Spectator's Notebook
IHARDLY feel it was very sensible of the Tories to table a personal motion of censure against the Home Secretary for his 'refusal . .. to set up
a specific inquiry . . . on the escape of George Blake.' It's clear that the Mountbatten inquiry will investigate the Blake affair in the course of its general probe into prison security; and if Mr Jenkins had offered an inquiry into the Blake escape alone he would have been equally open to criticism for not looking into the wider issue at a time when escapes of all kinds have doubled in three years. Indeed, this is the chief ground on which the present Government is vulnerable: its failure to realise the implica- tions of the recent boom in escapes or to do anything about it. But this is hardly cause for a personal censure motion. The fact that this was the sort of thing that Mr Wilson did when he was in Opposition is neither here nor there. One Wilson is more than enough.
Still, the Prime Minister is evidently taking the whole affair very seriously indeed, as his choice of Lord Mountbatten to head the inquiry indicates. For this is Mr Wilson's ultimate de- terrent: a man who, by virtue of his great service to the country in peace and war and his proximity to the blood royal, is considered by the Prime Minister to be beyond the reach of criticism. The last time he was used in this way was when Mr Wilson wanted to persuade his party to accept a complete volte-face on immi- gration, and Mountbatten was sent to the four corners of the Commonwealth—in the nick of time he just avoided setting foot in Pakistan —in order to 'demonstrate' that the Afro- Asian countries did not really want to send us any more immigrants anyway. He performed this mission with such remarkable success that the Labour party even accepted Mountbatten's curious recommendation that Malta (with which he has had a long and intimate naval connection) should have its immigrant vouchers cut by less than 30 per cent of the 1964 level, while the rest of the Commonwealth should be cut by more than 40 per cent.
It will be interesting to see what he produces this time. It would not be unpleasing if he were to discover that a combination of too much security and too harsh a punishment was a con- tributory cause of Blake's escape. Clearly, Blake had help—if only of a negative kind—from other prisoners. Traditionally, spies are regarded by their fellow jail-birds as only slightly less un- speakable than those who have committed sexual offences against children. But because Blake's case was held in camera for security reasons, the full enormity of his crime was unknown to his fellow-prisoners, who obviously thought him rather a good chap victimised by a cruel and unfair sentence. Meanwhile, I offer this thought for the week to Mr Jenkins: when sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.
The Difference Ever since the July 20 measures, Mr Harold Wilson has sought to define the difference be- tween his own gritty, pragmatic, purposive defla- tion and the old, discredited, Tory stop-go methods of managing the economy by claiming that Labour's dose of salts specifically exempted and protected those regions which suffered so harshly in previous, Conservative, recessions. Well, I've been taking a look at the latest Ministry of Labour figures. And leaving aside the Mid- lands, which have so far been abnormally hard- hit by the motor industry lay-offs, this is the picture that emerges. In England south of the Midlands, unemployment over the past three months has risen by 46,350, or 1.9 times the normal seasonal increase. In England north of the Midlands, Scotland and Wales, the com- parable rise in unemployment has been 53,273, or 2.7 times the normal seasonal increase. So much for Mr Wilson's 'exemption' of the `regions.' And I'm afraid the disparity is going to get a good deal worse.
Gib My own recollections of Gibraltar fail to con- vince me that here is a priceless jewel in the imperial diadem—even if it were (as it almost is) the only rock left. I recall chiefly a long street of tawdry shops selling souvenirs whose prices fluctuated with the nationality of the fleet at present in harbour, and a desperate water short- age. But perhaps my memory is coloured by the fact that at the time I was suffering all the priva- tions of an ordinary seaman on an aircraft carrier, when even escape to the Rock Hotel, where retired expatriates sipped tea as a lady pianist who looked as if she had known better days played Chopin with unusual emotion, could seem a blessed relief. Nor was there any escape to Spain: for the lower deck the frontier even then was closed.
And now it's closed for all and in earnest. The problem for Britain is clear enough. So long as this continues, the colony can only survive with the aid of a substantial UK subsidy (nor, even then, would it be a particularly agreeable place to live in). The Government's offer to refer the question to the Hague court is absurd, since there's no reason to suppose that if we get a favourable verdict it will make the slightest difference to Franco's conduct. The real choices before us are to pay the sub- sidy, to try and make Gibraltar self-supporting (perhaps it might take the place of that once- flourishing centre of financial and sexual free- dom, Tangier: after the British Council of Churches' report anything is possible), to nego- tiate an agreed settlement, or to surrender—an absurd and dishonourable course which the present Government seems oddly reluctant to exclude. It would be an irony if the only success- ful use of economic sanctions in the 1960s turned out to be against Britain.
Quasi Like its 1964 predecessor, Nuffield College's British General Election of 1966, reviewed by Alan Watkins on page 545, contains a chapter on television and radio by Mr Martin Harrison, of the University of Manchester. In it he dis- cusses the row that blew up between the Prime Minister and the BBC, and concludes that 'over a number of sensitive questions such as the confrontation issue and the arrangements for broadcasts on the day and evening after the poll, individual members of the BBC acted in a tactless and unimaginative way which pro- duced resentment against the entire Corporation.' It's a pity that Mr Harrison does not provide some facts to substantiate this charge. It's a pity, too, that, not having been present when the key incidents occurred, he did not even take the trouble to speak to those 'individual mem- bers of the BBC' chiefly responsible for tele- vision coverage of the election. This is hardly the standard expected of what is presumably intended to be a quasi-academic work.
Jubilation Dropping in on a small Sussex antique shop over the weekend, I caught sight of and pur- chased an octagonal Victorian Jubilee plate. In- evitably—and properly—the theme of the design is imperial: the arms of Australasia, Canada, Cape Colony and India in the four corners; between the Queen and the Prince of Wales a rather bored-looking Britannia surrounded by half-a-dozen assorted colonials (and the dreadful punning motto `ubi virtus ibi victoria'); a map of the world with the classic legend `The British Empire coloured red in map'; while right in the middle of the plate the circular inscription `The Empire on which the sun never sets' encloses a complicated geographico-chronological diagram designed to prove that this proud boast was nothing less than the literal truth.
But what caught my eye was the bold declara- tion at the bottom of the design, in the largest lettering of all: 'Imports £390,018,569—Exports £295,967,583.' A trade deficit, according to my calculations, of something over £94 million, or getting on for £600 million in today's money, regarded not as a national humiliation but at the very least with utter indifference, if not with a touch of pride. Those, Mr Callaghan, were the
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