A Spectator's Notebook
The Government's Counter-Inflation Bill has emerged from its Committee Stage pretty badly mutilated, from the Govern ment's point of view, but generally improved in the opinion of everyone else.
The Bill still represents a degree of intervention by the Government in the workings of a free economy repugnant to most conservatives, and it is indeed thanks to its socialist content and to socialists' support that it has come through in a form still recognisable and perhaps acceptable to the Prime Minister. It is an ugly little bastard of a Bill which should have been still-born, and probably would have been but for the socialist backing it has received.
Early on Wednesday morning the Government was again twice defeated in the now completed Committee stage, and unless Mr Heath accepts a good many of the alterations to the Bill made in Committee he may well face defeat in the House. What has happened in Committee has been in part the consequence of a working alliance between Mr Nicholas Ridley and Mr John Biffen on the Tory side and Mr Reg Prentice and Mr Brian Walden on the Labour side, who have insisted upon the accountability to Parliament of the Incomes Board and the Prices Commission to be set up under the Bill. Under Mr Wilson's old Prices and Incomes Board, each report was debatable. Mr Heath's Bill would have none of this Committee stage. The Bill has now been amended so that there shall be, at the least, quarterly debates on the activities of the Board and the Commission. Additionally, the life of the Board and the Commission have been reduced from three years to one, and the life of other clauses requiring the disclosure of information has likewise been reduced.
Labour opposition in the Committee has largely confined itself to this question of accountability, apart from some justified complaints about the missing Code under which the proposed Board and Commission are to operate. Conservative backbenchers on the Committee, like Sir Edward Brown and Dr Anthony Trafford have found themselves at times supporting the more regular Conservative opponents, Mr Ridley, Mr Biffen and Mr Wilf Proudfoot. In Committee, the Commons has re-asserted itself. It is to be expected that the Government will have the sense and the grace to concede; failing which, it is to be hoped that the full Commons will reject any obstinate attempt by the Government to have all its original proposals restored.
Are guns necessary?
Mr Marriott-Smith and Mr Pickering apparently run a firm called Replica Models (UK) Ltd. which import model guns from the Modern Gun Company of Japan. Mr Marriott-Smith is quoted as saying, of these imitation guns, "We feel no moral responsibility for selling them. No one can be shot with one of our guns." There is bound to be a public outcry over these imitation guns after the shooting incident at the Indian High Commission this week; and it would be no bad thing if the sale of such imitation guns were prohibited.
However, it remains true enough, as Mr Marriott-Smith said, that no one can be shot with one of them. If imitation guns are not to be sold, then the manufacture and sale of real guns, which can actually kill people, should surely be prohibited also.
This is not likely to happen. Imitation guns are presumably bought by or for children, or by criminals; and no one will be seriously inconvenienced if such toys are banned. Is there, however, any case for the sale for sporting use of real guns — pistols, rifles, shot-guns? Shooting is greatly enjoyed by those who practise it; and among their number are the great majority of the wealthiest land-owners in the country. Land-owners have always been powerful and privileged in this realm. They would doubtless resist any legislation which threatened to prevent them slaughtering birds on their and their friends' properties.
Nevertheless, if children, for the general good, are to be deprived of their imitation toys and prevented from playing their make-believe games, why not, for the general good, deprive adults of their real toys and prevent them from playing their
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