CHEERFUL FIGURES
IT WAS Sam Brittan who proposed a Society for the Abolition of Inconvenient Statistics. Nothing so crude for his old colleague Nigel Lawson. Before his 'au- tumn statement' we had been softened up for some ruthless abolition. This year there was to be no figure for fiscal adjustment, which is Treasury-ese for tax cuts. Last year, we were told, this had given everyone the wrong idea, and set off a run on sterling. So now the guileful Nigel leaves us to make our own adjustments. Cheerful, they look, and if between the exchange rate and the oil price they have come to look nonsense by Budget-time, that will be our fault, not the Chancellor's. Looking back a year, it wasn't the autumn state- ment that undermined sterling — it was the Government's obvious determination, at whatever cost, to keep the financial ear- kets sweet for Telecom, That wouldn't happen with British Gas, now, would it?
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