Political commentary
Planning for chaos
Colin Welch
Be my friend', Germans were supposed to say, 'or I will kill you'. This is how Labour talks to the banks and financial in- stitutions, as to whatever remains of British productive industry. It hopes to extract cheap cash from the banks and financial in- stitutions, from the pension funds and in- surance companies, 'by agreement'. In con- text 'by agreement' is clearly a euphemism for 'under duress' or 'at gun point'. 'We ex- pect the major clearing banks,' the Labour Plan declares, `to co-operate with us fully in these reforms': i.e., in securing state con- trol of lending and investment. 'However, should they fail to do so we shall stand ready to take one or more of them into public ownership.' Moreover, 'agreed development plans will be concluded with the banks and other financial institutions', as also with all leading firms. These plans would also be 'agreed', under the big stick of 'new industrial powers, including discre- tionary price controls, financial support and access to credit' as also of the granting or refusal of favours such as protection, tariffs and import controls; 'agreed' thus with bribes and threats, including always that of nationalisation for disobedience. Thus our savings are placed in double jeopardy, direct and indirect, not only by raids on die banks and financial institutions but also by screwing the industries in which they and we have incautiously invested. Nor is this all. The jehad against the shrunken, overburdened wealth-producing private sector is to be pursued at all levels, national, regional and local, on all fronts, from above and below, by every means, legitimate and illegitimate. A few douceurs are indeed offered to employers sufficiently subservient to Labour's whims. Bribes will presumably be offered to 'steer new industries and jobs to the regions and inner cities' — from which last, loony Labour local authorities will presumably steer them rapidly away again. Subsidies may be given to employers who hoard labour and preserve uneconomic over-manning. Subsidies galore will doubtless pour from thc proposed Depart- ment of Economic and Industrial Planning, wherever there are votes to be got, useless jobs to be preserved and dead industries to be given a la Dracula a horrific semblance of life. Premiums are offered to those who take on young recruits, who are in other respects to be rendered even more unemployable than they are at present. This is achieved by giving young employees the statutory right to be released, on full pay, for systematic education and training. Employers might reasonably wonder why young people from our marvellous com- prehensive schools cannot present themselves, if not trained, at least already Employers mployers might agree with I Tory Labour, as do, in 'rejecting the To argu- ment that young people have priced themselves out of jobs'. Young people, poor souls, hae done no such thing. They have been deliberately priced out by the unions, by minimum wages set too high to be properly earned by beginners, by loss of the most precious asset of the keen but inex- perienced, the right to undercut, and the loss thus of all hope and opportunity to prove themselves. Labour engages to keep their wages, if any, high as part of 'an offensive against low pay'. 'We will work with the unions to tackle low pay', to get 'fair wages', to restore all the wage arbitration quangoes, to strengthen the Equal Pay Act and introduce perhaps a national minimum wage. Young workers, part-timers, home-workers, women, the disabled, ethnic minorities: Labour has crocodile tears for all. All must get higher pay or (though this is unsaid) none. Is it cynical to regard this as an offen- sive not so much against low pay as against the low paid? Every time the minimum wage goes up in America, black uemploy- ment climbs proportionately; why not here? The low paid are attacked with whips, in- dustry with scorpions. Its old foes the unions are to be unleashed again, more ferocious than ever. 'You thrilled to God- zilla — now ... ' Inadequate as Tory union legislation so far is, it is all to be repealed. The unions (not the workers, n.b.) are to have new rights to information, consulta- tion and representation, to draw up plans for their firms — to which these unions may have no sort of loyalty or duty, to say the least. Full benefits will be paid to strikers' families, i.e. to strikers. The unions' role on joint safety committees will be reinforced, which will sound reasonable only to those happily unaware of how cynically safety regulations are used to procure frivolous stoppages and wage rises and to drive small firms into bankruptcy. In innumerable other ways the powers of the still over- mighty unions are to be enhanced. The employers are to be harrassed not only from below but from above too. To remove all incentives, capital, capital transfer and annual wealth taxes will be in- troduced or raised and made more savage. Selective price controls will be imposed by a new Price Commission, with antecedent in- vestigations, questionnaires and form- filling of the kind which make businessmen gibber. These controls, together with sub- sidies, lower VAT and lower national in- surance surcharges, are designed to 'stifle any resurgence of inflation'. They might in part suppress: but suppressed inflation is in some respects worse than unsuppressed. Employers must also expect to have their goods and services inspected and found wanting by a (presumably hostile) new Pro- duct Research Unit, with stiffer penalties for trading offences. Will the nationalised monopolies be thus persecuted? Perhaps: who cares? Their customers are helpless, their penalties, if any, paid by us. Will party manifestoes be subject to the proposed powers to order substantiation, withdrawal and correction of advertisements? Employers (small employers?) will fur- ther be forced to carry out and in part pay for training and to establish joint training committees. More playgrounds for the unions; and more still in the joint equal op- portunities committees at every workplace. In matters governed by the Sex Discrimina- tion and Equal Pay Acts, as also, I assume, in racial discrimination, employers will even be stripped, unprecedentedly and disgracefully, of the normal protection of the law: they will be presumed guilty till proven innocent. Managements have in the past few years regained a tiny bit of their right to manage, a bit of room and time to do it. All this and much more would be extinguished under Labour's vast new plans for planning, which hand over our economic future like a cloud of asphyxiating gas. Industry would be subject to a five-year plan drawn up by the 'powerful new Department 0,f Economic and Industrial Planning , assisted at every level by the new tripartite National Planning Council (enter th.e unions again, this time at the top). This It would be quite incapable of initiating or not 'rigid planning would be 'flexible', planning from the centre'. It would `resPond quickly to changing circumstances' and needs, and make 'rapid reassessments.. Does this sound reassuring? Not to . me It doesn't! On the contrary, it offers visions of a vast bureaucratic engine of oppression. even tolerating the many subtle, steady, complex and modest modifications by which a free economy adjusts itself to_ changing needs. It would be capable only 01 stupendous convulsions, of shattering reversals and disruptive halts, destructive. of all certainty, confidence and rationality, and thus of jobs and prosperity. A lot of 'rolling' will go on. Strategies are to be 'rolled forward' every year; so are plans; so is the whole chaos. Rolling has pleasant connotations: English drunkards, silvery moons, old Father Thames. More appropriate perhaps is Bakunin's pictures: que pronouncement: 'The chariot of revolution is rolling, and gnashing its teel as it rolls.' Not less alarming is the .chario. of planning, rolling forward, lurching. and gnashing its dentures, leaving behind It an where industrial desert or wasteland, nothing more will grow.
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