Political commentary

Curing the disease

Colin Welch

Even in the best conducted establishments like the Spectator there are poltergeists which play occasional tricks with what was written, making the writer look ludicrous or dotty or, as happened to me last week, wickedly callous. According to the poltergeist, I wrote, 'We must now harden our hearts to the consequent misery and distress' — to the misery and distress, that is to say, of unemployment consequent on the essential struggle against inflation. ,What a horrible thing to say! Where on this earth is the heart so soft that we should wish it harder? Does not cruel indifference come easily enough to the lucky well-off majority of us? Is that not the real danger to be guarded against? Of course, it would be different if the misery and distress were a sham. But isn't it as ridiculous to pretend that all unemployment springs from idleness or personal choice or fault, therefore causing no undeserved hardship, as to pretend that none does?

What I actually wrote was, 'We must not harden our hearts' etc, a sentence which, you may think, exposes me to a charge of canting hypocrisy rather than of exultant callousness. Pecksnif flan wailings and hand-wringing, you might point out, create no jobs. Yet I'm sure that it is perfectly possible to combine deep sympathy for the workless, and a longing to see the back of mass unemployment, with a deep suspicion of quack remedies which would make the problem worse.

And I'm afraid I must include in these a whole lot of stuff which I half-missed in the Budget speech. I have my excuses. Sir Geof- frey mumbles on a bit; the House is not always deathly quiet as he does so; we did not have the complete text till he sat down; little time then to peruse it; what he had to say about aid to industry was complex and detailed, and seemed relatively trivial; I let it pass. The Times leader writer, more perci- pient, noted without approval the Small Engineering Firms Investment Scheme, the Small Workshop Scheme and the Loan Guarantee Scheme. He could have added hand-outs to innovation-linked investment schemes, to market innovation software products, to some 'Cadcan' awareness pro- gramme, to all the interventionist claptrap which like ivy half-choked Patrick Jenkin's speech on Monday, and will bring such joy to bureaucrats and accountants and, yes, to 'senior industrial advisers' with their 'teams for innovation'. Soon the Gobbledygook Expansion Scheme and the Soft Widget Development Authority? It was the men- tion of the West Midlands, with its wealth of marginal seats, which should have

alerted me. Never in a national Budget speech is a particular area named without pork being barrelled and logs rolled.

How much pork, how many logs, at what cost, we cannot yet tell. But certainly every penny would have been better spent on general reductions in general taxes, which leave the sovereignty of the market intact, than on specific aid for specific firms or in- dustries or areas. Governments cannot pick or breed or train winners; they always get it wrong. It is sad indeed that this Govern- ment above all should fancy itself exempt from this grim rule.

To return to unemployment, it was Mr Mike Thomas who, in the debate, declared that to base policies on the majority in work at the expense of disregarding those out of work was the greatest moral criticism of this Government as well as the greatest economic and social criticism of its policies. I can't wholly go along with this. It is perfectly possible to devise policies which encourage those in work without disregard- ing those out of work. Indeed, if more wealth can be created by those in work then that will mean more jobs for those out of work and more revenue to finance their benefits till they find those jobs.

The Left increasingly resembles those perverse and blinkered medical specialists who see before them not an entire patient, a human being, but merely a diseased organ, and who risk curing damaged tissue by means which damage the healthy tissue around it and thus the patient's general health. In the same way the Left sees before it not an entire nation, which prospers or declines more or less as a whole, but a col- lection of parts, the diseased parts to be cured at the expense of the healthy, which in their turn become diseased or enfeebled, affording further material for political ex- ploitation, investigation and harmful in- terference — and so ad infinitum. This, if correctly stated, would be the greatest moral, economic and social criticism of people like Mr Thomas.

He is, I know, a Social Democrat. It doesn't really matter because, as Leon Brit- tan pointed out, all the opposition parties seem to be developing a common economic programme, the Alliance in particular deeming socialist economics as the way to win from Labour the socialist vote. The Alliance, according to Mr Thomas, in- tends to 'bite the bullet' (the dust?) by in- creasing the PSBR by about 0,000 billion. It would distribute benefits in such a way as to reduce unemployment by one million within two years, and deal with inflation by reducing VAT — if only it were so simple! If there be any sense in this rigmarole, it is only to confirm that there is only one party remotely fit to be entrusted with the pound.

Unhappily it is not only Mr Roy Jenkins who now, in understandable euphoria, pro- claims the terminal illness and imminent collapse of Labour. Shrewd Tory MPs, with nothing to gain and much to fear from such a development, think it quite possible and shiver at the thought of an effective Alliance opposition offering crazy economics, with renewed inflation and all the trimmings, in temptingly respectable guise. And if socialist and assorted pinkoes see nothing morally, economically and socially wrong with inflation, well, they should be damned well ashamed of themselves. The boot should go into their groin. Hanging's too good for these red rot- ters and scum. They should b-be — should be — aaaargh — shshshould b-be — Editor. Steady on, old boy, are you feeling quite yourself?

Yes indeed, very much so. Mr Roy Hat- tersley in a recent issue of the humorous magazine Punch pointed out that I puff and blow away 'just to work off my bad temper'. That is what I'm doing. Ed. Was he himself perhaps out of temper at the time? Had you provoked him?

Conceivably. He further accused Paul Johnson of being 'embarrassingly Pre- judiced' and Auberon Waugh of 'insipient (sic) nastiness'. By us three together, but principally by my agency, 'the balance of the paper', of the Spectator, has been changed. The 'elegance and elan', the 'air of Palladian detachment' which it formerly 'exuded', are gone. Ed. Dear me. Were this so, the effect on the Spectator would be grave. To what does he attribute your lack of elegance and the rest?

To the 'bad habits' formed by manY years on the Daily Telegraph of catering for 'the spluttering, splenetic outer LondOn suburbs. The retired majors expect to see the boot go into the socialist groin.' Ed. I can hardly believe that all retired majors nourish such brutal fantasies. There was the estimable Major Attlee, for in- stance, born in Putney, then an oute,r suburb; and wasn't Healey once a major. Nevertheless, Welch, could you ri.cn cultivate better company than these embit- tered military men? Mr Hattersley himself, for example: could he not instruct you in what you lack — Palladian detachment, elegance, polite deportment, the nice con- duct of cane or snuff-box, witty repartee, the art of pleasing in a duchess's drawing room?

The mutability of his opinions certain' speaks for a certain detachment, if perhaps more of the London Palladium than of Palladio. I will endeavour to model myself more upon him.

Ed. But wait: perhaps you should instead make way for a younger man. Have you Mr Hattersley's telephone number?