Political commentary

A Budget for whom?

Ferdinand Mount

We have in prospect next week a curi- osity: a Conservative Budget design- ed to fool the Conservative Party. Most Budgets introduced by Conservative Chancellors of the Exchequer are designed to fool the public. But this time it is general- ly acknowledged that it is the Tory back- benchers whom Sir Geoffrey must cheer up. The public is assumed to take a longer and steadier view of these matters.

The lobbying leading up to the 1982 Budget has as a result been strangely in- direct. If Sir Geoffrey knocks 1 or 2 per cent off the National Insurance surcharge, that will please the CBI spokesman, which will please some Tory MPs. If he indexes social security benefits, that will please younger Tories who specialise in welfare. Pleasing the public seems rather left out of the calculation.

Now these vicarious, if sometimes costly, satisfactions are dwarfed by the overriding obviousness of what Sir Geoffrey ought to do, as far as general taxing, printing or bor- rowing goes: namely, as little as possible. Everyone knows that the real way to get in- dustry moving is to reduce interest rates, and that will happen only if the government does not increase its borrowing.

The result is an appalling confusion bet- ween the best macro advice to Sir Geoffrey (which is to do nothing) and the best micro advice — which is, within an unchanged fiscal and monetary stance, to do a great deal to relieve unemployment: extend the Walters scheme for unemployed teenagers, bring in the Layard scheme for the long- term unemployed and any other scheme that can be devised for creating work at minimal cost. In preference to spreading the jam thinly, by reducing either income tax or the National Insurance surcharge, if I were Chancellor I would rather spend another billion pounds on subsidised jobs.

But this suggestion runs into a fresh political fact: the abrupt change in the atmosphere — which is a smart way of say- ing `the polls are looking better for Mrs Thatcher'. Since the New Year, the long predicted drifting away from the Social Democrats has begun. Even if it is only a temporary dip — which I doubt — it is timely for the Prime Minister.

At present, the polls vary from actually putting the Tories ahead to putting them no more than 5-7 per cent. behind the leading party, either Labour or the Alliance. And most recent governments have made up a lot of ground in the 18 months leading up to a General Election.

Now precedents are often wrong, but they cannot help influencing politicians. And this apparent revival in Tory fortunes has done great damage to Sir Ian Gilmour's

campaign. And it is his campaign. For a baronet famed for languor and privilege a figure out of an unwritten Hilaire Belloc rhyme — he has undeniably flattened the competition. Mr Peter Shore sounds merely silly as his billions soar off into space. Quick now, who are the economics spokesmen for the Liberals and the Social' Democrats? As for their leaders, Mr David Steel is inaudible, and Mr Roy Jenkins displays his famed 'prudent finance' with uncharacteristic hesitance; he does not seem to have quite recovered from the con- ference season when he unveiled the details of an inflation tax and then hurriedly wrap- ped them up again.

Meanwhile, Sir Ian has plugged steadily on, sticking to much the same arithmetic and avoiding the tricky bits as far as possi- ble. We need not go over again the economic incoherence: how do you bring interest rates down by borrowing another £5-6 billion? The difficulties he is now ploughing into are more narrowly political.

This is partly his own fault for choosing the lower moral ground in the first place. When he was filmed outside Downing Street after his dismissal, warning that the government was drifting onto the rocks (that interview still rankles with many Tory MPs), he made it clear that he meant the rocks of electoral defeat. By contrast, when Mrs Thatcher compares herself to Ulysses with her ears waxed against the sirens, the rocks she claims she is avoiding are those of corruption and infirmity of purpose. Naturally, she claims hers is the way to win the General Election as well, but only as a by-product of virtue. In Sir Ian's Odyssey, tackling the 'acute social evil' of unemploy- ment appears to be incidental to winning the election, which he claims is what the Conservative Party is all about.

This rhetoric was always dangerous; first, because he was open to the accusation now being made with increasing vehemence by his rattled colleagues — that Sir Ian was himself helping to lose the election by pro- moting disunity; but also because as soon as the Tories started to pick up in the polls, his arguments would lose much of their force.

Mrs Thatcher's metaphors are no better than Sir Ian's. She flunked the Good Samaritan. She has scored at best beta minus for the Odyssey. But the ruggedness of her purpose is not in doubt. She con- tinues to scare the pants off the Left. Mr Jeremy Seabrook, one of the most interest- ing socialist arguers around, wrote in the Guardian last week that Mrs Thatcher has shown that 'what has happened within the Left over the past 30 years was all a fiction anyway' and that it is her 'triumph to show that a majority of the people have so com- pletely identified themselves with the Pro- mises of capitalism that they have ceased even to be aware of an alternative vision'.

Now the apprehensiveness of the Prime Minister's opponents is beginning t° reverberate outside to the non-political world. In a dismal and uncertain moment, is there not something to be said for voting for a leader whose certainty frightens her enemies?

You and I, dear reader, may know that much of this is codswallop, that Mrs That- cher is quite malleable, in some ways even fragile, and that much of what she is sun- posed to have done, for good or ill, has in reality simply happened to her. But reputa- tions count, and the labelling of Sir Ian and his faction as 'wet' — however crude and irritating you find the label — is a prop' aganda stroke of unintended brilliance. For every time the Wets wave their fins, they in?- ply a resolute dryness in the Dries which is largely fictitious. If Sir Ian did not exist, somebody would have had to invent hirn. Mrs Thatcher is lucky in her oPponents. If Mr Norman St John-Stevas looked more like, say, Mr Jim Prior... if only Mr Heath had been less motivated by pique —This luck has its temptations. It is relatively easy to keep the Tory Party quiet. But that is not the same as keeping the country quiet. Most forecasts do not see unemployment corning down much below three million within the next two years. As the 1930s demonstrated, a high level of unemployment does not of itself destroy governments. particularly if the unemployment is declining in an economy which is visibly reviving, but general economic recovery may not be enough. For what does hurt governments is Civil disorder. If voters expect above all from their governments the ability to govern steadiness, public tranquility and a lack of fuss being the prime requisites which Mr Heath for one failed to supply — then the unemployed have the power to destroy the government in the most direct way possible, not by moving all hearts with the spectacle of their misfortunes, but by throwing petrol bombs.

Riots in August 1983 could shatter the best-laid plans of Central Office for that October. It is facile to identify the unemployed with the rioters. Those whose lives are worst blighted are the long-terl°, unemployed, who are mostly middle-aged whites, while a considerable proportion of the young blacks who rioted last summer had jobs. But the riots did feed on the feel- ing that there exists and is growing an ex- eluded class who are the victims of long repressed forces of economic change. The problem now is to re-include the unemployed, and quickly. The re-including began under Mr Callaghan with the Youth Opportunities Programme and the like, and has since gathered momentum, but not enough. If this is to be a Budget 'for' any specific category, both moral duty and political prudence (in whichever order You fancy) suggest that it should be a Budget not for business, but for the unemployed-