The Right Way Left ?

From BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL

PARIS

GOVIRNMEN1S of the left arc more or less likely to come, at a more or less early date, in Britain, Germany and France. Trying to pic- ture leftist governmental policies for the second half of the Sixties is, therefore, no idle specu- lation: I shall narrow it down to internal policies.

A leftist government will now find at the out- set what its predecessors have wanted and lacked : remember the friction which immediately arose between inter-war leftist governments, British or French, and their respective Treasury officials; remember how Roosevelt had to super- impose upon the Federal bureaucracies men of ample views but wholly inexperienced in ad- ministration. Contrast the present availability of planning inclination and talent in the Civil Ser- vice; this affords to the newcomers a staff admirably suited to their needs. There is, how- ever, a counterpart: such public servants are too familiar with operational research not to stress that you may not assign incompatible ob- jectives and that, once objectives have been chosen, you have little freedom as to paths.

The new government will find a public opinion attuned to rising expectations, but allergic to inflation, people who want to see their condition successively improved, but ■Nho are not in a mood of frustration and bitterness; therefore, there is no disposition to forgo- a pro- gression of concrete gains for the psychological satisfaction of a sweeping change.

The new government will take office at a time when problems generated by prior progress are coming to a head. The composition of American unemployment makes it quite clear that more schooling, desirable on moral grounds, is also a necessity of a growing economy: its man- power requirements expand in terms of the more educated and contract in terms of the less edu- cated. Full employment is surely a major impera- tive; we shall not get it if we suffer a dearth of highly qualified personnel which slows down ex- pansion to a pace leaving a redundancy of the least qualified. As the children now educated will be in the labour force well beyond the end of the

century, it is obvious that we must make great haste to endow them properly, and this means a great effort on education. This entails much building of schools and universities; it may entail many other measures.

The Buchanan Report warns us of the increas- ingly intolerable situation due to develop as the fast-growing crowd of motor vehicles presses upon inadequate traffic facilities: under such conditions environmental amenities are destroyed while the services rendered by the individual car declines. The report confronts private spending on motor vehicles with public investment in their accommodation and denounCes the great lag of the latter as responsible for the present conges- tion (which is worse in France than in Britain); it stresses that the major build-up in the motor `population' will occur within the next decade (in France expected additions are greater. in ab- solute terms than in Britain). Therefore it is urgent to embark upon a massive programme of traffic facilities in towns and conurbations.

It is good that such immediate pressure forces us to undertake the remodelling of our environ- ment, because there are other and better reasons to do so. An ever-increasing majority of our children are born and raised in towns; while we pride ourselves upon a rising standard of life, they have lost the natural playgrounds which were the birthright of country-raised children; the equivalent must be restored to them in urban life, firstly for their enjoyment, but also as a preventive of nervous disorders. But we must also consider the implications of greater leisure for the workers and of fast-rising numbers of retired people: for the younger of such adults we need sports fields, and for the older meeting places, clubs and gardens. It is to be hoped that the great remodelling thus required will be aesthetically inspired; seemliness is also a human need.

All this will, no doubt, take a great deal of time, but a massive attack is urgent. This calls for a mobilisation of material resources, and will show up financially as a great jump in public investments. Whether such efforts tending to the improvement of daily lives should not take precedence over the Channel tunnel, however desirable, is a question in my mind.

A great increase in public investment would be forced by circumstances upon any govern- ment: a leftist government, however, should proceed to it with a glad heart. Such a rise both assumes and induces a rapid rise in the national product, which, however, cannot be obtained without adequate .productive investment, and a flexibility of work rules, which, at present, can more readily be taken for granted in France than in Britain, and the maintenance' of which must perforce be a policy of a leftist government' in Britain.

To ensure a good pace, productive investment must grow somewhat faster than the national product, social investment growing much faster: it follows that some other uses of resources must move at a slower pace than the national product; an obvious candidate is military ex- penditure. Our interest in keeping it down as far as possible should logically lead to a European pooling of defence resources. Great spending on social investments can conceivably be compensated by relative savings on military expenditures, and thus we may hope that the ratio of public expenditure to national income Will not rise.'

Concentrating upon the French case, for which I have some data, it is quite true that we can hope, with a satisfactorily rising national output, to keep public expenditure from rising any

faster: that is, if we take a narrow view of `public expenditure' as meaning only central and local government expenditures; but the picture is fundamentally altered if we bring in what you call national insurance funds. On the basis of presently accepied principles concerning the pay- ing out of social benefits, their volume would rise at a pace somewhat higher than 7 per cent through the Sixties and well above 8 per cent in the Seventies. Even a quite optimistic view of economic growth faces us with the pros- pect of a financial load claiming for that purpose alone, within some twenty years, at least one- fourth of national output, presumably as much as or more than all other public expenditures. This may be specific to France; possibly it will be the unhappy lot of a leftist government to consider whether this development is feasible and, if not, to consider unwelcome adjustments.

Another annoying problem for a leftist gov- ernment, and one of more immediate urgency, arises from the present scarcity of the talents required for an expanding economy, be they scientific, technological, organisational, educa- tional or other.

However much a great educational effort may . multiply such talents for the future, its fruits are not to be expected before the late Seventies. In the meantime, it is the very definition of a fully stretched economy that it presses to the limit upon its scarcest resources: one result of such a situation, which is strikingly apparent in

France, is that such people work a' sixty-hour week, more or less. Another result is of a finan- cial nature: their services are cheap at any price; this is understandable enough, since they are the very leaven of general productivity gains. Thus their remuneration quite naturally forges ahead of wage increases. The increasing spreads in earned incomes are a spontaneous outcome of the great lag in the development of the talents called for. It may well be a temporary situation, but it does not sit well with the egalitarian doe- time of the left. Indeed the people benefiting from an intensive demand for their services are those whose willing and able co-operation a socialist government requires to carry out its plans. Therefore it will make sense for a leftist government to let them enjoy the material, ad- vantages they can claim, and to compensate this politically by the taxation of capital.

In general, the vision of an accelerated growth calls for a streamlining of social structure which may in not a few cases clash with senti- mentally preferred arrangements. But leftist gov- ernments can build a new and very attractive image of themselves if they mightily set to work on clearing the rubble of progress, on re- modelling the environment, bringing to the many the amenities which were enjoyed by the few in an aristocratic age; in one word, attending to the quality of life, as Bevan said in his last speech. And such are, indeed, the thoughts which are current in some French circles.