Houdini does it again
Patrick Cosgrave
Mr Anthony Barber is the veritable Houdini of politics. Whatever he says as Chancellor can, it seems, be turned to political advantage; and any budget of his is guaranteed to produce a significant political impact. Even this afternoon — it is the evening of Budget day on which I write — he managed to extract a significant amount of Central Office oomph from what amounted to a detailed and ineffective account of the present state of the economy. Mr Barber even — in perhaps the most consequential passage of his speech — managed to represent savings as a form of voluntary taxation. He was faced, and, come what may, even he could not avoid it, with a significant difference between the amount of money the Government was raising in taxation, and the amount of money they were spending — on good things and good works, no doubt, but nonetheless money spent and not earned — and he sought to bridge the gap by persuading our citizenry to put their money in National Savings, so that the Government could spend that, too.
That was the crux of the Budget. Everything else was marginal. Even so, Mr Barber, as always, could not merely manage to get the Labour goat, but persuade the Labour tiger to fall into the trap prepared for him. The Chancellor pointed out that, once VAT had been introduced, many prices would fall, and if they did not the Government would want to know why. In order to let them know which unscrupulous High Street traders had been misleading the public about this new, mysterious, but basically simple, tax there would be a complaints procedure, the consumer, for the use of, the Chancellor said. LalSour backbenchers hooted. But, said Mr Barber, in his mildest and most deceptive way, that was precisely what the TUC had asked for in the tripartite talks. Did Labour now object?
It was a delicious political moment in an otherwise pretty dull lecture. The Labour Party will always rise to Mr Barber, and he clearly enjoys their doing so. But, as the somewhat apathetic mood of the House of Commons during the speech indicated, Mr Barber glossed over rather than dealt with some of the more fundamental challenges with which he was confronted. Slight though he is in person, Mr Barber reminds me of the cruder kind of heavyweight prize fighter. He wades on through a sea of indifference, jocosity and hostility in a Commons speech, and orchestrates only when he has some joke or trap well planned. He never rides with punches. He never reacts spontaneously to what happens on the floor of the House. He is determined to dominate.
And that is, of course, essential to what he is trying to achieve. "Shades of Maudling ", muttered one very senior Tory backbencher, who has seen many, many Chancellors in operation over the 'last quarter-century. And, indeed, Mr Maudling, the greatest risk-taker among modern Chancellors, must have been very approving of his pupil this afternoon. For what Mr Barber has put forward as a formula is this: spend more, and, thereby, earn more. Mr Barber has gone broke on growth (if one can do such a contradictory thing); and, if he cannot achieve growth at five per cent by the end of this year, and at the same time make inflation tolerable, he will have to go back to the House of Commons and ask them to accept a nasty, deflationary mini-budget. It was not without significance that, when the Chancellor told the House that he would not, though his was a neutral Budget, be inhibited by its existence from introducing further financial measures during the rest of the year, the House hooted with despairing glee. They did so for two reasons: first, because they did not believe this Budget was permanent; second, because they felt there were other and more important matters going on outsid.e the Government's ken, which would determine what the British Government could do with our economy over the next year, much more sharply and much more cruelly, than anything Mr Barbel' could do today. For the really sad fact about this budget was that it was seen to be, and was felt by the House that listened to it to be, irrelevant.
Mr Philip Goodhart picked his nose. Mr Enoch Powell, who, at one stage buried his face in his hands, at another dozed off. Mrs Sally Oppenheim left the Chamber in mid-speech, with the briefest nod to the Speaker. Mr Michael Foot, who attended as closely as a good Socialist should to what Mr Barber was saying, yawned loudly several times. And even the Prime Minister looked pretty soporific, in what I take to be a new and rather beautiful navy blue suit, because, presumably, he felt that the really important decisions about the British economy in the next twelve months would be taken not in the House of Commons Committee on the Finance Bill, but in his own and his ministers' negotiations with the other European powers on the exchange rate of sterling. This was a budget which was felt by every member present to be crucial; and which was also known to be more than ordinarily vulnerable to the whims of the international money market. How many of Mr Barber's provisions survive will depend, not on the merits and demerits of zero VAT rating on children's clothing, not on increased pensions, not on the fashion in which Tory property tax is superior to Labour betterment levy, but on how this Government conducts its exchange arguments with its European partners. Never was there a budget so significant, in that it marked a turning point in whdt we can do; never was it so insignificant, in that it failed to make central to its argument the fact that how our domestic economy progresses is no longer dependent on our domestic dispositions as much as on our international relations.
I suppose it is possible that the Chancellor will win the pools. And it is impossible for even the fondest critic of Messrs Heath and Barber to withhold admiration for the daring enterprise on which both men are now embarked — to defy all the laws of economics and politics to achieve their cherished breakthrough to a happy land in which all the people rest content under a Tory regime which has no particular principles, but which can make everything and everybody happy.
There is always, in considering the Chancellor, an awareness shared with him of the possibility that nemesis will overtake him. This does not cramp his style, however. Those things in the budget speech which had clear political potential were stylistically played up by Mr Barber for all — and far more than all — they were worth. It disturbed the Labour Party when the goodies were trotted out. But not the Liberals. As though in symbolic appreciation of what the voters have been doing in the by-elections, and as though in contempt for any pretensions the Budget might have to relevance to the national situation and the political future, Mr Jeremy Thorpe spent practically the whole duration of the Chancellor's speech lounging in his seat, his eye on the Chamber clock. Time will tell, he seemed to be saying; and it is clear that he for one was very happy about what time would, in its due course, tell.
"However entrancing it may be to wander through a garden of bright images, are we not attracting your mind away from something of almost equal importance?" The somethings — the plural is intended — of almost equal importance are the disparity between public expenditure and taxation revenue, and the balance of exchange rates. Even Mr Barber cannot make them disappear. This Budget is merely the prelude to the crisis of the year ahead.
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