Freezing to death
It is clearly the Government's intention to exercise control over prices and incomes indefinitely. The powers it seeks, which Parliament will undoubtedly give it and which the Country for the time being will approve, are in the first instance for three years; but it only requires a Commons vote to prolong them year by year, or to re-activate them should they be allowed to lapse. The Prime Minister has declared his willingness and indeed hope that the complex apparata he is to St up will be operated voluntarily; but it is difficult to understand exactly what he means by this. Haw voluntary is a compulsory system being. voluntarily operated?
The prospect is dismaying, and dismal. The Conservative Party must now begin seriously considering whether it is any longer entitled to assume a long and healthy future, and whether indeed it is left with any raison d'être at all. The great platitude of this present administration is that governments must govern. Must they? Must a government govern badly, or in flagrant disregard of its election promises, Or Wholly hostile to the spirit which informs the party which keeps it in power? Is good government necessarily much government, and is most government best? Surely more tends to be worse and most is worst. Many Conservatives, probably a great majority, believe that we suffer from too much government, not too little; and that a government would in particular govern well by warming and invigorating the economy with bonfires of controls, rather than by letting lit freeze to death in the iron grip.of regulations and bureaucracy. The Conservative Party may well relish Disraeli's injunction to put party considerations before those of principle; but no democratic, parliamentary party can keep doing that. A party needs principles, or interests, or more often some of both, to keep it together. and to win elections. If a party possesses and expresses no principles beyond the principle of winning, and staying in power, and no interest beyond the exercise of power, it cannot possibly endure unless it becomes itself the instrument of totalitarian oppression. If the Conservative Party puts up indefinitely with the present policies of the present Administration, then it will put up with anything and anybody so long as it and he keep the party in power, and in this event the Conservative Party will in time lose even the worm's capacity to turn.
We are told there was no other choice. The Labour Party is unlikely seriously to dispute this. There will be argument between the two parties about the 'fairness' of the Government's measures in practice; land not only the Opposition will ask how any prices and incomes policy can possibly be ' fair ' as far as low-paid workers are concerned when food prices are excluded from control. The Labour Party will also be fully entitled to make party capital out of the Government's embarrassment. But the debate is bound to appear, outside Westminster, as unreal. The recently re-invigorated Mr Wilson, now once more leading his party from the front rather than from the side and rear, has said that the differences between the two parties are now greater than they have ever been; but if so, this is purely a matter of temperament and tactics. In terms of policies the parties have never been closer, Europe excepted. Mr Wilson wants to nationalise land. It would surprise no one if the Tories did so. Mr Wilson would love to have been able to bring in legislation like the Industries Bill, and to carry through something like the Industrial Relations Act. Mr Heath's Prices Commission and Incomes Board is Mr Wilson's Prices and Incomes Board writ large, with powers far greater and more oppressive than anything Mr Wilson ever dreamed of. Once again, it is the mixture as before, but with bigger ' popular ' budget-sized doses; and once more the pundits of consensus politics raise their voices with approval. Press and television unite to praise the Prime Minister for governing; they unite to agree that he could have done nothing else; everything, they sing in an unseemly chorus, is inevitable, and is for the best. Nothing else could have been done.
It needs to be said again and again that this consensus view, far from being correct, is false and pernicious. Present orthodoxy, defending Mr Heath's freeze, has it that the root cause of the trouble is the strength, the irresponsibility and the greed of the powerful trade unions, whose behaviour is the cause of inflation, which itself is the ground of all our other troubles. It needs to be repeated that inflation is not, and cannot be, caused by wage demands, or by strikes; nor can wage settlements be inflationary if they are the result of bargaining and are paid for out of profits. The causes of inflation are the payment of wage increases not paid for out of profits, especially by the great nationalised industries and certain publicly subsidised private industries; the creation of new 'paper' money by banks, insurance companies, credit systems and so forth; and excessive government spending, in excess of the receipts from taxation. Inflation occurs when the supply of money increases faster than the supply of goods and services, whose prices naturally rise until an equilibrium is achieved. Directly, and indirectly, it is the Government and no other agency which is able to control the supply of money. In earlier times, central banks could do so; but they cannot now, when something like half the economic activity of the country is, one way or another, actively controlled by government spending and by government policies. The Government, not the unions, has caused the inflation which is now used to justify the Government's latest bunch of controls. It has been the cowardice of the Government, not the bullying of the unions, which created the conditions for inflation to rage; and it is the cowardice of the Government which now causes it to freeze the economy, rather than to face the unpopularity which it 'assumes the application of conservative principles would bring about. Under this Government's defeatist continental Policy and its draconic new domestic controls, the country will slowly freeze to death. It may not suffer unduly in the process. Men dying of the cold have noted that a kind of calm resignation sets in before the end; and often they experience spells of happy detachment and pleasurable hallucinations. This does not stop them from perishing.
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