FROM THE PIGEON HOLE
NA-a. MACMILLAN made a very bad start in his first pro- nouncement as Chancellor last week. This turned out to be the kind of impeccable, though superficial, diagnosis of the dangers of inflation which any intelligent layman can compile for himself from the Monthly Digest of Statistics, but which Treasury officials apparently still believe passes for a speech. We have heard it all a hundred times before, except that Mr. Macmillan had a new analogy about plugs and fuses which. to be fair to the Treasury, was probably his own. The theme of the speech, so help us, was restraint. When will the authori- ties come to, and appreciate that there is only one possible source of inflation, the Government, and only the Government can do anything about it? We are suffering not from a lack of restraint, but from incompetent management of our affairs. Within the last eighteen mouths the Treasury has twice fallen down on its job on technical matters. It failed to foresee the investment boom coming, and then failed again to make the adjustments which would have allowed it to develop without damaging the economy. Second, it has mishandled the borrow- ing of the public authorities to such an extent that the banks' attempts to make the Government's credit squeeze work are now sabotaged by the Government itself. So instead of berating industrialists (who work for less money here than anywhere else in the free world) or the trade unions (who do not exist to keep wages down), or the long-suffering public (who, with very few exceptions, do not spend their spare time printing notes), the Chancellor could do worse than have a fatherly talk with his officials about the facts of economic life. At least he must insist that all routine briefs for Ministerial speeches are taken from their pigeon holes, carefully stacked together, and burnt.
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