We've paid ourselves the peace dividend but now we'll have to earn it
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
eposing Saddam Hussein is something to leave to the experts. Don't try to do it yourself. Warfare (or, to put it politely, defence) is what the economists would call a public good. meaning that it is more efficiently provided by the state than by the efforts of individuals. A year ago, Gordon Brown was budgeting to spend £24 billion on it, which might be considered a modest proportion of a £418 billion budget. A hundred years earlier C.T. Ritchie had to budget for a navy which could take on the second and third biggest navies in the world and beat them — but that was before the three giant spenders, health, education and social security, moved in on chancellors and barged their way to the top. It is not selfevident that they are, in the strict sense. public goods. Health, for instance, might be more efficiently provided if competition and choice were allowed to play a greater part. Defence has had to move over and make way for the big three. After the Falklands campaign it accounted for 5 per cent of our total output of goods and services. Since then its share has halved. Both Germany and France spend more on defence than we do, and the United States spends almost ten times as much. We have had an easy run for a decade or more, we have been happily paying ourselves the peace dividend, but now we have to earn it. If we intend to bring a serious military presence to the next battlefield and to the one after that, this Chancellor or his successor will almost certainly have to spend more on defence. It will distract his calculations and compete with his plans to spend more and more on the big three — but then, we have been here before.
Basra, Baghdad, Mosul
My law of the financial cycle says that things go wrong when the last man who can remember what happened last time has retired. Some old hand may still just remember what happened when the Western powers last changed the regime in Iraq. In those days the place was called Mesopotamia and represented three disparate provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire. It was Arnold Wilson, the British proconsul, who rolled them together, explaining: 'Basra, Baghdad and Mosul should be regarded as a single unit for administration and under British control.' This all sounded tidier than it was. Margaret Macmillan in The Peacemakers compared it to expecting Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs to make one country. Arthur Balfour grumbled that no one had worked out what this would cost in men and money. 'Do please realise,' Churchill wrote from the Colonial Office, 'that everything that happens in the Middle East is secondary to the reduction of expense. The bill for Iraq soared when the country flared up and punitive expeditions had to be marched in to put down rebellions. The cheap way out was to instal an Arab ruler, and Prince Faisal, T.E. Lawrence's disappointed ally, was made King of Iraq as a consolation prize. Since then the regime has been changed twice, by violence. Third time lucky? Eighty years on, the bill for the Middle Eastern peace settlement, Palestine included, continues to come in.
The borrower
For Gordon Brown, all this is awkwardly timed. He has allowed Budget day to drift away into April, presumably in the hope that something will turn up, such as his revenues. He expected too much from the economy and from his tax receipts. 'Once this trend has been established,' George Luckraft at Framlington warns. 'the ultimate level of borrowing is always much higher than originally expected.' This may not be the best time to touch him for the price of desert boots or aircraft carriers, but it is the time we are living in.
A ghost at Lloyds
Lloyds Bank's stone fortress in Lombard Street has room for 676 people, and no more. This was how Sir Brian Pitman controlled costs when he was hoovering other banks up. Losers in this game of musical desks could take the hint. Now his successors have pre ferred, as bankers do, to build themselves a new head office, and are on the move. I hope that they will first propitiate the ghost of T.S. Eliot, who worked in a basement office lit by glass bricks, and wrote The Waste Land on three months' leave of absence from the bank. How surely he conjures up the City of clerks and pubs and currant-traders and Wren churches, and the crowds trudging over London Bridge to work: so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet, Flowed up the hill and down King William Street. To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
They had to be inside the doors of Lloyds when that bell tolled, or they were late for work: black mark. Nothing is visible there now to honour the poet's memory or tell the story. Perhaps Lloyds, before it goes, will put that right.
Exeunt omnes
The Mermaid has been on the rocks for a long time now, but I am sad to see her sink below the waves. This unique City theatre, called into being by Sir Bernard Miles, had a riverside restaurant, a handy bar and. every so often, a hit, such as Hadrian VII— and if all else failed, as it frequently did, Sir Bernard would appear as Long John Silver. Without his efforts it went dark. Now Blacicfriars Estates, which owns the Mermaid and the charmless office block (full of accountants) on top of it, wants to pull them both down, and next week the City's planning committee will be asked to agree. Theatregoers will just have to cross the river to the Globe.
Park and hide
My topical new venture, Dundictatin Park, has a last-minute offer for Saddam Hussein. We can accommodate him on Nauru. This, you may recall, is the Pacific island which grew rich on phosphates until it met some dubious fund managers. Now Nauru is so strapped for cash and credit that its one-aircraft airline is grounded and its telephones have been cut off. Saddam would enjoy the peace and quiet, the favourable tax climate, and the company of Iraqi refugees who have been parked on the island with a subsidy from the Australian government. I am sure that the US Air Force would give him a lift.
Previous page
