ANOTHER VOICE
Two things the Tories might do before they say goodbye
AUBERON WAUGH
Mr Smith somehow managed to reassure the rich and the better paid that there would be no element of vindictiveness or penalty in Labour's tax policies, although the unvindictive top rate of 60 per cent (taking in National Insurance) was enough to frighten most of the middle class last time round. But we were fools to put that degree of confidence in him. People have forgotten that it was the famous moderate Roy Jenkins who last imposed a top rate of 103 (or was it 105?) per cent on savings incomes as Chancellor between 1968 and 1970. However moderate, or nice, or pretty the face of Labour's leader, we should never allow ourselves to forget what it is leading: not just the ugly, rancorous mass of workers' representatives but the endless ranks of the nation's inadequates, its dim- mos, its embittered wimmin who can't get laid and take the Guardian instead.
There is in our society, as in most, a huge segment of profoundly wrong-headed peo- ple: give them a stick, and they will unfail- ingly grasp the wrong end of it; ask them a question, and they will give you the wrong answer. These are the people who come into their own when a Labour government is in power. Pretty Mr Blair is almost too young to remember what it was like when Labour took power in 1964 and again in 1966, as all these dreadful people came running out of the schools, universities, unions, media and government depart- ments, babbling about how they were the natural party of government.
Private citizens can make their own arrangements to protect themselves from the malice and incompetence of the next Labour government, whether this means selling their businesses and sending their money abroad, taking early retirement and going to live in the Third World, putting all their savings into gold bars and burying them in a field, or simply divorcing their spouses and registering as two single par- ents on the dole. All this is a matter for individual decision. What interests me is whether the Government has any late plans before bowing out, any awareness of its duty to prepare the country for its next period of rule by the social services depart- ment of Tower Hamlets.
There are two areas to which it has turned a blind or ineffective eye in the course of the last 15 years. The first is employment, the second law and order. At no stage has it addressed itself to the cen- tral problem of the technological age, which is that the more successful and com- petitive our economy becomes the fewer people it needs to employ. Obviously, the jam must be spread, but its, way of spread- ing it, through lack of thought, has been to hire more and more public employees, until we now have 5 million of them as a perma- nent pressure for the encroachment of the state and the stifling of private enterprise. Many of these 5 million public employees have nothing whatever to do except make a nuisance of themselves in the private sec- tor, administering a vast battery of oppres- sive and unnecessary regulations obligingly created by Parliament for the purpose.
It is true that if these 5 million people had not been taken on the public pay-roll they might easily have drifted into the underclass, via fiddling state benefits, into other forms of criminality involving drugs, car theft, and what you will. It may be cheaper to keep these people on the dole than it is to take them into public employ- ment as Egg Inspectors or Child Abuse Experts, supplying them with offices, tele- phones, word processors, and pensions. But the purpose of any economic policy must be to spread prosperity around, and the dole fails to do this; public employment would be preferable, except for the stifling effect taxes have on private enterprise.
The obvious solution to problems of employment inside a technologically advanced society is to encourage the ser- vice industries. Before the war, domestic service was the biggest single employer of labour in the country. Since the war, with punitive rates of personal income tax it has become the only form of employment which is not tax-allowable, which has to be paid for out of taxed income. As a result, it has virtually disappeared as a source of employment. The British, once the best domestic servants in the world, now rot on the dole in their millions — simply because the Conservative Party has become too socially insecure to introduce an obvious reform, which will simultaneously halve the underclass, increase the comfort and wel- fare of double-income families, save the Exchequer billions, shift the balance of employment back into the private sector, and eventually solve most of our outstand- ing problems. One may doubt whether a Labour government would dare repeal such a measure if the Tories dared to enact it. Quite apart from the problems of the underclass, it is one of the tragedies of our time to see women making a nuisance of themselves as welfare officers when they could be usefully employed as third nursery maids.
On law and order, where the underclass threatens an end to all social tranquillity, the Tories have revealed themselves as so cravenly terrified of the police that they have effectively resigned all responsibility in this area. Mr Howard has been prepared to countenance flagrant protection rackets, whereby nobody unprepared to pay £10,000 for police protection is permitted to stage a public event, exorbitant gangster's demands for anything from £350 to £1,200 for keep- ing one prisoner in a police cell overnight and grossly excessive wages to a force which equips itself with helicopters, 150- mph Porsche sports cars, which loads itself with guns and even has the impertinence to demand 'unfettered discretion' to make a nuisance of itself to law-abiding citizens.
Since Mr Howard funked the Sheehy reforms, we must reluctantly decide that the police, far from affording any protec- tion against the lawless underclass, now constitutes an alternative hazard. The only reform which would make any difference at this late stage would be to allow household- ers in their own homes to shoot burglars. This seems the only way of discouraging them in the present climate, and is firmly recommended in the Bible, as Mr Howard will be aware (Exodus XXII, ii). But then he would probably agree that one of the tragedies of the modern world is how few people read the Bible.
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