CITY AND SUBURBAN
`It's going to cost sixteen billion dollars, Sam.'
`Harry, I'll do my damnedest'
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
It's easy to forget, said President Harry Truman in old age: 'The reports from Europe that I got in the winter and spring of 19 and 47 — I doubt if things had ever been worse, in the Middle Ages but not in modern times. People were starving, and they were cold because there wasn't enough coal, and tuberculosis was breaking out. There had been food riots in France and Italy, everywhere. And as if that wasn't enough, that winter turned out to be the coldest in history almost. And something had to be done — the British were broke, the United States had to do it. . . . ' His Secretary of State, General George Mar- shall, set the - plan out. Europe, he explained, needed more than it could pay for — so much more that it must have help or face collapse. Help must be a cure and not a palliative: 'The remedy lies in break- ing the vicious circle, and restoring the con- fidence of the European people in the eco- nomic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole.' To talk Congress into voting the money, Truman called in his old friend Sam Rayburn, the Speaker: 'It's going to cost about fifteen, sixteen billion dollars, Sam.' His face got as white as a sheet, Truman said — but the alternative, as both men knew, was starvation in Europe and depression in America. Ray- burn told him: 'Harry, I'll do my damnedest.' It proved good enough. All this happened before today's Prime Minis- ter and President were born, but they meet this week to honour the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan. It has something to teach them, and to teach others, too.
Rescue and liberation
THEY might first ask why it worked. Why did these dollars set Europe on its feet, when the billions that have followed them to Africa have disappeared down sinkholes, or into the numbered bank accounts of retiring dictators? Marshall had the answer. He was not trying to feed a dependency culture but to get a continent back into business. Once the vicious circle had been broken, Europeans could do that for Eur- ope. Africans can do it for Africa, too. So Marshall Aid ran for four years, and then ended. Its only institutional memorial is a boondoggle. The Organisation for Eco- nomic Co-operation and Development was set up to administer the programme and, as is the way of boondoggles, outlived it. Now it has its own château in Paris, and this was the week of its annual meeting, with the Economic Secretary to the Treasury in bemused attendance. Still visible, too, is the bite-mark left by the French upon the hand that fed them. Their policymakers can use 'Anglo-Saxon' as a term of abuse. So short are memories. I prefer to remember Chur- chill's prophecy that the New World would come — as it came, first in war, then in peace —to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.
Taste that kir
ONE more heave towards the ten-franc kir. The banks still quote you 9.3 francs to the pound, but Le Touquet's shopkeepers, I find, will round it up to 10. Like everybody else in France, they need the trade. My advice is sinking in: votez non, votez souvent, I told the French people, and they voted non to poor, hairless, harassed Alain Juppe, who always seems to me to have escaped from a black-and-white sitcom and can now go back there. Another such vote this week- end and the franc should be weak enough to make the kir affordable. If it derailed the single currency, that, too, would be helfpul.
Ready, Eddie, go
YOU shouldn't change neddies, or Eddies, in midstream. Sensible governments work with the governor of the Bank of England that they find. So Edward Heath reappoint- ed Leslie O'Brien, who had been Harold Wilson's choice — and, later, Gordon Richardson, who went on to work with Wil- son and Callaghan. (Working with Mar- garet Thatcher proved harder.) I dare say it was understood that O'Brien would not serve out his second five-year term, retiring in time to let Heath make a choice of his own. It has long seemed to me that just such a deal would suit Gordon Brown and Eddie George. Now, though, the two of them have had their first tiff, and I wonder. Mr George's term runs out in June next year. At some such time there may be a vacancy at the world's biggest banking group: HSBC, owner of the Hongkong Bank, the Midland and much else. Its chair- man, Sir William Purves, has stayed on past what for a lesser man would be retirement age, partly to see the group through the transfer of power in Hong Kong. His act will be impossible to follow, but if Mr George were free. . . . The job carries something like five times the Governor's present salary. My advice to Mr Brown is to be nice to him.
Send for the books
THE FIRST thing an incoming Chancellor does is to send for the books. (The Trea- sury keeps a set handy.) Then he affects to be horrified. The situation, so he says, is grave, so we shall have to shelve all those election promises and put the public finances in order. (This is Treasuryspeak for raising taxes.) Today's Chancellor has gone one better and is having the books audited. Then he can brandish the auditors' certificate — heavily qualified, of course and look appalled. They will certainly find some creative arithmetic. Kenneth Clarke budgeted to spend more on education for less money, because the banks would pay to take student loans off the government's hands. (At the loans' face value? Surely not. At a discount? Shouldn't that be in the books?) Then there was his scheme to hire more taxmen and get the money back in taxes, ten times over. He called it spending to save. An incoming Chancellor might call it spending.
Don't miss the party
THIS Chancellor is having terrible trouble finding a date for his midsummer budget. Quite apart from Ascot, Henley, Lord's, Glyndebourne, Wimbledon and so on, he is plagued by meetings of acronyms like Ecofin and summits everywhere from Ams- terdam to Denver. There is even a sugges- tion that his budget day may have to coin- cide with the Spectator party. Then, as he looks around an empty House of Com- mons, he will realise where everyone is.
Previous page
