CITY AND SUBURBAN
Tip from Hong Kong: don't sell UK short hang on for the bid
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Safely returned, I can now disclose the secret purpose of my flight to the Far East. I was not, as you might think, simply swan- ning around the Temple of Heaven or get- ting some shirts made. These activities were mere cover. I noted the significant sequence of deals in which Hong Kong's leading companies have bought British Hutchison Whampoa going for Felixstowe Dock, Dickson Concepts for Harvey Nichols, Hongkong Land for Trafalgar House, the Hongkong Bank group for the Midland. It was time, I thought, to bring this trend to its logical conclusion. I there- fore arrived with proposals for Hong Kong to take over the United Kingdom. For Hong Kong, itself confronted with a takeover bid from China, this riposte would come straight out of the textbooks, where it is called the Poison Pill Defence. In this, the target company swallows something to make itself indigestible. For the UK, the attractions are of another order. How hap- pily the Treasury would merge its over- stretched finances with Hong Kong's, knowing that Hong Kong has no national debt, only a national honeypot! How we might all hope that Hong Kong's growth rate and tax rates and interest rates would rub off on us! How we must wish that we had followed Hong Kong's example and tied our currency, not to the mark but to the dollar! Better still not to put that shirt on any one horse, but since that horse is improving, we might stay with it for a while. Reorganisation would be kept to a mini- mum. Christopher Patten would remain Governor, but, like the top brass of the Hongkong Bank, would relocate to Lon- don, probably to Downing Street. The post of lieutenant-governor (or taipan) would rotate among the Keswick family. Signing accounts at the Ritz would be honoured at the Mandarin. UK plc would find itself part of a free trade area next door to the world's fastest growing economy. Await the offer for UK and do not dispose of your shares.
Boardroom bigwigs
WHAT maddens me about the Confedera- tion of British Industry is the way it can hire quick-witted men like John Banham and Howard Davies, and then jog along with the pack. I suppose that if it speeded up, the laggards might be slow with their subscriptions. This week the CBI has been going through its paces in genteel Harro- gate, staging its annual conference among the antique shops and urging the need for new and stimulating policies. They would make a change from old and stupefying policies, but of course when we had those, the CBI was right behind them. No bunch of boardroom bigwigs could have been keener to take sterling into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, and as the price of membership went up, the CBI never wavered. It found itself, no doubt by mistake, allied with the dear-money poli- cies which we have now abandoned, along with the exchange rates which forced them on us. Only two big company chairmen, to my recollection, broke from the pack. Sir Denys Henderson of Imperial Chemical Industries, choking on his two-dollar marti- ni, saw and said that we could not go on like this. Sir Owen Green of BTR was a sceptic from earlier on. This week Sir Denys spoke to the conference from his hotel room in Taiwan, where he was open- ing a factory. Sir Owen was not in Harro- gate either. Not belonging to the CBI is one of the ways in which he and his company save time and money.
Assault and Gattery
JACQUES DELORS, the oil-seed rapist, now says that he hopes to have the great Gatt spat resolved before the year is out. I would like to think that he was influenced, or at least shaken, by his call at 10 Downing Street, where John Major laid mildness aside and fairly rattled the chandeliers. It was, says my informant nostalgically, just like the old days.
The health of nations
THIS IS Autumn Statement week, when the Chancellor moves on from this year's record-breaking deficit to forecast next year's, which will be even worse. I offer him a text for the times: Great nations are never impoverished by pri- vate, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct. The whole, or almost the whole public revenue, is in most countries employed in maintaining unproduc- tive hands. Such are the people who compose a numerous and splendid court, a great eccle- siastical establishment, great fleets and armies . . . Such people, as they themselves produce nothing, are all maintained by the produce of other men's labours. When multi- plied, therefore, to an unnecessary number, they may in a particular year consume so great a share of this producers not to leave a sufficiency for maintaining the productive labourers who should reproduce it next year. The next year's produce, therefore, will be less than that of the foregoing, and if the same disorder should continue, that of the third year will be less than that of the second.
Norman Lamont will recognise the clear North British tones of Adam Smith, and hurry on, to find a happy ending, of a sort. Man's wish to better his lot, so Smith says, can overcome what he calls the extrava- gance of government and the greatest errors of administration: Like the unknown principle of animal life, it frequently restores health and vigour to the constitution, in spite, not only of the disease, but of the absurd prescriptions of the doctor.
We must keep on not taking the tablets.
New readers begin here
I LEARN with pleasure that The Spectator has found a new readership, among the Vietnamese boat people stranded in their camps in Hong Kong. Kindly subscribers pass copies on, and the inmates read them avidly, by way of improving their English. They may do more. When the Czech dissi- dent Waclaw Klaus was sent into internal exile, his reading list was restricted (or so I am told) to the Bank Credit Analyst. That austere journal of monetarist thought may have been intended as an additional pun- ishment. Instead, it left Mr Klaus in a fer- ment of free-market thoughts, which were still with him when he became finance min- ister and set out to privatise industry by giv- ing every citizen vouchers to buy shares. I salute any Vietnamese reader who is still with me, and when he comes home from exile to run the economy on City and Sub- urban principles, I must buy him a drink.
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