On putting the clock forward
Nicholas Davenport
Having accused Big Benn of Putting the clock back I must now try to put the clock forward and see what is the future, if any, for Britain as a great trading nation. If you were to read the latest, and gloomiest, industrial survey of the CBI, you would think that there could be no future at all. Manufacturing industry, it says, is moving very rapidly into recession, deeper than ever before, and unless there is a sharp drop in wage demands the Government's hopes of an export-led recovery next year Will be dashed. The rapid and consistent fall in new orders since last summer is causing more and more firms to lay off men and close down plant. A substantial fall in manufacturing investment in 1975 and 1976 is therefore expected. It ends:a general pessimism about the business situation is widespread. And yet the capital market in the City in its collective wisdom continues to move up, as sterling falls and inflation mounts, though one observes an increasing preference for companies with large assets overseas.
An important development: Mr Campbell Adamson, the director general of the CBI, has warned the Government that industry is nearing exasperation point and that it they continue to disregard the views of the business community industry might withdraw its cooperation. There are some provisions in the Industry Bill, he said, Which point to the eventual state take-over of all firms — whether Benn is in charge or not — while Others so upset the balance of Power between management and employees that the job of management becomes impossible. The threat of non-co-operation must therefore be taken seriously. It is the beginning of the bourgeois revolt.
It seems that in'the state of nearungovernability we have reached today we are drifting towards either a corporate state or a communist state. There is, of course, no majority support for the latter but the student population — and the young managerial class into which they move — are all so bitterly envious of wealth, which they do not possess themselves, that they desire the take-over of private property and the confiscation of private savings. Hence any revolutionary' trade union leader who wants to disrupt
capitalist society will have the support of these young Marxists. Happily they have no leader and they are always quarrelhng among themselves — the Marxists against the Maoists and the Trotskyites against the orthodox Communists. The leaders of industry are no fools and while they do not take these revolutionaries too seriously they recognise that they can cause disruption of factory output through carefully planned strikes when they work in collusion with militant shop stewards. When the strikes occur the managements are helpless. Their only hope is that before long the wives of the strikers will picket the factory gates and get the men back to work as they did once at Cowley. If they don't the managements have to fall back on Mr Benn and ask the Government to bale them out, which is not, of course, the way to secure the industrial future of Great Britain.
Incidentally, many industrialists are questioning the Ryder report on British Leyland and asking whether the starry-eyed Sir Don has ever been up against a shop-floor fight or ever understood the ungovernability of militant trade unions. Has he over-estimated the future of the motor industry and the willingness of workers to co-operate in raising productivity? Past history suggests that investment does not necessarily pay off with a non-co-operative workforce.
The leader of the Labour Party is also no fool. While he miraculously holds his irreconcilable left and right together he sems to be steering the warring factions towards a corporate state by relying on tripartite talks between Government, TUC and CBI through the machinery of NEDC. He is even toying with the idea that the three estates in the realm might plan the size of the national cake in the coming year and work out the distribution between personal consumption, investment and government spending as some Continental countries have done, but not with great success. As a refinement of the national cake splitting Lord (Wilfred) Brown has proposed a National Council for the Regulation of Wage and Salary Differentials (composed of trade unionists only) which would allocate the slice of the cake going to wages among the different
employment groups. But as Peter Jay has pointed out so clearly in his after-comment on the television interview, with the Prime Minister, the real problem is how to enforce, or to secure voluntary observance of, any restraint formula. There is absolutely no evidence, he adds, "that the solemn determinations of the nation's political and industrial leaders in high conclave will count for two pins on the shop-floor where the decisions which matter are made". . For the time being the Chancellor is pursuing, with Mr Wilson's consent, a budgetary policy which Mr Mikardo calls "an obscenity." He is making an increase in unemployment the fine for breaches of the social contract. The objection to this policy is that he is creating an even more unfair society than it is today, for by increasing income tax he is penalising especially those who have unselfishly and patriotically kept within the terms of the social contract. If he confined himself to cutting public expenditure there would be less outcry from the aggrieved. Making stupid people learn by suffering should be left to God, not Mr Healey.
As it is only a minority of powerful trade unions who are selfishly breaking the social contract and robbing their poorer comrades by putting up their cost of living, it is obvious that the Government should appeal to the moderates by promising them a share in capital profit when the world trade recession ends and growth returns to the economy next year. This can be done, as I
have so often argued, by giving them participation in a public unit trust and it might be confined to those unions who honour the social contract. This is an idea which has never been considered before, but it is surely logical and fair, that moderation in wages should be made to yield a profit in some form of capital appreciation.
In the end, we must allow popular revolt against extremism to take its course. It usually does in Britain. Sometimes it is the strikers' wives: sometimes it is farmers or ratepayers or Middle Class Associations. II was interesting to see the outburst of the Socialist writer, Paul tohnson — in another place railing against powerful trade unions who have indiscriminately sought, he says, to increase their power and wages. who have broken governments, political parties, private industry and public boards. They are, he cries, killing honest socialism in Britain. They are certainly killing the social democracy which could easily work here in a mixed economy as it does on the Continent. For when they have created hyper-inflation at home and destroyed the credibility of sterling abroad they Will force the Government, even Mr Wilson's, to take draconian measures and introduce what is, in effect, an authoritarian corporate state. It will be a. sad day for parliamentary democracy. But 1 am sure that efficient companies which can get on with their work force, pay high wages and invite it to share in their management and capital profit will survive and prosper.
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