Centrepiece
Wiser counsels
Colin Welch
The appearance of Mrs Gandhi in the Queen's Christmas broadcast gave me a nasty turn, as I have already told the retired suburban majors etc who read the Daily Telegraph. Judging from my mail bag, it must have reduced them to near-apoplexy. Lest our indignation seem absurdly ex- cessive, may I add one or two details excised from my original piece? As part of her Perverse campaign to reduce the number of Indians (still to me, old-fashioned as I am, an odd aim for an Indian government), this virago gave local officials exacting targets — so many poor devils to be sterilised in each area. The results (fully reported at the time, so far as I know, only by John O'Sullivan in the Telegraph) were cruel and appalling. Numberless males were seized at random and dragged off to be emasculated. Vasectomies were performed by unqualified brutes, with dirty blunt instruments, on vic- tims strapped down, say, on dirty railway waiting-room tables. Terrible illnesses and death often ensued, or at best an old age without children to support one — a truly grim prospect in India, as Mrs Gandhi should know well though probably, in her Progressive fools' paradise, doesn't. I cannot see our dear Queen authorising or encouraging any such assaults on her own subjects, nor imagine why she should wish to be seen in the company of anyone so minded. Would she have taken tea with Amin, or Coard? Will she with Mugabe? As Tones leaders used to say, we must hope that wiser counsels will prevail. For myself I took refuge partly in drink, doubly appropriate in the circumstances, Partly in the lucid and benign essays of two sane and salutary economists — in Sam Brittan's The Role and Limits of Govern- ment (Temple Smith, £8.95) and in John (Lord) Vaizey's In Breach of Promise (Weidenfeld, £9.95). The former is sober, dryish, formidably informed, indispensable to all interested in political economy, severely logical and analytical, though with bizarre idiosyncratic quirks protruding here and there like forget-me-nots pressed in a textbook. Lord Vaizey is slapdash, lively, subjective, affectionate, unpredictable, the least donnish of don.-i. In his company you travel fast, exhilaratingly and bumpily, as if
In a troika driven by a coachman with a hip- flask. Yet the two sages must have more in common than they once had — in par- ticular a marked preference for the free Market economy over all forms of central dirigisme.
John Vaizey's essays are about five remarkable men, all dead, all interesting, all known to and liked by him, all hostile or in- different to the free market, all either big
government men or big spenders or both: Gaitskell, Macleod, Titmuss, Crosland and Boyle. In his view it was the second world war which shaped them, which shaped the institutions they launched and presided over, which has shaped our society ever since. Not the war of flags, guns and glory, of course (though Macleod was a roman- tic), but the drab war of dockets, forms and requisitions, the war not of tigers but of sheep.
The war had been won (in itself a ques- tionable term), so they thought, by central direction and controls, by total mobilisa- tion of manpower and resources by hordes of civil servants working to a plan, by the total subordination of the price mechanism to labyrinthine systems of rationing, priorities and allocations, by the conscious treatment of the nation's wealth as public property, with private spending reduced to a mere residuum, pocket money, after the state had taken its fill.
The civil servants involved (Gaitskell, Titmuss and Boyle actually were wartime civil servants, and Boyle opposed the end of building controls even in late 1954!) were naturally enamoured of their jobs and om- nicompetence, unaware or contemptuous of other ways of getting results. The despis- ed Thirties provided only an example of how not to do things (incidentally, does John Vaizey still think Montagu Norman such an ass?). Unfettered dirigisme had won the war: what else could win the peace?
It was our (or their) great mistake to sup- pose that the problems of war and peace were alike and the ways of tackling them therefore identical. It was our great misfor- tune that the immense bureaucratic machine which the war had engendered sur- vived intact. France, Germany and liberated Western Europe were in this respect luckier, America wiser. We alone faced the post-war consumer world burden- ed down with an unwieldy state apparatus which, treating the consumer as mud, was about as appropriate as a dinosaur at a disco. (I often wonder, incidentally, whether the formidable civil service we be- queathed to India was more curse than blessing: could Mrs Gandhi have done half as much damage without it?) Hence the origins of that sluggish, constipated, muscle-bound Britain against which Mrs Thatcher wages war (albeit with limited suc- cess so far) and which Sam Brittan so perci- piently and impartially analyses.
In one essay alone from his present col- lection, on Hayek (85 this year and still go- ing strong), you will find more gold than in most whole books, apart from what is derived from Hayek himself. John Rawls is gently but shrewdly unveiled. The frighten- ing hubris involved in trying to tie rewards to merit is deplored. Mr Brittan exposes what is often ignored, that "reward accor- ding to merit" is quite incompatible with egalitarianism and is indeed a quite con- trary idea'.
The free market is extolled by Brittan as `a method of co-ordinating the activities of millions of people without a vast apparatus of political decision and ... enforcement'. Yet most people are unaware of its very ex- istence, and 'assume that we must have a "policy" for energy, jobs, productivity' or whatever else hits the headlines. Even Ox- bridge graduates think 'they have only to diagnose a departure from some theoretical optimum (so-called perfect competition)' to yell for government intervention, without wondering whether those who will intervene are fit to do so or not. Brittan makes mock of conventional interventionist policies, in- cluding energy, housing, export program- mes and farms.
`One does not,' he declares, 'have to be on the radical right to accept [my] critique', which 'could be compatible with a much higher degree of redistribution of income and wealth than we now have.' Well, it could indeed be 'compatible'. But does Mr Brittan in fact support more redistribution and, if so, to what extent? We can envisage a minimisation of rewards and penalties which, while leaving us all where we were on the scale of relative incomes, would kill the market stone dead by discouraging risk- taking and encouraging sloth. To talk about redistribution at all, without precise limits, safety-catches and dual keys, is very dangerous: look who's listening!
Other Brittanic quirks pop up from time to time. The ability to sing the Liebestod is for him a matter of luck not merit. Up to a point, Lord Brittan: but how Flagstad must have studied and practised! Nor is it luck alone which has made Mr Brittan a pro- found and respected commentator. A mild and benevolent permissiveness separates him sharply from his brother's Tory Party: `decidedly not where I wished to be'. It in- spires his oft-proclaimed desire to ban cor- poral punishment in schools: what rights have parents who favour it, or children who might profit from it, if only by discovering early and without permanent damage that the world is unfair, as Mr Brittan concedes it is and must be? 'Oppression,' he avers, `.. . even in the family can be just as great' as oppression by the state. I suppose it could be: but just think of the dispropro- tionate increase in the state's power and omnipresence, of the further damage to be inflicted on the already enfeebled family, if this rare possibility were to be prevented.
Sometimes he gives a vague impression that his own childhood and school days were not altogether happy. Do I hear the faint crying of a little boy some 40-odd years ago? Perhaps my ears deceive me. If not, these distant sobs suggest what he might not care to boast: that early sorrows are no bar to a gloriously fruitful maturity.
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