Prodigal's return
Sir: It is nice to be thought of by Cohn Brownlow (ketters, December 8), along with others, as one who, he says, has in the past enlivened your columns. May I do so again in serious vein — as usual?
No government in my lifetime has so Ignored its election pledges and reversed more of the policies on which it won power as has the present one. It should therefore be easy for it to carry the process further without losing much more of the over-confident face with which it started off. If what I suggest should immediately be done is going to upset more of Heath's original supporters so be it. Far too much is at stake now for any more dillydallying or Peter Walker/Barber pep talk if we are to survive three years' gross mismanagement of our aft s. The mad over-issue of money should cease and taxes should at once be raised on all those above a middle income range. Phase 3 is a dead letter and should at once be treated as such because it has been overtaken by events. The Industrial Relations Act must be scrapped without further delay and all Union bashing invoked as a scapegoat to cover the Government's failures must stop. A fair, clearly expressed unequivocal prices and incomes policy should be enacted forthwith with the whole-hearted consent of employees and employers both in private and publicly owned industry. In a new climate this could be obtained.
All rents, rates and the prices of basic commodities should be frozen at the expense of the get-rich-quicklytypes whom the Government have virtually sponsored in their anti-social actiyities. I am thinking especially of land speculators and property racketeers.
The sale of arms to South Africa should be instantly banned so as to safeguard the huge amount of oil we import from Nigeria which will be cut off if Heath's policy of flouting a UN Security Council decision and offending African opinion continues.
We can no longer go ahead under the two nations plan that Toryism has imposed on us despite the Prime Minister's one nation pledge. The rich being made richer because they are mostly Conservative Party supporters has been a scandal, and has been quite naturally an incitement to industrial unrest already responsible for double the number of hours lost since 1970 compared with those sacrificed during six years of Labour rule. All further political differences between the main parties could be argued about at an election in which the Government would have to answer for its wholesale backtracking and for stealing almost all of its main opponents' clothing. The Liberals I predict would be lost in a scrum in which voters would come to realise that it was the adoption of Labour's policies which was saving them. And Harold Wilson would once more take over at No 10 as one of this country's most competent peacetime Prime Ministers.
T. C. Skeffington-Lodge 5 Powis Grove, Brighton
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