Political commentary

Mr Prior's Green Cross Code

Ferdinand Mount

Jim Prior makes no secret of his lack of enthusiasm for the present leadership of the Conservative Party (leadership is such a handy abstract word, is it not?) Indeed, it is difficult to stop him making no secret of it.

You feel that he could hardly buy a Mars Bar without confiding to the lady behind the counter 'You know, I make no secret . . But this is very different from saying that he takes or has taken a dissenting or disloyal line on wages. On the contrary, there is not a single word he spoke at the conference of Tory trade unionists at Bradford last weekend (or anywhere else, as far as I know) that conflicts in any way with the official party policy document The Right Approach to the Economy. Indeed it would be odd if there were, as he was one of the five people who put their names to that document. The others were Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe, David Howell and Angus Maude. It is absurd therefore to claim that his words at Bradford 'must bring him into conflict with free market advocates led by Sir Keith Joseph, and supported by Mrs Thatcher' — as the Sunday Telegraph claimed —or that the Tories have been moving in recent months away from a freefor-all, as The Times asserted. The policy is completely unchanged since it was agreed in October last year. How then do such headlines as 'Prior Backs Pay Controls' and 'Tories Ignore Call for Free Wage Bargaining' come to get written?

This confusion in the press appears to date from Mrs Thatcher's speech to Glasgow businessmen in January in which she spoke of `a withdrawal of Government from interference in wage bargaining.' That prospect was made more precise by a lastminute gloss in which she made a distinction between three separate kinds of collective bargaining. In private industry, employers would be able to bargain for themselves, the government's sole function being to control the money supply. Nationalised industries would also bargain independently of government on the understanding that wage increases would have to be paid for out of productivity and not by government subsidy. Government would be in a position to determine wages only in the third kind of bargaining where it was a direct employer of labour negotiating within a departmental budget.

None of this conflicts with what Mr Prior said last weekend. It is simply the other half of the policy set out in The Right Approach to the Economy, the half which was assumed in the conditional part of his premise that if collective bargaining, free from control by the government, is not going to lead us back down the road to rigid incomes policy, then

that bargaining must be realistic and responsible.' Mr Prior's speech was simply a rehearsal of the Tory plans to create a climate in which free collective bargaining would also be realistic and responsible: the German-style national forum for talking about wages to be sited in the existing National Economic Development Council and the link between NEDC and the Commons Select Committee on Expenditure. The Thatcher half of the message is that the children are old enough to go out on the roads by themselves. The Prior half is a sort of Green Cross Code to teach them how not to get run over. 'Controls' do not come into it. Now you may think all this to be admirable forethought or reckless waffle or sinister corporatism. What it isn't is new. It is all in the book. Nobody pretends that the two wings of the Tory Party think alike about wages. And naturally each wing will incline to dwell upon that half of party policy which it finds most sympathetic. But these inclinations must not be mistaken for change or development in the policy itself, or for rebellion against the policy.

The upshot is then that nobody has said anything new about wages in the Tory party for the past six months. The only significant feature of recent Conservative statements is that there is nothing significant about them. The very real differences between the Prior and Joseph wings of the party have been effectively submerged, if only for the time being:The question now is not whether they have papered over the cracks; the question is what the wallpaper looks like. Will a national forum to discuss wages really educate both the union leaders and members in the economic realities and so restrain their demands?

Whatever its merits, this exposition has at least partially closed off one of Labour's lines of attack. Labour MPs in the Commons do not shout 'What would you do?' with quite the same confidence. Tory economic strategy, while soggy in some parts, fogbound in others, is beginning to achieve a recognisable outline. And for this credit must go to Sir Geoffrey Howe, who has after all been Shadow Chancellor throughout the two years of the Thatcher leadership.

Praising Geoffrey Howe is like saying 'English footballers aren't really half bad' or 'I've got a soft spot for Vera Lynn': it is a cause so deeply unfashionable as to arouse suspicions of rank perversity. His speeches are said to reach epic levels of dullness, his presence on television to be a guarantee of torpor. In fact, compared with Merlyn Rees, Sir Geoffrey is a combination of Demosthenes and Euclid; and his public

persona is not so much lacklustre as goodhumoured and even comfortable. He is also said to talk too much in shadow cabinet, at least too much for Mrs Thatcher's liking. Oddly enough, the same was said of Mrs Thatcher in Mr Heath's cabinet. But then. prolixity tends to pay off in politics; it wears down the opposition. Sir Geoffrey's colleagues could also do worse than copy his attitude towards the 1970-1974 administration. He neither beats his breast in prolonged public displays of contrition (when will Keith Joseph stop saying sorry?); nor, unlike Sir Ian Gilmour and Mr Prior and others, does he persist in saying that in a certain sense he was right all along and that had it not been for OPEC and the miners and Mr Heath's reluctance to hold the election in January or April or June the Conservatives would have been home and drY. It is almost as hard to find a Tory ex minister who admits to having urged an election at the end of February 1974 as it was to find a German who fought on the Western Front.

But Sir Geoffrey Howe by contrast quietly admits that he was completelY wrong and pads on in his hushpuppies W confront the future. His speech on practical monetarism last week was a thoughtful and nicely balanced effort. He expounded the benefits of monetary targets openly proclaimed and explained, argued for a greater degree of independence for the Bank of England (though without going as far as Peter Jay's plan for a totally independent authority, free from all political pressure) and also gave the Treasury diehards, in the person of Sir Douglas Wass, a well-judged knee in the groin. Inside the Shadow Cabinet there are now rather more voices than there used to be urging that Mrs Thatcher keep Sir Geoffrey on at the Treasury, on the grounds that he works so well with her. But did not Tony Barber work fatally well with Mr Heath? Don't we need a more independent and vigorous petsonality as Chancellor?

Perhaps so. Yet history may well judge Lord Barber more kindly. There is evidence that he tried repeatedly to gain the Prime Minister's approval for cuts in public expenditure and rises in interest rates 1972, before inflation had gathered real momentum. He could of course have resigned when balked; but even if he had been

so minded, the Thorneycroft precedent was not encouraging. What was fatal was nOt s° much any flaw in Lord Barber himself as the

lack of any Conservative economic strategY. Because there was no pre-agreement about which element or combination of elements, in the equation was to take the strain 0' inflation — exchange rate, money supPlY,

taxation and/or expenditure — matters were left to drift. This deficiency in Tory poltcY,. was pointed out at the time by Mr Jay and, I

am sorry to say, pooh-poohed by, among others, the present writer. If the Tories do not make that particular mistake this time, Sir Geoffrey Howe will be entitled to take a modest bow.