Neddy in Toyland
I THOUGHT it was a bad sign when John Major was so nice to everyone at the Neddy meeting. Indeed, it was a bad sign that Neddy should meet at all. I had hoped that it had been discouraged into going away. The National Economic Develop- ment Council and its deprecatory nick- name were both of them legacies of Selwyn Lloyd, who, as Chancellor, conjured them up in default of a policy. Neddy was a talking-shop for government and the 'two sides of industry' (the third side, which provides the money, got its chair much later.) It reflected Selwyn's understandable need to be liked. Its self-importance swel- led as the governments of the 1960s and 1970s spent more time trying to overrule markets. It was just the place to talk about price control and pay policies. It was the habitat of Solomon Binding, the negotiator who gave his name to elastic agreements. Nigel Lawson as Neddy's ex officio chair- man left no one in doubt that he thought it a waste of time. He was known to yawn in a Neddy meeting halfway through a con- tribution from the Governor of the Bank of England — also present ex officio, but better able to keep boredom concealed. However, Neddy's first meeting under its new chairman was longer (or seemed longer) than usual, and those who had chafed through the Lawson era thought that Mr Major was paying them careful attention. He listened while Norman Willis explained the TUC's economic policy, which was that if prices kept going up, the unions and their member could not be blamed for asking for more money. This unexpected outbreak of TUC monetarism, pushing the blame for inflation firmly back to the Government and its agents in the Bank of England, was indeed instructive. Neddy, though, is no place for monetarists. It exists as an alternative to policy, for the mutual bolstering of self-esteem, and Mr Major, playing along with it, may have concluded that courtesy costs nothing ex- cept time and patience. I hope he does not think that sitting through Neddy meetings will stave off the next Ford pay claim.
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