The new ideology
Every generation, it seems, must have a simple economic ideology in which it can repose a blind, unreasoning faith. For our fathers it was the mystique of the balanced budget : for us it is the mumbo-jumbo of the incomes policy. 'Only through an in- comes policy shall ye obtain a balance of payments surplus; only through an incomes policy shall ye be saved.' So intone the ministerial high priests of the new cult, as their acolytes in Fleet Street, from Mr Cecil King's Daily Mirror to Lord Thomson's Sunday- Times, duly echo the litany with all the fervour at their command. And Par- liament dutifully votes still greater shackles on the freedom of a bewildered people, and still severer penalties for the exercise of the freedoms the people once had.
In vain to point out that no surplus coun- try in the world has an incomes policy— so why should Britain alone need to per- form this penance? In vain to point out that no free country that has attempted an in- comes policy has ever made it work. In vain to point out that for an unpopular government to attempt to enforce such a policy must lead to more or less crippling industrial unrest—and for a government actually to use its power to prosecute trade unionists could make London tomorrow like Paris today. In vain to point out that, on the other hand, the Government, once having chosen to declare the policy the sine qua non of its economic success, cannot then yield without undermining what little overseas confidence it has managed so far to retain. In vain to point out that pay in British industry has risen, on average, by 6+ per cent a year over the past decade (which is incidentally less than in France, Germany or Japan) and that the Government's official advisers will be surprised and delighted if this figure is not exceeded in the year ahead, so that Mrs Castle's 34 per cent 'ceiling,' on which the attention of the world has been focused, is doomed from the start.
It is in vain to advance arguments based on reason, for faith in the incomes policy is by its very nature immune to reason. The ideologies of socialism and liberalism have seemingly passed away: only the half- baked paternalism of the incomes policy remains. Until this, too, is abandoned our best hope is that common sense—and the fortunate accident that Mrs Castle probably does not believe in it at all—will ensure that it does the least possible harm.
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