SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
NIGEL LAWSON
It was, of course, rather foolish of Lord Robens to have gone on television im- mediately after the disaster to assert (in- correctly, as is now abundantly plain) that the Aberfan tip slide was unforeseeable. But one mustn't be too hard on him for that. The Prime Minister, after all, insisted on television that the 1966 sterling crisis was unforeseeable. It's just All Robens's bad luck that there was a judicial tribunal of inquiry into the Aberfan disaster but not into the sterling crisis.
In any event, what really matters is how the foreseeable was allowed to occur, not what happened afterwards. And simply settling for Lord Robens's resignation would be to miss the whole point of the tribunal's report. Of course some sackings—of some of the Coal Board officials listed in the report whose specific responsibility is inescapable—are plainly called for, and it is not enough for these individuals to be shuffled round, as the Board appears to think. But the overall failure was so great that Robens himself is an utterly inadequate scape- goat for it.
In essence, the report is a searing indictment of nationalised industry; and that the coal industry is nationalised is only in small part the fault of Lord Robens. The tribunal discovered that there had been two previous comparable incidents in the area (although there were no deaths in either case): a tip-slide in 1939, when the industry was in private ownership, and a further occurrence in 1965. Of the former, the report says 'not only was the 1939 slide itself reported extensively to the London directors, but we were shown other reports, fortuitously preserved after the lapse of more than twenty years, which relate to other incidents involving other tips.' Of the latter, it reveals that 'at the London headquarters of the National Coal Board nothing was ever heard of the Tymawr incident.' The senior regional official who did know about it, Mr Geoffrey Morgan, was defended by his counsel on the ground of the size of his responsibilities : more than 60,000 employees and a turnover of more than £100 million a year. No one of similar standing in private industry would conceivably have been given responsibility on this scale.
The report reveals, in brief, something that goes far beyond Aberfan : the fundamental failings of a nationalised industry, so large that it has become completely out of control, its internal communications collapsed, and its senior personnel given jobs that are far beyond their capacity to carry out. What is needed now is not an eminent scapegoat, but a further searching inquiry, this time into every single aspect of the NCB'S activities, with special refer- ence to the possibilities of dismemberment. And the railways might as well be next on the list.
Through the looking-glass
Normally, on holiday abroad, I sever my con- nection with the British press with equanimity —not to say a stiff upper lip. For the past fort- night, however, sentenced by a malign Chancel- lor to an English summer holiday, Fleet Street in all its August horror has been thrust upon me. Give me Nice-Matin, with its storms, sex-crimes and sudden deaths, any day. I do, however, recall reading between bathing (at high tide) and crab-hunting (at low tide) a letfer to The Times from that golden-hearted sugar-daddy of the Caribbean, Lord Campbell of Eskan and Booker Brothers, who seemed to take ex- ception to a speech by Lord Walston (who ought, incidentally, to be promoted in the next reshuffle but won't be) saying that we shouldn't allow our trade with South Africa to be affected by our dislike of her racial policies. Since Lord Campbell is quite happy to trade with any non-racialist tyranny, he was forced to justify his stand on the curious grounds that oppression of some of the people (as in South Africa) is worse than oppression of all the people (as in some Communist countries)— regardless, too, apparently, of any other aspects of the different regimes. But the real confusion is between external and internal behaviour. Trade isn't an accolade, but in any event I'm sure Lord Campbell didn't interrogate Booker Brothers' customers to find out whether they beat their wives: what matters is whether they pay their bills. It's odd how the muddle- headed left's aversion to trade with South Africa is in fact the mirror image of the funda- mentalist right's objection to trade and other links with Russia, China or Cuba—and based on precisely the same fallacy.
Bad egg I'm faintly surprised that in all this neo- Gladstonian furore about wasteful and extrava- gant spending of public money not a word has been said about the egregious Egg Market- ing Board. Admittedly it spends only about f18 million a year of taxpayers' money—but even this isn't chickenfeed (if you'll forgive the un- deliberate pun). The money .goes chiefly on those rather jolly television advertisements and on subsidising uneconomic egg producers. In addition the board enforces (to the best of its ability) a number of rules designed specifically to penalise the efficient (who do their own packing), the expanding, and the new entrants into the business. By now it is universally acknowledged that the whole system, subsidies and all, could be scrapped without any rise in the price of eggs or anything but benefit to the consumer. Indeed, half the eggs we eat already bypass the board. Yet the most Mr Peart has conceded is an independent inquiry into the whole business. Perhaps it's natural that a government ideologically committed to marketing boards should be reluctant to wind one up. But the Tory party's silence on this issue, for fear of offending the small egg- farmer, is even more culpable.
Six day wonder
It just isn't Alf Robens's week. Even Churchill pere et fils's paperback The Six-Day War, which Heinemann has now published at 5s, takes time off to ridicule him for having taken for granted on a radio programme (go down the mine if you must, daddy, but don't go on the air) that Nasser's resignation was irrevocable ('arid to think he was once shadow Foreign Secretary!'). This book is a remark- ably successful effort, for all the inevitable evi- dence of haste, the tell-tale signs of joint authorship, and the over-reliance on Israeli sources. But now that the war is over, what of the peace? The Churchills' advice is for the 'big powers' to cease to play politics in the Middle East, and leave things to sort them- selves out between Jew and Arab. In one sense the 'big powers' have no alternative: one of the lessons of the war was that they dared not get involved. In another sense—in the supply of arms—it is, alas, inevitable that the big powers (and the not so big) will fail to agree on a self-denying ordinance. But whatever happens the war has in fact lanced the Arab- Israeli boil for the time being. The area of instability and danger today lies in relations between the Arab countries themselves.
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