A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

JOCK BRUCE-GARDYNE

Every time I visit Bonn I am reminded of the old French proverb that 'nothing lasts like the provisional.' When I spent a couple of weeks at the university there as a student in 1951 Bonn was an attractive, sedate, provin- cial university city—a German Cambridge. The arrival of the Federal government and parlia- ment two years earlier did not seem to have made much of an impact: the politicians were looked upon as temporary evacuees who would soon be going back to their proper home in Berlin.

Seventeen years later they are still there: but they have swamped the old city. In every direction the matchbox-style offices, houses and blocks of flats spread out into the surrounding countryside. But although nobody now imagines that the return to Berlin is in sight, the polite fiction of impermanence has to be maintained. For a foreign government to spend money on building a stylish embassy would imply an unworthy acceptance of the status quo; so all the official buildings have • the appearance of prefabricated sections- standing ready for dis- mantlement at the first breath of a more co- operative attitude from the east.

Partners in pessimism

The partners in the large-coalition'—the Chris- tian Democrats and the Social Democrats— eye each other warily, rather like wrestlers locked in an embrace. The theory behind the coalition, that it would enable the two major parties to share responsibility for policy changes, in particular towards eastern Europe. that neither of them would dare to undertake singlehanded, seems to have worked out to the satisfaction of both, even though the tangible results have been meagre enough.

But both partners are curiously pessimistic about the effect that their alliance will have on their fortunes in the parliamentary elections in eighteen months' time. The Christian Demo- crats are shocked to see the satisfaction which their business supporters find in working with the Socialist (sPD) Economics. Minister, Pro- fessor Schiller. Worse still, they believe that this satisfaction has been translated into a substan- tial flow of business funds to the SPD coffers. They reckon that at the elections they are bound to suffer at the hands of the neo-Nazi NPD, while the SPD may make inroads into their middle-class vote because of their new-found respectability.

This forecast is, however, rejected by the SPD. The Socialists are well pleased with their success in burying the ghost of Adenauer's highly effective campaign slogan—`a vote for the SPD is a vote for Moscow'—but they say the erosion of their support on the left, from those who regarded the SPD as their champions against the long series of Christian Democrat governments, has been far more severe than they had bargained for. Their best hope now, they reckon, is to form a 'small coalition' with the Liberals after the elections: but they forecast that the Christian Democrats are far more-likely to come out on top.

The. Keynesian cometh

Professor Schiller has undoubtedly been one Of the Major finds of the 'big coalition.' He

has, admittedly, just lost an involved battle with his CDU-CSU team-mate, Finance Minister Franz-Josef Strauss, over tax cuts. But his stand has only enhanced his popularity with the business lobby; and it cannot have been a comfortable experience for Herr Strauss to be labelled as the obstacle to concessions on company taxation.

Far more important for the future has been the Economics Minister's success in rendering Keynesian management of the economy re- spectable for the first time in postwar Ger- many. The Bundestag has accepted a record budget deficit for the current year, and if the target -figure of a 4 per cent increase in GNP - (which the IMF has castigated ' as both inadequate and unlikely to be fulfilled) looks to be in danger, the central government stands ready to plunge further into the red by under- writing spending by the provincial Lander governments. •

All the same, there are clear limits to the expansiveness of the German economic man- darins. They are as scathing as any Frenchmen about the way in which the United States has been allowed to prolong its payments deficit unchecked, and they hotly refute sugges- tions that there was anything particularly irre- sponsible about their ow n deflation in 1966-67. If the French should come forward with schemes for automatic mutual assistance within the European Community to save indi- vidual member countries from having to put on the brake to protect their reserves from the consequences of President Johnson's New Year measures, they are likely to get a dusty answer from Bonn. Germany, one is told, cannot tolerate its partners 'exporting infla- tion' by expanding too fast.

All or nothing German diplomats and politicians are the politest of hosts. But the tactics of the British government since the General's veto (one is not allowed to call it that in Bonn) strain their good manners. We, of course, regard Lord Chalfont as a joke: unfortunately he seems to be taken rather more seriously in Bonn. (No doubt the British information services have something to answer for here. Why, one is endlessly asked in Bonn, does the British government have to say that it is interested in `all or nothing'—since it is plain to the meanest intelligence that 'all' is not available and will not be available for many years to come?

The Germans do not have any exaggerated hopes of the General's offer to consider an arrangement for British and Scandinavian trade. But they cannot see that we or they have anything to lose by investigating it.

What perhaps exasperates the Germans most is the covert British effort to encourage the intransigence of the Dutch. It seems that the Foreign Office was behind the Dutch decision to walk out of the Marechal Committee which is busy working on plans for technological co- operation between Britain and the Six. The Ger- mans cannot understand how it can be in Britain's interests to sabotage precisely the sort of cooperation between industries which we profess to desire. But then Bonn is not the only - capital in which the strategy of our present

• leaders is not always easy to follow.