A Spectator's Notebook
It went unremarked that the Conservative Party had it in their power to force the Prime Minister to go to the country by calling a General Election on the historic vote on the Common Market on Wednesday night of last ,week. The Government had a 226 majority on a free vote on the motion. The figures were 396 for the motion and 170 against. 144 Labour MPs plus one teller went into the 'No' lobby whereas the total of Labour MPs in the 'Aye' lobby was only 136 plus two tellers. If the Conservatives had en bloc abstained the Government would have been defeated with inevitable results. Though this strategy was considered by the Tory leadership and their whips it was rejected on the moral ground that the Common Market was a matter of such paramount importance that the national interest should come first and on the more practical level that the outcome of a general election fought over the Common Market might not be as satisfactory as a pro-Market result from a June referendum splitting the Labour party.
No encouragement
It is a pity that the Chancellor did not encourage, in his Budget, industrial investment in the manner advocated by The Spectator. We have suggested in the past that the policy of free industrial depreciation that already exists within the tax system should be coupled with severe dividend restraint and a possible excess corporation tax. Such a policy would impel companies to rely on internally generated cash-flow and not on the stock market which has, in any event, signally failed to raise new money for industry during the past few years. Dividend restrictions are, in accordance with the spirit of the 'social contract', deflationary and conducive to restraint in wage demands. Few companies would be tempted to relax their vigilance on the wages front when in a position to improve productivity and escape corporate taxation completely by making organic productive investment that could be written off in a single year against profits, which would otherwise be largely lost. At a time when it is becoming increasingly perilous for any company to rely on its bankers or short term money, and when the money panic has already spread to the City, the more self-reliant industry is forced to become better. Mr Healey has again failed to produce the imaginative financial planning on which the country should have been able to rely.
Wintex 75'
A major exercise designed to test the higher control of 'crisis management' in NATO, known as the Wintex' series, comes along every two years. I hear of an interesting pointthat emerged disconcertingly from this year's exercise during a session of the North Atlantic Council, the supreme authority of the Alliance, at which countries are represented by officials of ambassador status.
One country which had been subjected — in the exercise scenario — to chemical attack, requested a NATO nuclear response. In the debate which followed it became clear that a number of countries were realising for the first time that chemical warfare is regarded by the Russians as conventional warfare, and one ambassador observed that as the results of a major chemical attack on a non-military target are as bad, if not worse than that of a nuclear attack, NATO must surely have some response.. Alas, due to certain well-known pressures, the only NATO country to have an offensive chemical capability is the United States, and the use of US chemi,cal weapons is not a subject of discussion in NATO. From which we may take it that there is one area at least in which NATO as such has no flexible response at all — an uncomfortable state of affairs, I think, and I have little confidence in the lesson being picked up in the right quarters.
Britain and Europe
The average wage in this country is, I suppose. around £50 a week. The number of unemployed is put at 756,000 which is a 26 per cent increase during the past twelve months according to a report prepared by the Get Britain Out Referendum Campaign. In the same report our non-oil deficit with the Community is shown to have groivn to over £2 billion, a figure that has a suspiciously close connection with the 756,000 unemployed who are not getting £50 a week.
Discreet silence
The anti-Market organisations should go to some trouble to show that VAT is a tax with which we will not be allowed to dispense so long as we are members of the Community, in spite of harmonisation not being in prospect. Amusingly attention might be directed to a recent meeting of the EEC Finance Ministers discussing tax evasion and avoidance. During the talks the Luxembourg representative was "notable by his silence" according to a report in the current issue of the Banker.
Bouncing back
My friend Peter Walker is said to have been so humiliatingly lowered by the defeat of Ted Heath last February that he has scarcely stopped to pass the time with his favourite company — the lobby journalists. Gradually Walker is recovering confidence. He spoke to the Army Staff College recently and was back in his old form. On being asked for his views on Gough Whitlam, Australia's increasingly mushy Prime Minister, Walker replied: "I have a greater contempt for Whitlam than for Wilson if that is conceivable. It is relatively easy to destroy the British economy, but to destroy the Australian takes a touch of genius." In the same speech he referred with relish to a mot attributed to Tank Ali: "There are' two things I don't like about Harold Wilson — his face."
Lawson's lapses
I am sorry to see from my copy of the Dunstable Gazette that Nigel Lawson, once Editor of The Spectator, and now the Tory MP for Blaby has been fined for "not glancing at his speedometer for a few moments" when he was doing 86 mph as the police claimed. There is little doubt that Lawson is a man in a hurry well getting the publicity he is seeking. He stage-managed to hit Stanley Clinton-Davis with his order paper in the Chamber of the House and it should not be long before his crass misjudgment in backing Ted Heath against Margaret Thatcher is forgotten and he is once more on his way into a junior shadow post.
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