Mr. Callaghan's anti-budget

POLITICAL COMMENTARY ALAN WATKINS

Scientists have recently come up with the con- cept of anti-matter. Mr James Callaghan is not to be outdone. He has perfected the anti-speech.

(My scientific advisers tell me, incidentally, that anti-matter is connected with curious entities known as free radicals. Mr Callaghan, it is hardly necessary to state, has not been associat- ing with them recently.) On Tuesday the Chancellor took an hour and a half to say what could have been said in twenty minutes. Any competent sub-editor could have done the neces- sary cutting, but then the Treasury does not employ sub-editors, competent or otherwise. At times in his speech Mr Callaghan seemed aware that he was merely going through various more or less traditional motions to no very useful purpose. And certainly his audience seemed aware of this.

Not that the Members were restless or in- attentive. It was just that there was an absence of any sense of occasion, which was possibly a healthy thing. There was no crowd of MPS at the bar of the House. The benches were hardly crowded. Miss Joan Lestor, Mrs Anne Kerr and Mrs Gwyneth Dunwoody did not wear hats, though Dame Irene Ward, Mrs Jill Knight

and Mr Leo Abse wore theirs. The general effect was sober, not to say grey. Most Labour MPS had come to hear Mr Callaghan with no very great expectations. They went away with even their modest hopes unfulfilled.

The disappointment which was evident after Mr Callaghan sat down can be analysed in at least two ways: we can take either a general frame of reference or a more specifically Socialist one. In general terms, the parlia- mentary party hoped that the Chancellor would begin a modest reflation. This he refused to do. It is true that he did not claim that the July measures had been wholly justified in their consequences. (Mr Callaghan is perfectly cap- able of making such a claim, and even bolder ones, when the mood takes him: last October, it will be recalled, he soberly assured the Labour party conference that the July measures had nothing whatever to do with the bankers.) What the Chancellor did claim was that the measures could be in substance re- tained, and at the same time economic growth secured. What he omitted to explain was how this could be done.

This, however, is not the most fundamental Labour criticism of the budget. Precisely when to reflate is a technical question which most back-benchers are content to leave to their economic betters. Members were disappointed, not so much because of the budget's neutral character, as because of the evidence it provided of the Government's general attitude of mind. It is here that a specifically Socialist frame of reference is relevant. For by no stan- dards can the Government's attitude, as re- vealed in the budget, be described as Socialist.

And why on earth—I can already hear you asking—did anyone expect it to be Socialist? Surely the age of Socialism, like the age of chivalry, is gone? And yet, in the past four months—roughly since the last party con- ference--there has been an aura of aimlessness about the Labour benches. Mr Harold Wilson

cannot be unaware of this. It is not a matter of left and right, or of young and old, or of marketeers and anti-marketeers. Rather it is that ordinary hies, not normal harbourers of dangerous ideas or disloyal thoughts, have taken to asking themselves and their friends: why exactly are we here? Mr Wilson has pro- vided no very satisfactory answer; nor has Mr Callaghan; nor has Mr George Brown; still less has Mr Michael Stewart. The budget speech could have been used to give some hope to these mes, of whom Mr John Mackintosh, Mr David Marquand and Dr David Owen are good examples. The opportunity was missed.

Indeed, Mr Callaghan seemed to go out of his way to demonstrate just how ill-disposed he was towards humanitarian or egalitarian notions. For example, the tax concessions to widows and women who look after relations are useful only if the proposed beneficiaries pay tax. Moreover, those who initially have the highest incomes, and hence pay more tax, make the greatest gains. Again, national savings are no doubt a very splendid thing, but Mr Callag- han's new proposals will benefit only those who have savings, and fairly substantial savings at that, in the first place.

There was no comfort from Mr Callaghan for the lower-paid worker with the large family. As far as one can gather, the Government's intentions remain that tax allowances for children will stay, while family allowances will be increased on a means-test basis. The money will be found from savings on school milk and meals. Of this kind of thinking, how- ever, there was not a hint in Mr Callaghan's speech. One suggestion is that the announce- ment was postponed because it was feared it would be damaging at the Gt.c elections. Whether this is so or not, there was no sug- gestion that the Government as a whole was seriously concerned about the situation of the poorest members of society.

No doubt it is unreasonable to expect that a budget speech should be addressed solely to back-benchers who are worried about the way in which the Government is moving, or rather is not moving. It does not follow from this

that the speech should therefore be addressed to the Confederation of British Industry. For there were occasions when it seemed that this was the precise audience which Mr Callaghan

had in mind. At one point, for instance, the Chancellor embarked on a spirited defence of high public expenditure. Then he withdrew: public expenditure, he declared sternly, would have to come down in the coming years. Nor were profits to be despised: Mr Callaghan assured us that he was as much in favour of them as any capitalist. Admittedly we live in a

mixed economy, as Mr Harold Lever and my colleague Nicholas Davenport keep reminding everyone: but it is very doubtful whether Labour Chancellors really gain very much by generalised declarations of friendly intent to- wards the City.

We can compare the present Government's situation to that of the Attlee government in 1947-48. Then also the flow of Socialist ideas, such as it had been, came to a stop. But one important difference is surely this: in the 'forties the ideas came to a stop because there were no more ideas; whereas today the ideas that exist are simply not being put into practice. Partly this is a matter of deliberate policy by the Prime Minister and other leading ministers: such-and- such is not done because it may frighten the holders of sterling, or (more rarely) distress the floating voters. But it is not entirely a question of deliberate choice. The kind of budget which Mr Callaghan produced on Tuesday is also a product of our machinery of government.

To digress slightly: it is, surely, quite irrational that priorities in social or other spending should be settled after an unseemly squabble in and around the Cabinet; minister being set against minister, and the Treasury set against all of them. The Plowden recom- mendations on public expenditure made some improvements: but they did nothing to affect the fundamental state of affairs under which Mr Fred Pcart, for instance, is considered a 'good' minister because he secured a generous, indeed ludicrously lavish, price review for the farmers. Similarly, Mrs Barbara Castle is prone to assume a virtuous expression, particularly at party conferences, when she tells of how she thumped the table and demanded more money from the Treasury.

Yet in this respect, ministers such as Mr Peart and Mrs Castle are, not good, but highly irresponsible. One of the few politicians who has perceived this general point is Mr Anthony Crosland, who some time ago astonished an educational gathering by saying that, given existing resources, the allocation made to education was about right. The Government, in short, might start to plan its own expendi- ture in an orderly way.

Mr Wilson would argue that Socialist ideas,' and Socialist priorities, and Socialist practices, do not win elections. A lack of them, however, can destroy a party. The Conservatives have still not recovered from the battering they took at the hands of Mr Harold Macmillan; and it is possible that Mr Wilson is reducing the Labour party to a similar condition. It is, ad- mittedly, unfair to blame Mr Wilson for the budget, which is the Chancellor's own work; nevertheless, there was about the content of Tuesday's speech something typical of the Government generally. Its characteristic was that it had no characteristic. 'The Labour party,' remarked Mr Wilson once, 'is a crusade or it is nothing.' On the evidence of the budget, it is certainly not a crusade.