to most of the people involved in them, they don't want to go on strike. They know that the strikes merely make things more difficult, not only for their industries but for the country and themselves, but they feel bound because they are members of organisations and go along with the organisation. Take the conduct of our press. Journalists, who are charming people in ordinary life, will do the most monstrous things and when you say: ‘Why do you do this?’, they say: ‘Well, if we didn't do this our owner wouldn't like it, or the editor wouldn't like it, or our National Union of Journalists wouldn't like it.’ Then you say to them: ‘Aren't you individuals who are bound to make up your own mind and follow your own conscience?’ and they think this is a surprising view. If

[p. 73]

we are going to get Britain right we must reassert the primacy of the individual and tell people that they are responsible for decisions. Obviously they can't decide about everything all the time but it is no excuse to say that your organisation ordered you to do something.

Curiously enough this is, or was, a basic feature of British law: it was no excuse to say that you had been ordered to do something. This indeed led to great difficulties. When I was a young lawyer in Britain I was taught that it was no excuse for a private soldier to say that he had been obeying orders if he was called out in aid of the civil power and shot somebody. Although he had been ordered to do so, he was liable. This may have been too extreme but we have gone to the other extreme and now no one appears to be liable. We are falling more and more into a dogfight between different organisations and this only results in inflation and in distortions because the most powerful organisation wins whether it in fact deserves to or not.

2. The House of Commons

Bolkestein: Roy Jenkins said that the House of Commons has declined as a forum of national debate. Is that because people in the House of Commons also play rôles?

Grimond: Yes it is. As you know the Labour Party now depends almost entirely upon the trade unions. Over half of their funds come from the trade unions and a great many of their members are directly sponsored by trade unions. They are more and more the political wing of the trade union movement. This is another sign of the growth of the power of organisations. But there are other factors too. When Britain was a powerful body internationally, foreign affairs were of great importance to the House of Commons, a subject which is peculiarly susceptible to parliamentary treatment. The immediate economic pressures were removed from members and they were not fighting for their own constituency. They were much more genuine debates than many of our debates about home affairs which really amounted to jockeying for position. Now that Britain's voice has deteriorated a great deal in the world, our foreign affairs debates are not at all what they were. The other thing is that a great deal of political power has passed away, even from the government and certainly from the House of Commons. Decisions are taken at

[p. 74]

meetings between Ministers and organisations. The trade unions and the employers' federation have become increasingly important. This has led to a diminution of the House of Commons itself. Roy Jenkins is right that it has decreased as a forum for debate and in some ways its authority has decreased too.

But there are some other factors. The House of Commons does depend to some extent upon how big a majority the Government have. In the last Parliament, when the Government had no majority of it's own, the House of Commons did in fact assert itself to a greater extent than it had been able to do for many years and it even threw out parts of important government bills. The other factor which is important is television. Being a leading member of the House of Commons does enable you to get on television. Inevitably if there is a political debate the television people will get a Minister or a leading member of the opposition to take part and therefore some members of the House have got a wider audience than they used to have. This only applies to very few but it does apply to some. The last factor which has slightly enhanced the position of the House of Commons, but still hasn't offset the decline, is that we are getting rather good young members. For a while we went through an awkward period in which being a member of the House of Commons was still ostensibly a part-time job, although it was in fact full time. Now it is accepted as a very important time-consuming job and we are getting younger people who will accept that. I think that the younger members, particularly, I am bound to say, in the Conservative Party, are rather good.

3. A Counter-Civil Service?

Bolkestein: Somewhere else you have put the question: ‘What is the future of the Specialist Parliamentary Committee? Should it have a small civil service of its own?’ What would your answer be?

Grimond: When I wrote that and up to a year or two ago, I was fairly certain that we ought to have what I would call a counter-civil service. These committees should have a few experts at their beck and call who would enable them to compete on more equal terms with the knowledge and expertise of the official civil service. But I now have doubts about that because I have watched the enormous growth in bureaucracy in my

[p. 75]

country, not only in the civil service but bureaucracy of every kind, and I am terrified of adding to this. I hope the British can be weaned away from this appalling growth in government but certainly at the moment they are not. The Conservative Party have made practically no impact. The size of government is as big as ever if not bigger.

Our parliamentary system was really a very simple one. Government emerged in the old days out of the crown rather than out of the party system. The business of the House of Commons was to criticise it, and to watch it and to thwart it, and not to try and manage itself. I constantly have to point out to Americans that our system, although it is believed to be the origin of theirs, is quite different because Congress in America actually legislates. All major legislation in Britain is initiated by the Government but a Member of Congress is virtually a member of a government: he produces legislation, he has a large office and in many ways he acts like a Minister. Now that did not use to be the position of an M.P. His business was not an attempt to manage or to govern or to introduce legislation but to give voice to the grievances of his constituents and to see that the Government didn't get too big. That is changing. To begin with a lot of the new M.P.'s in Britain want to be Ministers. They want to govern, far more than they did so even ten or fifteen years ago. Secondly, Government has spread so enormously that their constituents come into contact with Government now at every turn and so M.P.'s are getting involved in Government. Furthermore, a fruitful recruiting ground for British M.P.'s are technical colleges and universities and here we have people who hold views about the theory of politics and the running of government and so forth. They are, if you like, much more involved in government and want much more to become involved in government than the old type who was a member of a trade union or a local farmer who came up to Westminster to express the views of his colleagues, not really to study government at all. So there has been an increase in the desire of M.P.'s to take an active part in the work of the government. We are coming nearer, perhaps, to the American system or to certain continental systems.

I am not altogether satisfied that it is a wholly good thing. I sat for a time on one of our specialist committees which are quite new in our Parliament. The one I sat on was about immigration and how we should treat immigrants. We went arount the country, sitting as committee to hear evidence from Pakistanis, Indians, West Indians and local authori-

[p. 76]

ties and so forth and in a way it was a very necessary development. Problems of immigration were new to us and it was very good for these people to be able to come and see a committee of Parliament and explain their point of view. It was also very good for us as parliamentarians to talk to them and to local authorities, to mayors and so forth about the problems immigration caused for them. But, of course, it did gravely affect the parliamentary system. To begin with, on this committee we all became very friendly and it is not the business of liberals to be friendly with conservatives, except in a private capacity. We developed a common view. I found myself in almost total agreement with a rather left-wing member of the Labour Party. I had known him for a long time. We had always been very friendly but we had never agreed about anything in politics. This time we were agreeing about immigration. Furthermore, and much worse, we began to sympathise with the Ministers and it is not our business to sympathise with Ministers. Our business is to criticise Ministers, to keep them at arms length and to say to them: ‘It is not my business to tell you how to do your job. All I can tell you is that you are doing it very badly and unless you go away and do it better I shall do my best to get rid of you.’ But now, you see, these poor Ministers came around with our committee and we saw what an awful time they had and how intractable the problems were and we began to sympathize with them. We became involved, we were sucked into the whole business of government, we got to know the civil servants and we saw how very difficult it was. In a way this was quite right, a valuable insight into the real world, but in another way it was a big change in the simple British system. I maintain that there is still something to be said for the simple British system, that people do want representatives - at least some representatives - who are not involved in Government, who are simply sent up because they can tell the Minister where the shoe pinches. Now we have got to try and move into this new field of specialist committees because they are necessary for the increase of government but we also have got to try and preserve the old role of the parliamentarian and this is extremely difficult. One way that we might tackle it is to change the responsibilities of our upper chamber but so far we have not solved this and until we do I am rather chary of suggesting more civil servants for these committees because it is not wholly apparent to me what the real task of these committees is ultimately going to be.

[p. 77]

4. The Ombudsman

Bolkestein: Haven't you said that you thought the Ombudsman was not a very fruitful development?

Grimond: Indeed I did. First of all the appointment of the Ombudsman was another sign of the general periferation of government in Britain. We didn't think out exactly what we were trying to do. Westminster Parliament is far and away the biggest Parliament in the world. There are 630 members of the House of Commons. America, Germany and France get on with 400 or so. Then we have the House of Lords: over a thousand members if they like to turn up. We very nearly had a Parliament in Scotland and a Parliament in Wales and then we have had a reorganisation of local government which has enormously increased its size, so it cannot be said that we do not have enough political bodies. Now on top of all this we have the Ombudsman but it is the duty of the M.P. to take up grievances. Perhaps he is too amateur and perhaps a lot of people don't feel that they trust their Members of Parliament. Still, it was his basic business and still is. Most of an M.P.'s time is taken up with individual cases, not with big political issues but with people who can't get houses or object to their income tax assessment. At the moment you have to approach your Ombudsman through your M.P. This means that the people write to me and I write to the Minister and the Minister gives me what from their point of view is an unsatisfactory answer. I pass this on to them and say, ‘I'm sorry but so far I have not managed to budge the Minister.’ They answer: ‘Would you send this case to the Ombudsman?’ Well, I do, but rather weakly, because if I can't persuade the Minister why should he be able to? The only area in which he might be able to do so is a very specialised area but if the Ombudsman is going to operate in specialised areas he is going to need a very large staff and we are going to have another large accumulation of civil servants.

The other thing we haven't thought out is, who is going to be the Ombudsman? The Ombudsman up to now has been a civil servant and he has been by tradition and training a member of the very bureaucracy over which he is supposed to be watchdog. Now the argument for this is that no one who has not been in the civil service will understand how it works and therefore the civil service will be able to fob off any outsider

[p. 78]

quite easily. Of course, the Ombudsman then sees all the problems and difficulties of a civil servant. He has been brought up in that atmosphere and is therefore not as savage a watchdog as we would like. Another thing about the Ombudsman is that a great many of the problems which badly affect ordinary people in Britain are only partially to do with our Westminster Parliament's responsibility. Several of the questions I get are now really questions for the European Parliament or for a great many of the local authorities. The nationalised industries, our health service and the post office - all these things have been moved out of direct parliamentary control. The nationalised industries are supposed to be free from day-to-day interference by parliament. Half of my complaints are about bad air services, why the trains don't run on time, why the local railway station has been closed. ‘Why can't I get into hospital? Why can't I get a house? Why can't I get a subsidy from Strassbourg to build a fishing boat?’ None of these matters now are directly the concern of the Westminster Parliament nor, indeed therefore, should they really be the concern of the Ombudsman. We got over this to a small extent by appointing yet another Ombudsman for local authorities but really we can't have a clutter of Ombudsmen, we can't have an Ombudsman for nationalised industries and one for the health service and one for Brussels and so forth. Therefore I think we have got to give a lot more thought to the Ombudsman. There may be a place for him. I very much doubt whether we shall ever get rid of him but I do believe that he is being loaded on to a system which does not lack political bodies.

5. The House of Lords

Bolkestein: In his Romanes Lecture of 1930 Winston Churchill spoke of a sub-Parliament that would consist of experts from the main segments of society, such as trade unions, large corporations and so on. I suppose that as an enemy of the corporate state you wouldn't like this?

Grimond: No, I wouldn't. I don't want to encourage the corporate state. I quite see that there is a case for it, though. There is a case for making the trade union leaders stand up in the House of Lords and defend their policies but, on the whole, I am against it. What I would really like to see is an elected House of Lords that represents very large

[p. 79]

constituencies, elected by proportional representation for a fixed term, certainly not less than six years and possibly as much as ten. I wouldn't want it to have great power, but certain powers of delay and examination of legislation and, of course, the right to conduct general debates on broad matters of policy. The House of Commons has now become a full time job and this will exclude many good people from it. Although I don't go along with Winston's proposition I think that if you have a second chamber of the sort I have in mind you would get some of the people whom he wants because they would find it possible to give up a certain amount of their time to the House of Lords. If they had a big enough constituency they would not be involved with too many personal cases.

I also think that you would get many other people of value. You would for instance get the dissidents in the Labour Party who are now in danger of being thrown out by their local association. You would get some conservatives who don't feel inclined to take part in the day-to-day business of conservative politics. You would get a certain number of distinguished people with a longish view on where Britain ought to be going. These are the people that we lack in politics at the moment. In many ways we are too much involved in infighting and in the short term view. We want a longer view which the House of Lords might give. We would also get people who would give a certain expert opinion on bills before they became law and I think that if they had a certain democratic base they would be able to say that they did represent something or somebody. The present trouble with the House of Lords is that they don't represent anyone. About one tenth is appointed by the Government and nine-tenths are hereditary. The people I have in mind would claim a democratic base but it would be sufficiently large to relieve them of the day-to-day pressures of democratic politics. If they were there for six, seven or more years they would be able to take a fairly long view. At the moment it is becoming more and more the case that Parliament is affected by how near or far the next election is.

6. The Liberal Delusion

Bolkestein: Your philosophy has been described as a political version of ‘small is beautiful’: community-politics, devolution and worker participation. Yet, you also write about what you call the liberal delusion, i.e.

[p. 80]

the idea that the whole human race wants to sit around discussing how its work or life or the organization of public services should be run. Isn't there a contradiction between these two thoughts?

Grimond: Yes, I am aware of that. I reconcile it by saying that although small is usually beautiful, or more beautiful than very big, obviously some big things are very beautiful too. Possibly I have exaggerated beauty and smallness. Indeed, some of the biggest problems which we face all over the Western world arise from bigness but are inescapable. What are we to do with industries that really must operate with very big plants? So perhaps I have exaggerated the beauty of smallness but I still think, other things being equal, that small organizations are better. Certainly we have greatly exaggerated the advantages of size. There are very grave disadvantages to size. As for participation, there are enough people who are prepared to sit around. The others, who don't really want to sit around all day discussing, do want to be kept well informed and have a right to express their views when they feel so inclined.

The British political system, which was the English system, did have a great merit in that it allowed people to air their grievances through their Member of Parliament, without necessarily becoming involved in the day-to-day business of politics. We have got to try and reconcile these two perfectly reasonable and desirable things: the people who want to take part in the administration at whatever level and the people who don't but want to be kept informed and want to have some method of putting their grievances right.

7. Cooperatives

Grimond: I am at the moment very much interested in the possibility of extending cooperatives into industry. So far our cooperative movement has been largely a consumers' movement. It is quite obvious that cooperatives work best if they are comparatively small. It is no doubt possible to run a cooperative with more than five or six hundred workers but it is getting very difficult and within the cooperative it is quite apparent that only a proportion of the workers really wants to take part in active management. I think these things can be reconciled. For one thing, in the best cooperatives the workers appoint the management and no doubt act like a board of directors but they don't attempt

[p. 81]

the day-to-day management of their business and the people who don't want to take part in it therefore needn't do so. They are not bound to participate anymore than shareholders of a company. They leave it to the directors so long as they are satisfied with what the directors do but they do have the right to sack them and to take part in the management if they want. As to communities in Britain, we have put too much stress on size. Part of the trouble with our cities is that they have become too big, although by the standards of America or Japan they are not all that big. Manchester, Liverpool, London and so forth are becoming very nearly unmanageable and I think certainly that we should operate with rather smaller communities. I accept that there is a difficulty and that you cannot run everything in very small communities but I still think that part of the solution is to make it possible for more people to take part in the running of the community.

Bolkestein: Your ideas are like those of Gandhi. You invited him once to Oxford. You weren't very impressed with him, were you?

Grimond: No, he was rather a disappointment but partly because he was exhausted and partly because he was being asked questions in an English context, while really his thoughts were entirely on India and the two of them are very different. Gandhi had two beliefs which I don't share. One was a belief in handicrafts. I am all for people taking up handicrafts as a hobby but I can't say that I attach any great importance to them. The cooperatives which I admire are not concerned with handicrafts. They are concerned with highly sophisticated technology. The Mondragon cooperatives in Spain have the best research organization in electronics in Spain and possibly one of the best in Europe. They are not interested in handicrafts as Gandhi was. Secondly, Gandhi's work was all linked very closely to the Hindu religion which I admire but do not understand. Gandhi was not very forthcoming and I think that this was because at that time he was negotiating with the British government and he was a very shrewd and indeed Machiavellian negotiator. Certainly this combination of deeply religious Hinduism, handicrafts and at the same time what appeared to be rather cagey politics is not the sort of combination that appeals strongly to the young.

Shortly after Gandhi came I procured a man called Shaukat Ali. He has disappeared from the scene but he was at that time a great leader of

[p. 82]

the Muslims. He was just the opposite. He was a flamboyant personality and in every way a contrast to Gandhi: a magnificent looking man, dressed in flowing robes with a great stick with an ivory head. He behaved in just the opposite way. He said the British were hell. He flourished his stick and said: ‘I've killed twenty people with this myself,’ and with the young this went down very well. ‘Do you believe in violence?’ ‘Oh yes, I believe in violence.’ He was a leader of the Muslims but he didn't have to play his hand like Gandhi.

What has impressed me is to see these cooperatives in the Basque country because what they have done is to harness Basque nationalism to improve their economy. They were started by a priest to improve the appalling standard of living of some of the Basque provinces. While in Britain everybody looks to London for grants, help and loans, they were not only remote from Madrid - they were anti-Madrid. They were against the Franco Government and part of the driving force in setting up the cooperatives was to show that the Basques could run their own industry and improve their own communities. To a great extent they raised their own money. You had to pay to join the cooperative. This is an extraordinary thought to a British workman, that he should actually put down a thousand pounds to get a job, but Mondragon had waiting-lists of people. I said to them: ‘But surely you can't get ordinary working people to pay to be employed.’ ‘Oh yes, indeed, you can. Don't your working people buy colour television and motor cars? Well, if they can do that, why can't they put a thousand or fifteen hundred pounds into their own business?’ They have a bank which mobilises local savings and instead of putting them into government stock as happens in Britain, or into speculative housing, they invest them locally. This bank provides them with a central service of expertise in management and all this is linked to intense local feeling. The cooperatives run a research place and an apprentice scheme. The apprentices not only learn a trade but as soon as they can do anything they are formed into a cooperative and they pay for themselves. The apprentices don't get grants, they don't get any pay, they have to earn their money. Although there is free education run by the state and also the Catholic school which I amagine is subsidised by the Church, there are schools which are not actually part of the cooperatives but are closely linked to them. To go to these the parents have to pay but the ordinary working class Basque parent would rather pay and send his children to a school that he wants and

[p. 83]

over which he has some control than send it free to a government school.

8. The Limits of the Welfare State

Bolkestein: One of our basic problems concerns what one might call the limits of the welfare state. At the moment, whenever there is a problem, people ask the government to solve it for them. Where do we draw the line?

Grimond: I have come to the conclusion that we cannot extend the personal social services further. They were necessary and I am not in favour of abolishing them but instead of trying to prevent trouble arising we now wait until it has arisen and then we say: we will just have to have a new department to deal with it. This really has reached the end of the road. If we are going to prevent trouble arising then we have got to raise the standards of the poorer communities. That you must do by giving them the money but not telling them exactly what they have to do with it. Our trouble is that grants to local authorities and so forth are still too much linked to particular purposes. This means that the local authority has no real incentive to make up it's own mind between priorities or indeed to be economical in pursuing any priorities. It knows that it is going to get a certain grant for a road. If it doesn't take it for that, it will get it for nothing else. So it takes the grant and the road is probably built fairly extravagantly. You must give the grants but to a far greater extent you must give them without strings attached.

Further, I think you must look at the causes of social evil. One of the most prominent in Britain is bad planning. This has led to the devastation of cities. The internal parts of cities have been denuded of their people and quite appalling housing estates have been built on the outskirts, which are now virtually slums. We have separated industry from living, which may be good up to a point, but it has gone far beyond any reasonable point so people have to travel miles to their work and small businesses that must be near their customers cannot find premises.

We have got to start with education. To begin with I think we have to have more variety in British education. It has become very centralised. People have got to be taught their individual responsibilities and that they must not rely upon their organization or their welfare workers to make up their mind about everything for them.

[p. 84]

Some services must be maintained either because they are general services which the whole community wants and which therefore bind the community together or because they operate when totally unforeseen or largely unforseeable matters have arisen. There are a lot of criticisms of the health service. I think it is quite wrong that people who are suddenly struck with illness should be unable to get good medical attention because they haven't got enough money.

Also, there are services which everybody requires and which give solidity to the community. I think that the most obvious of these is the police. I deplore the tendency in Britain for more and more institutions to be hived off to private organizations which provide a so-called security. But our social services have gone far beyond that into all sorts of things. I see no reason why refuse collection shouldn't be hived off to private enterprise. I can't see that there is anything particularly ethical about refuse collection. If some private firm can do that - all well and good. I don't think that we need anything like the individual services which have crept up and I think we would have done far better to look more closely into the police force and what they can do. The police in Britain, at the moment, are getting involved in all sorts of administration that is not their business. They are getting involved in looking after football crowds when they don't really have enough people to prevent ordinary assaults. The local policeman was a very valuable man not only in keeping order but in social welfare. He knew people, he had authority and he was probably more capable of preventing the beating up of wives than is a social worker. That sort of thing is now handed over to the social worker. Cruelty to children, which I am afraid is very prevalent in Britain, is considered the job of the social worker. This is not very satisfactory. I don't say I would do away with social workers altogether but I think we took a wrong turning.

Then we have gone in for a whole lot of services to the old and incapacitated and so forth. Now some of these again are good. I see it very strongly in a rural area. In the old days everybody looked after their own parents and so forth. Now they are put into homes and neighbours don't cut each others crops if they are ill, which they certainly did. There are some very valuable services, for example those that provide meals for people who can't provide their own. This putting of old people indefinitely into homes has, however, been a mistake. It would have been far better to have let them stay in their own houses or indeed

[p. 85]

with their families if they would have them and possibly to send in some meals for them. At the moment we are getting more and more old people and of course they live longer. These homes which are getting bigger and bigger every year are really not altogether satisfactory.

I am in favour of a national minimum earnings. It would be far better, instead of having this vast proliferation of different rates of assistance for different people, to say that a civilised community is not going to allow anyone to starve and that therefore we are going to have a minimum income. At the moment in Britain there are countless rates of pay and allowances and it is all taxed back and taken to the State and dished out again. We should simplify that.

9. Devolution

Bolkestein: Were you a Scottish nationalist?

Grimond: I have always thought that there ought to be a Scottish Parliament. When I was young I was probably more violently nationalist, like all young people. Now I believe that there should be a federal system in Britain and that Wales, Scotland and England should each have their own parliament within it. I don't think one can deny that when one was young there was an element of rather fervid Scottish nationalism about this. I can imagine the time when I was to some extent a Jacobite and admired the Stuarts and resented every encroachment of the English in Scotland. I never disliked the English but they appeared to be encroaching on our law, customs and traditions.

I very much regret that the Labour government made such a mess of the devolution proposals. For obvious reasons they were introduced by the Labour Party to scotch the Scottish Nationalists. The Labour Party was terrified because it was losing votes in Glasgow. Therefore they felt that they must do something to placate Scottish opinion but they didn't really believe in it and they were determined that the features of our system which favour Labour should be retained. Normally Labour has a majority in Scotland and Wales and very often it is enabled to have a majority over Britain as a whole because of the Scottish and Welsh seats. It has not had a majority in England itself since the war. Therefore it was determined not to give up its Scottish or Welsh seats at Westminster. This, of course, made nonsense of the whole thing

[p. 86]

because there is no reason why the Scots and Welsh should retain all their representation in Westminster and also have a Parliament of their own. It led to such anomalies as the proposal that the Scottish members would be able to vote on housing in England but would have nothing to do with housing in Scotland. The other thing which led to a great deal of nonsense was the determination of the Civil Service to maintain all its offices, perks and indeed responsibilities. Of course, you can't have a proper federal system without altering the present system. The Central Civil Service was determined not to give up an inch of either its numbers or its power. The Conservative Party doesn't believe in devolution either. It was more divided. Some members of it did but the majority of the party didn't believe in it. This is no atmosphere to make constitutional changes in and the whole bill was mucked up from my point of view. I would have liked to have seen a clear statement of what functions were going to be dealt with in Scotland. These would have been practically everything in my view except defence, foreign affairs and major broad economic planning. I would have liked to have seen this linked to what was going to be done in Brussels but this was never discussed. The fact that while devolution was being discussed we were actually becoming part of Europe was never really mentioned at all. This would have left Westminster Parliament with extremely little to do. You could cut down the number of Scottish members there. In fact I rather favour the idea that the Scots would simply from time to time send a delegation from their Parliament to meet with the English and discuss these matters of foreign affairs and that there should be no permanent representation.

The failure of the referendum really killed the thing off. The Scottish Nationalists lost at the election and therefore the Labour Party now doesn't think they are a menace and its enthusiasm, such as it was, has waned. The Conservatives never were enthusiastic. I think it will revive. I don't quite know in what form but I think that there will be some protest movement in Scotland linked to nationalism. This may take the form of reviving the present Scottish Nationalist Party which is a very orthodox party filled with rather able and nice people but middle class and unrevolutionary. I say that in its favour. There isn't now much very far left in Scotland but there has been from time to time. It is just possible that the next thing will be a much more left wing party which will be Marxist-Nationalist. Perhaps in four or five years time we shall see a

[p. 87]

recrudescence of Scottish Nationalism, possibly allied to some other political movement.

10. The Labour Party^*

Bolkestein: Will Tony Benn succeed in giving a permanent left-wing turn and a Marxist slant to the Labour Party.

Grimond: I think the probability, although not by any means the certainty, is that that will happen. The Labour Party is very much the political wing of the trade unions and it is unable to move very far from what the trade unions want. The trade unions, after the war, were in normal terms very right wing Labour and people like Bevin were right wing Social Democrats. They were in charge of the big unions and the real change in British politics has partly come about because the big unions are no longer in the charge of powerful right wing figures like Deakin and Bevin. Their present leaders are much more to the left and this alone will gravely affect the Labour Party. Also, by its constitution it is a fairly left wing organization. There is no talk of preserving free enterprise. On the contrary all the means of production, distribution and exchange are to be under public control. There has been some argument as to what is meant by public control but it is normally assumed to be nationalisation and there are many Labour members who say quite frankly:

‘There is no ultimate difference between what we believe in and what communists believe. The difference simply resides in how we get there. We don't believe in revolution and we certainly don't believe in taking over things by an armed coup but if we can persuade the British electorate then we really will have a communist state. It wouldn't of course be like Russia.’ All communists believe that the next communist state is going to be heaven. Many socialists don't deny that they believe in total public control.

Of course, they have never put the constitution into effect, partly because the unions themselves were right wing and partly because the Labour Party is well aware that it can never win the essential marginal seats on what is virtually a communist programme. The real trouble is

* This interview took place in March, 1980.

[p. 88]

that the Party has become a party of the establishment. The unions are now very powerful and so are the other organizations which support the Labour Party. So far from being a radical party, it is the party of government, of office and of the establishment. It is growing all the features which establishments have. It has become conservative. It is very much in opposition to any real reform but this does not suit the younger members of the party who still want it to be a changing, reforming party. The right wing is not really supplying them with anything to go for. They are very keen to have office. I think that a prime example of this was Harold Wilson, whose main objective was to remain in office as a Socialist Prime Minister. Perfectly honourable but not very inspiring for a young and up-and-coming idealistic Socialist. Therefore they have turned to the left and they have looked to people like Wedgwood Benn, who after all does produce ideas. I have a great deal of affection and indeed some admiration for Benn. I don't say that he is producing philosophy but he is producing ideas or latching on to them and this, of course, attracts the younger people.

Under Gaitskell the right wing fought to have the constitution of the party changed and make it into a social democratic party in the terms which are understood in Holland and in Germany. It was defeated. It has never been apparent to me what it is trying to do now. The leading active right-wing members of the Labour Party in Parliament have mostly departed from British politics. They would say that they stood for equality, but they don't show much enthusiasm for equality as far as they are concerned. They have got the highest paid jobs they can possibly find. They have become Head of the Commission in Brussels or one of the most highly paid television people or they have got into merchant banking. There do remain people who would say they are Social Democrats but they have not produced anything to take the place of ‘equality’ as a slogan. They are losing ground in the Labour Party, partly because the nature of the party has changed and partly because they have produced no alternative strategy.

Outside the party and outside parliament there are a lot of people who have been voting Labour but who are gravely worried about the activities of left wing people in their constituencies. As the Labour Party has always been very frightened of scaring off large sections of the electorate by appearing too left wing, it is becoming more and more apparent that it is faced with the need to make up its mind. If it wants to remain a

[p. 89]

party of the left, a party of change and so forth, then it has got to tell us what it stands for. So far the only people who have done this are the far left who stand for pretty extreme socialism. If it is going to be a party of the establishment which is simply concerned with remaining in office then it is not going to keep its young element. It has got to make up its mind what its relationship, in the long run, is going to be with the unions. I think that the outcome of that will be that it will move to the left.

Bolkestein: What will happen to the moderate Socialists?

Grimond: I think there are three possibilities. One is that at last we may see some re-alignment: a left-of-centre party which will then contain the Liberals. To this the Liberals would supply the organization and they would supply active politicians and to a certain degree, the Liberal philosophy. I think Roy Jenkins is a Liberal. He also, no doubt, would have certain social democratic ideas too but then so would we. I don't really think that there is very much difference in political outlook between David Steel and Roy Jenkins. There are Liberals who are more laisser faire but David Steel has a great element of the social democrat in him, as do many Liberals. It is an old strand in Liberal thinking in Britain which goes right back to the 1906 government and Lloyd George and Asquith. It has been kept going by Keynes and Beveridge and the welfare state.

The difficulty is old loyalties and starting up any sort of new party or even changing the nature of a party in Britain. British politics are extremely conservative. It is essential to have an organization. Mr. Taverne, who was a Labour Minister, attempted to do this. He kept it going for about five years but eventually it disintegrated because it couldn't expand. It was centred in Lincoln and still exists there, but it has no organization outside. There is also a question of finance - here again we come back to the unions - but certainly one possibility is that we shall have a Liberal/Social Democratic Party and that is possibly a very good prospect.

The other possibility is that the Social Democrats simply go out of politics, which the leading ones have been doing, and that their followers divide themselves up between the Conservative, Liberal and Labour parties. Although the Conservative Party is being very right wing at the

[p. 90]

moment and is certainly not holding out much which is of great interest to people who voted Labour, it is nevertheless the only element in British politics which is actively going in a new direction. There are quite a lot of people who may not like her policies but are quite prepared to say that Mrs. Thatcher is showing guts.

As a third possibility the Social Democrats may have success in the Labour Party. I don't think that this is at all likely. It was much more likely in the days of Gaitskell. There was a real possibility that had Gaitskell lived it would have become a Social Democratic Party and might have changed its constitution. I don't think there is the same possibility now, partly because of the change in the nature of the unions and partly because the Gaitskellites have no leader of the calibre of Gaitskell.

11. The Contradiction of Socialism

Bolkestein: You favour a re-alignment on the left between Social Democrats and Liberals. Yet you have also said somewhere: ‘Democratic socialism was a parasitic growth which depended on a Liberal political and economic society. But it gradually weakened this society.’ By this you must mean the contradiction of Social Democracy: a good thing as far as it goes but sapping the Liberal economy as the oak is being throttled by the vine.

Grimond: I do indeed think that. It is the reason that I myself would not dream of joining a social democratic party unless it were strongly Liberal. If the Social Democrats are going to get anywhere they have virtually got to join the Liberal Party. As they are probably better known than most of the people in the Liberal Party its name may be changed but essentially they have got to accept the basic tenets of Liberalism. The welfare state depends upon a very effective economy and the only really effective economy is a free enterprise, market economy. Therefore it is parasitic of this. Where we have gone wrong is to go in for this appalling state socialism which the Social Democrats, of course, supported. Indeed to some extent it originated under Mr. Atlee with these large state-run monopolies set up for no reason except that either they were in difficulties or Gaitskell - extraordinary aberration - thought they were the commanding heights of the economy. In point of

[p. 91]

fact they turned out to be the depths. State socialism can not exist in any effective form without a liberal society.

There is a possibility that we get a Conservative Party of the sort which believes in Milton Friedman's economics and abandons the old ideas of conservatives - that their real job is to maintain an even keel and swim with the tide. Over and against this the main opposition would be a Liberal and Social Democratic Party. There are quite interesting developments in America. There is a movement towards neo-conservatism and quite a few of the intellectuals who have been in and out of Harvard and government are now abandoning left-wing stands and taking up the position that they wish to run a free liberal society but with a rather powerful welfare state. They are strongly opposed to communism in all its forms. I don't think American ways will ever come to Britain in exactly that form but you might have a useful dialogue here between what one might call a Milton Friedman-type Conservative Party and what I would call a Liberal Party with a social democratic wing.

12. The Conservative Party

Bolkestein: There are two strains in the Tory Party. There is the interventionist strain, exemplified by Harold MacMillan, and there is the old Whig or laisser faire tradition of which Mrs. Thatcher is an exponent. Has the latter strain become dominant?

Grimond: You are quite right in saying that the other strain exists and one of its leaders is Ian Gilmour. He really believes in the old paternal conservative stance. These people were suspicious of if not hostile to what they thought was a moneygrabbing, middle class and mercantile outlook. It is part of the old patrician conservative view. They think it well worth while to deviate from economic purity for the sake of decency and for the sake of having a stable society to which they attach enormous importance. There is a lot to be said for it. They would no doubt pay the coal-mining industry many millions to stop further disruption. They are certainly a powerful and in some ways an appealing element in the Conservative Party. On the whole I think now that the Thatcherites may win.

If the Liberals in Britain do not succeed in producing a new way for-

[p. 92]

ward, something to take the place of state socialism or Marxism, and if they do not get behind them these disaffected people we have been talking about, not only the top people like Roy Jenkins but all the people who are worried about the tendency of the Labour Party, if the Liberals don't succeed in mobilising these people, then I think that the Conservatives will. We shall then find that a type of neo-conservatism has come to Britain. We shall have a modification of the Thatcher stand and we shall have a Conservative Party which will be very formidable because it will have a more definite economic and political philosophy than it has had for many years, under the aegis of people like Keith Joseph, but it will also retain certain traditional conservative attitudes which are very popular and rather necessary. The Liberals have not got very long. Unless they can produce good results and some good new thinking within the next three or four years they may loose their chance.

Bolkestein: In The Economist of 16 September 1978 there was this phrase: ‘The young Liberals propose to carpet Mr. Jo Grimond for his alleged support of the views of Sir Keith Joseph.’

Grimond: It is perfectly true that I have considerable admiration for Sir Keith Joseph. It is important to look at Sir Keith Joseph's career and actually to read what he says and not merely the headlines in the newspapers. In the last conservative government Sir Keith Joseph was the biggest spender of all. He spent a fantastic amount on the Health Service and at the time he was a leading example of the paternalistic view. He believed that the poor and the ill are entitled to good treatment and if that looked economically wrong, well, too bad - politics are superior to economics and humanity to all dry doctrine. Then he became convinced that we had gone too far, not so much in the social services as in the general state of control. Well, we did go too far. Our attempt to interfere all over the economy eventually became one of the factors which disrupted it and made it so inefficient. The young liberals, though small in number, are great headline-readers and get carried away by various things. If one followed what they believed in one would have a very odd party indeed. I dare say it is the same everywhere.

Certainly I must mention one thing about British politics and that is the press. These encapsulated opinions in the press about politicians can and do make the place very difficult to run. Sir Keith Joseph is now

[p. 93]

branded as a fanatic monk devoted to the pure doctrine of extreme laisser faire. It is quite true that in so far as he thinks economics is susceptible to scientific development he does believe in laisser faire and so do I. But he is very far from being a desiccated calculating machine. He might well become a neo-conservative of the American order. At the moment he is putting stress upon the market economy because the British have gone too far the other way, but the last time he was a minister he was the big protagonist of a huge health service. I do not agree with all he does and I have grave disagreements with some of his policies. I think, however, he is a useful element in British politics, as on the other wing - although I disagree with him even more - Wedgwood Benn is. Some people in politics are prepared to argue a case and put up alternatives and they do perform a very valuable function.

13. Right and Left

Bolkestein: You have contributed to publications of the Institute of Economic Affairs, which is labelled right-wing and put in the Friedmanite corner. Do its publications have any influence in Britain?

Grimond: Again I come back to this difficulty of political labels and the press. The old political labels are the only ones still in circulation. They really don't fit the situation, though. Unfortunately they are taken up by the press and people get branded and once they have been branded it is very difficult for them to shake it off. I think that the Press in Britain destroyed Mr. Heath. When he was leader of the opposition, day after day they narked away at him. If you opened the paper you got it said or implied that Mr. Heath was unapproachable, bad-tempered, disliked by the Conservative Party or didn't mix with women. There were a lot of things which may sound very silly but repeated like drops of water on a stone they damaged his self confidence and caused him a lot of distress. This drove him into many attitudes which indeed he didn't hold. He became difficult. He was driven to it. He became difficult for his colleagues to approach and to talk to because he constantly thought everyone was criticising him. Every day when he woke up he saw that he was being accused of being an unapproachable, difficult and monkish chap. This does get most people down.

To revert to the I.E.A., here again I feel this was like Sir Keith

[p. 94]

Joseph. I think ‘Charge’ (a book by Arthur Seldon of the I.E.A.) has many interesting ideas. I do think we should look at charging for some state services. We can not regard the I.E.A. as being right-wing or in the service of the ultra-conservatives. On the contrary, it is examining and shaking many cherished establishment beliefs in Britain and it is one of the forces for change. Their arguments for a free market economy are much needed in Britain. Also, it must be remembered that on a whole range of issues either the I.E.A. has no definite policy because they are not its business or its policies are not right wing. We must remember that many important issues in Britain are of a very uneconomic nature. There is one's attitude towards immigrants. There is one's attitude towards crime and punishment. Abortion is quite an issue. There are many people who may be right wing in the sense that they are Friedmanites but who would be highly liberal on these other issues. I don't know what the I.E.A. would actually say about these matters but in general the people I know in it are very liberal on purely political issues. They do play a very valuable part.

Between, say, 1935 and 1965 or 1970 what might be called the intellectuals and the publishing and academic worlds were nearly all collectivists of some variety. Now all of this is much modified. I don't say that there is not a very big collectivist element in the universities and schools but there are now organizations like the I.E.A. and the Mainstream Bookclub, to which I belong. The field is not left entirely to the left wing bookclub and the Fabians, as it was fifty years ago. There is an element of political dialogue and the I.E.A. is extremely important.

14. Trade Unions

Bolkestein: In one of the I.E.A.'s publications, ‘Trade Unions: Public Goods or Public Bads?’ you wrote: ‘Strikes are now aimed, not by the downtrodden workers against wicked employers but by reasonably well-off interest groups against the public. The mentality behind them is the same as that behind kidnappings’. You wrote that real wages as opposed to money wages would be higher to-day were there no unions and that the closed-shop is a direct infringement of freedom. What are we going to do about the unions?

Grimond: The main thing to do is to interest them in the running of in-

[p. 95]

dustry. When I say ‘them’ I really mean their members. I don't favour appointing the heads of the trade unions to the boards of companies, but I do very much favour an extension, in various forms, of partnership and cooperatives. We have got to get the unions to take an interest in the efficiency of their industries. We really cannot go on running Britain as a dog-fight between the unions and the state or the management. Another thing is that you have got to exercise real political skills towards the unions.

The British think of themselves as being in the position of a liberal country such as ought to have existed in about 1890. The assumptions are liberal. Although we never were a liberal state of the pure order of John Stuart Mill and although very few people would now claim to believe the whole of Mill, nevertheless the background of British thinking is that we are a democratic liberal state of the Mill variety and must pursue the purposes of such a state: democracy will ultimately settle everything, drawn to the right conclusion by reason; we must be tolerant and decent; everything will come right through a mixture of state intervention and freedom; a general mix-up of simple liberal values. In fact I think we are far more like a late medieval state. In the 14th and 15th centuries the land was full of powerful barons with private armies - some good, some bad, but all pretty powerful; these are the trade unions now. The Executive is the Crown, which had a measure of power but had to manoeuvre between these barons. The ideas of democracy were pretty remote. If you were in charge of the Executive you had to be a skillful man. If you thought you could defeat the barons in open battle you took them on. If you didn't do that you invited them to dinner and quietly poisoned them. I'm not in favour of going as far as that but nevertheless we have to think of ourselves as being in that position.

These barons were not all bad and the trade unions have played a great part in British life. We may be very glad of them if we were ever really threatened by a communist coup or by some form of invasion. I have no doubt that the trade unions could then be a very valuable element because so long as they are there we are not a unitary state and therefore by simply taking over the Government you cannot take over Britain.

But at the moment they have got up an entirely wrong road. These strikes are not always by the very badly-off. The officials of courts have been on strike, people paid £10,000 to £12,000 a year. Every year the

[p. 96]

taxpayer in Britain gives on average one thousand pounds to every worker in our steel industry. The steel strike is not against the employers, it is against the Government. They are saying that because it is a nationalised industry the Government must provide even more out of taxes. It doesn't matter to them whether the industry is profitable or not. Of course it makes an enormous loss. This is a feature not only of the strikes in the public sector which are by far the most serious, but even in the private sector. The unions are out to enforce their will over issues like the closed shop to win higher wages. If this makes the industry hopelessly unprofitable they demand that the taxpayer keeps it going. These are political actions against the Government and not like the nineteenth century strikes, when individual employers were making a huge amount of profit and paying very poor wages.

The people who run the British steel industry are the equivalent of civil servants, not steelmen at all. Villiers is a merchant banker. He only took the job on for a limited number of years. He has no stake in the industry. You go down to Corby, the big steel town, founded by the private steel firm Stewarts and Lloyds: the Lloyds lived there, or near it. The Lloyds money was invested in it and so was that of the Stewarts. The whole thing was brought home to them in every way. They suffered directly from strikes and they lost their own money. Now this has gone. The manager is going to be there for two or three years. He gets a certain salary, whether he does well or badly, and in due course he will go on to manage something else. The whole thing is entirely different. We have got to get the unions and the structure of industry wholly changed, with the unions taking an interest in running industry.

Until we can get back to being a Liberal state, the Government must think of themselves far more as the Crown in the old days, when it had to manoeuvre. There is no doubt that Mr. Heath took on the wrong people. It was fatal at that moment to provoke a controversy with the miners. This is not cynical, this is the basic business of politics and running a country: to manoeuvre to some extent. At the moment it is very necessary. I am certain we must have some changes in the law relating to trade unions. Prior is probably quite right in saying that these have got to be fairly gradual, but they have got to come. I have absolutely no doubt about that. You asked me what was going to be the ultimate test as to whether the disaffected right-wing people in the Labour Party were really serious in wanting a new political departure. The test is

[p. 97]

going to be whether they are going to support the Prior proposals. If they are not, then they are virtually saying that they cannot move away from the unions. That puts an end, to my mind, to their usefulness. If they are going to oppose them they might just as well remain in the Labour Party and knuckle under to its present leadership. Anyone who really thinks it is all right to keep the unions in the entirely privileged position they are in can't really have any claim to being a social democrat.^*

Some of the trade union leaders have many great virtues. They have great loyalty to their members and in many ways they are rather efficient and humane. They live to a great extent among their own people and everybody finds them rather pleasant to deal with. Their public image is terrible but privately most people find it much pleasanter to deal with the local trade union boss than with the local bureaucrat.

Bolkestein: What about the saying: ‘I'll tell the lads to get their snouts into the trough’?

Grimond: Yes, their public image is terrible. In fact what they encourage is terrible. This picketing is really inexcusable. They can claim, though, that this sort of remark is unfairly picked up by the press. What they have been doing to the economy cannot to my mind be too strongly attacked. But they do have great virtues and in private they are extremely nice people to deal with. They do argue their case rather well and in a way they are much more real than the employers. Their solidarity does matter to them.

Bolkestein: How can you harness this solidarity for the good of the nation?

Grimond: We have got to get them into running industry to a far greater extent. We have got to change the law so that they can't carry on this violent picketing. We have got to do something about the closed shop. Also we must have a general discussion about what their nature really ought to be. This has not been done. The only argument is whether you approve or disapprove of picketing. If you disapprove you're simply union bashing. This is nonsense. If anyone bashes it is, of course, the

* On 19 May 1982 all but one of the 29 SDP members abstained from voting when Mr. Norman Tebbit's Employment Bill was given its third reading.

[p. 98]

unions. Serious discussion as to what their role ought to be is lacking, however.

15. The Liberal Party

Bolkestein: It is said of the Liberals that they are a traditionalist middle-class party with Celtic affiliations. Is that a fair description?

Grimond: It certainly has a basis of truth. It is quite true that the Liberals, immediately after the war, never did very well in the industrial areas and it is not their most hopeful ground now. It must be said, though, that things are changing. No one can deny that Rochdale is an industrial area. Cyril Smith won it in a by-election eight years ago and he has held it for three elections by a fairly large majority. We also had the Colne Valley. The Colne Valley is part of Yorkshire. It is a long valley, running up to the Lancashire border and because of the river coming down this valley it was a great centre of the woollen industry. There are a lot of mills, originally run by water but now of course on electricity. It is again a working class area. Richard Wainwright got in for it. He was then put out but he got back again and he too has held it for the last three elections. So we can claim that we are breaking into the heart of industrial England. Nevertheless we haven't got very far, nor have the Conservative Party. The Conservative Party is losing enormously in Scotland and in Northern England.

I don't dispute that we are to some extent a middle class party. The leadership of all parties is middle class in Britain. Of course, if you begin to fall as the Liberal Party did, it is your leadership which tends to survive, ex hypothesi. The survivors become the leaders and the leaders get the publicity so they tend to survive again and they tend to be middle class. The leadership of the Labour Party is very middle class and certainly of the Conservative Party. As for Celtic, this too is true - Cornwall, Wales and the North of Scotland - but not so much because it is Celtic as because of the way of life. These are areas of small farmers, fishermen and other people who are independent of the labour movement and who are not working-class proletariat but equally are not governing class at all. It is also because of the power in these places of the non-conformist Churches, which are of course tremendous breeding grounds for Liberals.

[p. 99]

16. The Prospect for Britain

Bolkestein: You wrote in the Times in December 1977: ‘We are now passed the crisis. We are sliding into disintegration’. Did you write this in a moment of dejection or do you still believe it?

Grimond: It probably is a little exaggerated. I don't mean to say that we couldn't stop the slide. The odds are, however, that Britain will become a 19th century Austria or Spain. It will not be unpleasant to live in. Vienna at the end of the last century, right up to the war, had good music and highly stimulating intellectual society but it was no great political or economic succes, nor indeed was 19th century Spain. This is undoubtedly the way we are going, coupled with a certain amount of disintegration. We are supposed to be a highly experienced little country but our strikes are quite deplorable. That Britain, which is a highly centralised society, should be torn by this kind of thing is odd.

It is true that the dominant political thought in Britain is still state-socialist, even among many Conservatives and to a certain extent among the Liberals. One tends, if there is any trouble, to think: ‘Well, the State must get in and pay a subsidy to take over and set up another organization’. That is still dominant in rather important places, for example in the civil service and to some extent in the schools. There has been a shift, however, and things like the I.E.A. receive far more attention than they did. The victory of Mrs. Thatcher was quite significant although it hasn't meant that everybody has changed his view; certainly not in the civil service, nor indeed in the educational world. Still, it is a shift, so the slide could be stopped. This is a very crucial time in British politics. One very crucial matter is: is there any hope of a Liberal Social Democratic Party? This is very important. Secondly, what is going to happen to Mrs. Thatcher's government? Thirdly, are the British now prepared to stand up to organizations? There are signs that some people will not obey their union. This is quite new. There is a shift towards personal responsibility although possibly for purely selfish reasons but a very good thing in my view. So there are cracks in what used to be considered a very solid basis in Britain. If they can be encouraged then I think the slide can be stopped.

Of course, one thing we have not discussed is Britain's position in the world. Foreign policy in Britain has rather disappeared off the political

[p. 100]

agenda for a number of years. We are well aware that we don't carry much weight among the very big powers. Europe and joining it has taken up some of our interest but on the whole it has proved rather disappointing from our point of view, no doubt through our own fault. We no longer do much in the Commonwealth, in spite of Rhodesia. My feeling is, however, that the pressures from Russia and the question of the defence of the West are going to become very important and that this will have considerable impact on British policies. There is a section of the Labour Party which is extremely pro-Russian. I am not accusing them of disloyalty but they would defend Russia on every occasion. They defend its invasion of Afghanistan. They even defend its internal system. They are keen to go to the Olympic Games and so forth. Now if Russia's menace to the free world becomes much greater, this is going to present the Labour Party with issues that might lead to a very serious split, because there are a lot in the Labour Party, and there always have been, who are intensely anti-Russian. However much they may wish to have public control of Britain and however near they may get to sharing the communist view of how a state should be run, they are under no illusions about the dangers of external communism and I think would not remain in a party which really became a party of appeasement to the Russians.

17. Conclusion

Bolkestein: Isaiah Berlin has written an essay on Tolstoy called ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’. The hedgehog is the man who knows one thing and knows it very well. The fox is the man who knows a lot of things but inevitably knows them less well. In which of these two categories would you put yourself?

Grimond: I'm afraid the less desirable animal and that is the fox. People who devote their lives to one thing probably achieve more but I would defend myself by saying that you must be a fox if you are a politician. You have got to take an interest in a lot of things. You can't just shut yourself away and say: I am now going to become the greatest expert upon whatever it may be. You are going to be pestered by the day-to-day debates in Parliament. Somebody is going to say: ‘Well, you've got to say something about this’. Then you've got to think and find out

[p. 101]

about it. Politics is a very diverting occupation and this is even more so for the leader of a party. You can't lead the party on one issue, so that by career, by nature I am a fox, but also by education and no doubt by innate characteristics. I probably lack the intense concentration necessary to become a first rate scientist and I am not particularly well organised. The amount of my life I have simply wasted through not being reasonably well organised, trying to find papers that I have lost, the numbers of books which I have got half way through and then being diverted to something else when really I should have finished them at the time, do make me think that this is quite a serious lack. So I'm afraid I am a fox but I don't really think that a hedgehog could lead a party.

Bolkestein: You have now spent thirty years in politics. It is a grinding profession and because of the British electoral system it has not brought you the traditional rewards. Has it been worth it?

Grimond: To my mind infinitely worth it. I have enjoyed politics far more than becoming a Minister. I don't know if I would particularly relish being a junior Minister. There are few more boring jobs than being second or third in command of a rather dull Ministry. There is a lot of work but it is not very interesting and not very rewarding, so I don't regret that a bit. Politics is a fascinating business that takes one into all sorts of things (this is where the fox comes in) which otherwise one would miss and it has all sorts of elements which I like very much. I actually like the case work. I like the personal cases. I like having a definite constituency. I have groaned about going to Orkney and Shetland but I rather enjoy being involved in local things. I have no regrets about that and I don't really wish to go to the House of Lords, although I may conceivably go there - I can't see what else they are going to do with me. My only criticisms of politics are, first of all, that I think you must watch its effect upon the character. A man has recently written a book about the appalling effect of politics on people's health, how leading statesmen take to drink or suffer from diseases or premature senility. At the top, politics is very wearing upon the character. I have mentioned Heath but I see it happening to other people. I think that you have to be very tough to be the first Woman Prime Minister of Britain what with this constant criticism of your hair and your voice and also the need to hedge a bit upon things for the sake of votes. I think it can

[p. 102]

have a bad effect upon the character. Also, of course, one should watch one's effect upon one's family. I might end by telling how my youngest son when he was at school in Orkney was given a lift on the road by some people. We happened to know them but they didn't know who my son was. We heard the story from them. They tried to find out what his father did but he hummed and hawed and then they had the terrible feeling that there must be something awful about his father, he must be in prison or something. Eventually what he said about his father, in the strong Orkney accent that he then had, was: ‘Och well, he only gangs aboot’.