TO SET AN EXAMPLE?
71 est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.'—Voltaire, Candide Ch. XX111
There are almost invariably excellent reasons to be discovered and put forward why in any particular hard case, general principle should be abandoned for practi- cal desirability and political trimming. It is very rare indeed to set an example by decisive and indeed final decision on a matter of principle when such an example cannot but be painful or inhumane. John Byng remains the only admiral we have executed, and whether it was good to do so, as Voltaire quipped, in order to en- courage the others is open to question. Hard cases may make bad law; but poli- tical decisions are different from legal ones, and there is indeed no political reason why doctrine should necessarily prevail in the hard case 'provided by the plight of the Upper Clyde-Shipbuilders consortium. The Government has, after all, found political reasons good enough for its own purposes to continue with the economic folly and social irresponsibility of the Concorde project; and if it is not exactly baling out Rolls-Royce it is cer- tainly not encouraging it to sink. On a greater scale than even these, fiscal and other devices designed to help particular regions of the country represent what can only be regarded as lame-duck' policies. And this being so, it is first of all worth asking whether, in fact, there exists in any practical sense a general principle of the present government that, to mix horribly the two metaphors most commonly used lame ducks should not be baled out.
It is abundantly clear that Mr Heath's administration in general and Mr Davies's Department of Trade and Industry in particular have sought to create a climate of opinion among industrialists, capital- ists, managers, trade unionists and em- ployees in which none of these should feel entitled to expect the Government to bring in public funds to sustain his com- pany should it become unprofitable as a result of poor management, strikes, ex- cessive wage requirements, idleness, com- petition or bad luck. A general principle has been enunciated without doubt. But has it been adopted as a clear policy to be put into practice? Seemingly not.
The £5 or £6 million apparently re- quired by Upper Clyde Shipbuilders is not, in itself and judged by present-day standards, a particularly large sum of money for the Government to find. If, as is said, ucs is the top of a pyramid of employment which keeps between 25,000 and 35,000 men at work, then obviously on simple arithmetical terms, it would be cheaper to keep Ms going than to pay unemployment and other social security benefits orl the scale envisaged by the gloomier predictions of the effect of clos- ing down ,the Upper Clyde yards. Unem- ployment in Glasgow is already well above the national average, and there can be no confidence that the men thrown out of work by the closure of ucs would readily find alternative employment on or around the Clyde. In the event, it seems that the Government has decided that ucs itself should in due course be allowed to fall apart, but that enough public funds will be provided to keep it going until it is discovered what, if anything, in the way of valuable or viable parts can be sal- vaged from the inevitable wreck. This is not a particularly bad kind of solution, as long as it is realised by one and all that it is a palliative and temporary expedient, and nothing more. The Labour govern- ment's attempt to solve the problem of the shipbuilding industry on the Upper Clyde by forming the ucs consortium in 1968 has,failed; and it ought now to be abundantly clear that shipbuilding on the Clyde on anything like the scale Glasgow has been accustomed to, is in the painful process of becoming a thing of the past.
In the long run, this means either a general contraction in employment in the Glasgow area, or further government aid directed towards attracting new industries. to the Clyde. More acutely than the Rolls-Royce affair, and more acutely than the almost inevitable cancellation of Con- corde, the ucs collapse forces the govern- ment to consider its regional policies. There is little point in this or any govern- ment declining further to pump public money into shipbuilding on the Clyde if instead the government of this or another day decides to pump public money into bribing other industries to go there to mop up the spare labour made available by the contraction in shipbuilding. The same must be said of South Wales or of Northern Ireland, or indeed of any other region where, for one reason or another, the contraction in employment brought about by the decline of a local and old industry is not compensated by increasing employment in new industries naturally attracted to the region in question. The artificial direction of industry into areas it would not go to without the interven- tion of the state must, in the long run, lead to progressive inefficiency and the misuse of national resources. The Mid- lands and the South-east must be allowed to develop their growth industries natur- ally and the industrial economies of Northern Ireland, Scotland and South Wales must not be prevented from natur- ally contracting. The Government must resist the temptation of striving all the time, and usually for the best of political reasons, officiously to keep alive lame ducks which should be dead ducks. This is the case whether the lame duck is a firm, or an industry, or a region.
This is not to argue that regions which suffer from certain natural disadvantages which could be removed or lessened should be denied all assistance. In parti- cular the disadvantages of geography can and should be reduced as much as possi- ble by the improvement of road com- munications—it makes, for instance, better economic sense to extend the motorway complex up to the north and west of Scotland than to encircle London with two, three or four motorway routes at far greater cost of cash, of buildings and of amenities. This said, it remains the case that the sooner people realise that it is economic folly for a state to intervene to bale out companies or industries or regions, the better. If the Government's handling of the ucs collapse fudges the issue, much as the Rolls-Royce issue has been fudged. it will be unfortunate. Sooner better than later an example must be set. It is in a way less important which admiral is executed in order to encourage the others, than that some admiral or other from time to time be killed.
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