POLITICAL COMMENTARY

The Enochs of the Left

By ALAN WATKINS

MR HAROLD WILSON is said to hold the view that if he fell under the proverbial political bus, his successor would be Mr James Callaghan. ('The trouble with that,' remarked one minister, `is that Harold never goes near a bus nowadays.') Certainly Mr Callaghan has grown more and more impressive as Chancellor; and when in eleven days' time he rises to deliver his budget speech he will be speaking as a politician in complete com- mand of his party and of the House. Having paid this handsome tribute to Mr Callaghan, I hope it will not be considered impious to question whether it is altogether healthy for_him to main- tain this hegemony. But before going,into this matter, it may be helpful to speculate about the kind of budget he is likely to introduce.

The main long-term consideration to bear in mind is that, as far as one can gather, the Chan- cellor considers a general rise in taxation inevit- able over the next four or five years. He adopts a refreshingly simple attitude towards this increase. The public, he says, demands better reads, better schools, better hospitals. better pensions. Very well then : the public will have to pay. And there is no honest method of paying for these infinite blessings except through increased 'taxation. (No nonsense here, you notice, about paying for in- creased benefits out of increased production.) It should not be imagined that Mr Callaghan and other ministers are unaware of the electoral dangers in this. There may come a point, they fear, when the voters will stop merely grumbling about higher taxes: instead, encouraged by Mr kin Macleod's possibly rash promise at the last Con- servative conference, they will start to vote against the Government. Indeed one view inside the Cabinet is that it is only a general weariness with high taxation which can deprive Labour of another five-year term.

But there are more immediate considerations Which point to higher taxes. The opinion of the Treasury is that a spot of deflation would do everyone good. A hundred million out of purchas- ing power? Or two hundred million? Perhaps it does not very much matter. There is a case for saying (Mr Enoch Powell, for one, has said it) that crude Keynesianism of this kind does not solve any real problems and creates more harm than anything else. Be this as it may, we shall be fairly safe in assuming that Mr Callaghan will think of a number and produce some compromise figure-- say a hundred and fifty million.

Nor is a deflationary budget purely a matter of following the Treasury's advice. There is also the old political adage, repeated by Lord Attlee among others, of getting the unpleasant things out of the way as soon as possible. In 1964, for in- stance, there were some ministers, such as Mr Anthony Crosland, who did not believe that Mr CaHaghan's first emergency budget w'Ss nearly deflationary enough. And there are those Conser- vatives who trace the decline in their party's for- tunes- in 1961-64 to the fact that Mr Derick Heathcoat Amory—ah, those were the days—did not introduce a tough budget in 1960. If Mr

Amory had done this, they argue, Mr. Selwyn Llody's 1961 measures (which can still send a shudder down straight Conservative spines) would

have been unnecessary, and the entire political history of the decade would have been changed. So much, then, for the broad factors which point to a deflationary budget. What of the details? Mr Callaghan, we may be confident, will try his best not to raise income tax; not this timc. anyway. Income tax, understandably enough, arouses much fiercer emotions than other forms of taxation. Mr Callaghan will probably prefer to make heavy increases in purchase tax. And to balance these increases—to give the impression that he is being socially just—he is likely to intro- duce a payroll tax or increase employers' national insurance contributions and also perhaps levy corporation tax at a higher rate than is expected.

No one can pretend-1 am sure Mr Callaghan would not try to pretend—that there is anything particularly socialist or even particularly novel about the measures outlined above. Indeed Mr Callaghan would probably reply that last year's Finance Act provided quite enough socialism and quite enough novelty to be going on with; and he might add that the Treasury machine was already overworked. Nevertheless. the truth is that there is an expansionist case to be made, and this case is now going by default. It is certainly not being adequately stated by Mr Brown.

Expansionism would involve either very many more controls or very many fewer; and it would involve either a rigorously applied incomes policy or no incomes policy at all. Since this is a Labour government, and since words may be presumed to retain at least part of their meanings, we can take it that the second method of going about expansionism—if you like, the Conservative method—would prove unacceptable to Mr Wilson, though one can never be sure of these things. This leaves us with the first method—if you like, the socialist method. Why is it that both inside the Government and in the Labour party as a whole the socialist case for expansion bas been so infrequently stated and, when it has been stated, so peremptorily brushed aside? In a way, this is the most puzzling question of all about the Labour party since October 1964.

To examine the Cabinet first: the sad fact is that all the ministers with any economic expertise, notably Mr Crosland and Mr Roy Jenkins, have fairly consistently supported Mr Callaghan. (Mr Jenkins, incidentally, modestly disclaims the fre- quent descriptions of himself as an economist. He says he has now no expert knowledge at all.) Mr Wilson tries to appear neutral behind a cloud of pipe smoke, but does not succeed very well : he too is solidly with Jim. Oddly enough, Mr Brown is not nearly such an expansionist as he is some- times supposed to be. He is perfectly prepared to

come to cosy agreement with Mr Wilson and Mr

Callaghan. Moreover, the early warning Bill apart (and of that more hereafter), Mr Brown is, as We all know, a great believer in the power of his own voice rather than the power of legislation. He thinks he can do it all by talking to people or if

necessary by shouting at them—functions which have now been transferred to Mr Ray Gunter and M r Douglas Jay.

Which leaves us with Mr Richard Crossman. Mrs Barbara Castle, Mr Frank Cousins and Mr Fred Lee as the representatives of expansion. All

of them have the feeling that something is whim; with the Government's economic policy. None of

them, however. is capable of expressing this dis- satisfaction in terms of detailed alternative pro- posals. This is not perhaps surprising, as none of them is-an economist. Mr Crossman, for example, is frank about it: if he tried to criticise Mr Callaghan's economic policy. Mr Callaghan would simply not listen to him.

It has been the same story on the back benches. The docility of the left has frequently been com-

mented upon; nevertheless, on Vietnam the left did at least make some kind of gesture; whereas on economic policy it accepted the Treasury line without a murmur. There is a perfectly under- standable historical explanation for this. For years and years the left, under the influence of Aneurin Bevan, devoted most of its energies to foreign affairs. Its economic ideas were confined to de- mands for the nationalisation of steel and of other ill-assorted industries. No coherent left-wing view of economic policy was advanced. And the left— of whom those two foreign affairs experts of

yesteryear, Mr Crossman and Mrs Castle, may be taken as exalted examples—is now paying the price.

.Will it, however, be the same story in the new Parliament? It is possible that it will not be. True, any account of the new intake of Labour MPs now includes a seemingly obligatory reference to their enthusiasm for parliamentary reform. I

would be the last person to deny the interest or

the importance of parliamentary reform. Still. it should perhaps be recognised that it is hardly the

most vital topic in the entire political field. Of

course it would suit the Labour leadership admir- ably to pretend that it was indeed the most vital topic.; parliamentary reform could well serve as a highly convenient safety-valve mechanism. The new Members should be on their guard against this tactic, as they should also be on their guard against a proliferation of working parties, back- ' bench committees and similar diversionary para- phernalia. If they resolutely refuse to be side- tracked they may well exercise some influence on economic policy in the post-budget months.

But one hopes that they are not trapped by the early warning legislation. In the early months of this year the left, and particularly its newer mem- bers, such as Mr Stanley Orme, succeeded in working themselves into a thoroughly Tory posture over Mr Brown's Bill. The Bill, to be sure, is an unworthy one, introduced for unworthy motives. In its present form it could do a great deal of damage. Nevertheless, if the left wishes to have any economic policy to pit against Mr Callaghan and the Treasury it will have to press. not for an abandonment of the incomes polioy but for a policy that is more detailed and more rigorously enforced. Mr Michael Foot at least seemed to recognise this when he privately des- cribed Mr Clive Jenkins as `the Enoch Powell of the Labour movement.' But then, there are so many other Enochs in the movement that no one 'scan be confident about the emergence' of a new policy on the economy.