PERSONAL COLUMN
Men are we and must grieve
DENTS BROGAN
There is a great deal of in-and-out fighting going on not only in the artificial sporting club ring in the House of Commons, but in the more serious outside world of Derby, Bristol, and places where the incompetence of our political leaders is most painfully felt. And it is, I am afraid, going to be much worse as the two ruling parties, neither of them conspicuously competent, pass the buck to and fro.
Mr Wedgwood Benn, mt. for Bristol South- East, goes off to coax the Americans to bring pressure on their government to lend money to Lockheed to enable them to pay for the Rolls-Royce engines which they can no longer afford to buy and Rolls-Royce can no longer afford to produce at the contractual price. Dr Paul Einzig in the Times is all in favour of our spending five hundred million pounds or so in restoring our commercial credit with the Americans who, apparently, have been pouring money on to us in unlimited generosity for.quite a long time. This is a simplification of the economic relations between the United States and Great Britain, and there is no mention in Dr Einzig's letter of the impact of two great wars on our balance of pay- ments. Indeed, reading Dr Einzig's letter and other powerful proclamations of com- mercial virtue, I have reflected that one of the most disastrous innovations in European history was the decision of Cavour, during the Crimean War, not to ,accept a mere subsidy from Great Britain for sending some Sardinian troops to the Crimea, but insisting on borrowing British money to keep up the credit of the Sardinian mon- archy and save the future of the political institutions of Italy. In the good old days, we should simply have subsidised the Sardinians as we subsidised unimpressive German states, and the French subsidised Swiss cantons. But we have been above all that for a long time. So we borrow money which we cannot repay and perhaps sus- pected from the beginning we could not repay.
More serious is the question of whether, in times so extremely hard, any decision by
Mr Heath and what are now called his cohorts, to provide enough money to meet Dr Einzig's very elevated moral standards is sensible. Rolls-Royce will have to sink or swim, and probably will sink as far as its aero-engine division is concerned. So, it seems highly probable, will Lockheed, for I see no signs at the moment that the Nixon administration is going to salvage Lockheed, any more than the Heath administration is going to salvage all of Rolls-Royce.
Professor J. K. Galbraith of Harvard, at present resident in Cambridge (England), has given his opinion that Lockheed is only slightly less incompetent than Rolls-Royce —it is obviously a very close-run thing, as
the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo. The United States, of course, can survive the loss of Lockheed, but it is possible our aero-engine industry will not survive the loss of Rolls-Royce. I shall regret this sen- timentally rather than practically, for I am not at all certain that the Rolls-Royce aeroplane business is in fact a national asset at all. The unanimity of the Bristol foes in asking for the saving of Rolls-Royce is extremely natural, but it is a matter of indifference to a great part of this country. (I notice with a kind of pleasure that at the very moment that Derby is going under the hammer, if we can believe all its Bishop says, Derby County Football Club, or, as Mr Heath would call it, soccer club, is able to pay £170,000 for a very young foot- ball player. First things first, as they say round the Peak.) I should, of course, be romantically dis- tressed if the Rolls-Royce car disappeared, because it is an extremely elegant vehicle to look at, and quite an agreeable vehicle to ride in. It was the car for the very rich, and the fact that very many rich Arab sheiks bought Cadillacs merely shows bad taste on their part, or bad salesmanship on the part of Rolls-Royce.
But in the grim times that are now upon us, we must assess our sense of liability rather more cogently than the MPS of Bristol or Derbyshire can do, or than I suspect a great part of the Tory party can do. It is, of course, natural that people should regret the collapse of so famous a firm as Rolls- Royce. The emotional distress this causes is a kind of emotion very familiar to me. When I was a schoolboy, half the ships in the world were built on the Clyde. It was a simple act of faith that ships not built where 'Clyde the sacred river ran' were unsafe. (The fate of the 'Titanic' seemed to confirm this general belief) The Clyde began to slide just after the first war, helped by the curious inconsistencies of the policy of the Lloyd George coalition government. By a complicated system of British govern- ment grants, the rising Genoese firm, Lloyd-Sabaudo, was subsidised by the British government to have ships built at Dalmuir by the old steel manufacturing firm of Beardmore. Those ships drove the ships of the venerable Glasgow Anchor Line out of the Mediterranean. One sighed, then, for the simple days when ships paid their own way.
Although I still think that ships not built on the Clyde are (a) unsafe, (b) immoral, I think a great deal of money has been lost on the Upper Clyde consortium, especially in keeping the absurdly placed shipyard of Fairfield (or Fairfields as it is now called) on an extremely valuable business site about as suitable for a shipyard in these days as a London shipyard would be if it were planted on the site of County Hall. And it may be that we cannot afford even so world-famous an aero-engine manufac- turing firm as Rolls-Royce, although we could afford, I should think, the survival of the car manufacturing part of this combine.
These painful thoughts are, of course, very much resented by both Labour MPS and Tory Mrs for Derbyshire, for neither party is really committed to a rigorous policy of investing only in industrial undertakings which are going to help to keep the country basically solvent. Mr Enoch Powell, at any rate if we can believe what he says, realises that perhaps the best way to deal with our numerous inefficient businesses is to let them sink. I have no belief or hope that such a policy will be adopted, and I am sure that I am not hard- hearted or hard-headed enough, even if I had the power of decision, to let them sink. Reading a great deal of the incoherent and often emotionally foolish protests from both parties about the end of Rolls-Royce,
could not-help reflecting that a turning point in British history occurred in Derby, in 1745, when Prince Charles Edward, regent for his father, King James VIII and HI, was forced to turn back from his invasion of his father's southern kingdom to disaster at Culloden.
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