POLITICS
Earth, air, fire, water and Professor Peacock
FERDINAND MOUNT
0 lder readers may recall how delight- fully Flanagan and Allen used to sing `Free'. They would start off together 'Free — that's the way it ought to be,' and then Bud would continue crooning the melody while Chesney would drop into a kind of reverent recitative about 'the rainbow with its divine chord of colour harmony' and other wonders of nature which were avail- able to us all gratis and for nothing. I have noticed a similar brainless warbling when any subject touching on Aristotle's Four Elements crops up in British politics. God gave the land and the skies and the waters and the fossil fuels to the people, and therefore, we are told, they are a vital natural resource or national resource (the two things seem to be indifferently jum- bled), not to be selfishly appropriated by private interests, or subjected to crude calculations of profit and loss, but held in trust for future generations. There are signs that the Government is grinding to a halt in face of this 'elemental socialism', which deludes paternalists in every party and infests the House of Lords like wood- worm. Last week Mr Ridley, the Environ- ment Secretary, postponed the privatisa- tion of the water authorities, having pre- viously delayed the selling of British Air- ways. Mr Hurd blocked Professor Peacock's plans to whittle away the BBC. I see no sign that Mr Walker intends to erode the monopoly powers of British Coal. And the Government hastily retreat- ed when its backbenchers got wind of a proposal to sell off the Forestry Commis- sion.
Tory MPs are relieved. Upsets the shires. Don't want to get bogged down in massive contentious legislation when we ought to be preparing for the general election. Plans probably unsound anyway.
For elemental socialists, the water au- thorities present the benign face of public ownership, providing pure water and beautifully landscaped reservoirs, dappled by windsurfers and fringed by contented fishermen. They do not pause to think of the valleys that were drowned to construct hideously expensive and quite often un- necessary reservoirs, of the brutalist dams scarring the uplands, of the equally un- necessary drainage schemes reducing river banks and wetlands to featureless conduits. Together with the Ministry of Agriculture and the Forestry Commission, the water authorities have ruined more of Britain than the spec builders and the motorways put together.
The root cause of their fecklessness is their indifference to cost. Raising money in the City instead of from the Treasury, diversifying into tourism and plumbing services — all these things, it is said, could be done without denationalising the au- thorities. But the point of denationalising is not to free them — or the Forestry Commission, or the Coal Board, or even the BBC — to undertake a whole new range of glamorous activities. The prime purpose is to subject their existing activi- ties to some kind of financial discipline, however imperfect. Alas, the best things in life are not free merely because they are provided by publicly owned authorities. Water costs more. So do air fares, and electricity, and timber and the licence fee.
In practice, these public authorities, being owned by nobody in particular and accountable to nobody much, often judge and jury in their own cause, are quite irresponsible, either to this generation or the next, because they are free to define their trusteeship in any terms they wish. I am tempted to reverse the conventional view that it is desirable to denationalise publicly owned industries which have to compete but undesirable to do the same to natural monopolies. For the performance of the former, even when still in public ownership, can be judged by straightfor- ward criteria: is British Leyland selling enough cars to cover its costs or make a profit? Who can say whether a water authority does as well as it could?
Mr Ridley may be right in coming to the conclusion that the draft plans, prepared by a highly reluctant Department of the Environment, had not properly worked out how to regulate the authorities after privatisation. All the same, I cannot help feeling that the shelving of the plans does represent a loss of momentum, if not of nerve. When all about you are congratulat- ing you on your discretion, that is the time to start worrying. If Mr Ridley has dis- appointed expectations, Mr Hurd has abundantly fulfilled them. With a most elegant flick of the instep, he despatched Professor Peacock's report to the long grass: a stimulating and challenging re- port. . . fits well with our general philoso- phy. . . present regulations not sacrosanct . . . constructive debate needed.'
The technique is all too familiar: express enthusiasm for all the long-term goals (which will require decisions from your successors) and pour cold water on all the proposals for immediate decision: the abolition of pre-censorship of program- mes, the insistence that 40 per cent of programmes should be bought from inde- pendent producers, the selling off to inde- pendent contractors of the non-occupied night=time hours — in short, all Peacock's steps for gradual loosening of the system.
True, the Home Secretary's response was not quite so depressingly negative as Mr Gerald Kaufman's or that of the BBC and IBA. For the Labour Party, the BBC is as near perfection as could be hoped for, a 1930s state corporation preserved in aspic and staffed by vaguely leftist characters who, while more or less preserving impar- tiality on the cruder party-political ques- tions, can be relied on not to challenge Labour's view of the world. The only thing the BBC cares about is not having to accept advertising; the ITV companies share the same prejudice, fearing that there would not be enough advertising to go round. What Peacock calls the 'comfort- able duopoly' breathes again, pro tern. And pro tern is all the politicians care about too. Governments of either party will continue to collude with the duopoly and maintain strict control of broadcasting in- the name of 'standards' until the system finally collapses, just as the old censorship of the printed word collapsed three centur- ies ago. At least Peacock, unlike Annan and Pilkington and Beveridge, has de- scribed the shape of the future.
Does it all matter? Among those not professionally concerned with broadcast- ing, I suspect, the whole argument seems rather tedious; Mr Peter Jay's vision of a deregulated world of 'electronic pub- lishing' does not make most people's blood race. The general view is that, whatever happens, television will still be mostly rubbish. Our sights are set pretty low.
Yet in my bones I feel it does matter. The end of pre-publication censorship in 1694, so campaigned for by Locke and praised by Macaulay, was not simply a great blow for liberty; it helped set all sort of wheels whirring — scientific, philo- sophical, technical, commercial. The con- trols on broadcasting now are enfeebling as well as humiliating; and neither politicians nor broadcasters show the slightest signs of understanding why.
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