Political Commentary
The assumption of St Denis
Ferdinand Mount
The great confrontation on pay between the Prime Minister and Mrs Thatcher was a dispiriting occasion. These parliamentary set pieces often are. Mr Callaghan, nakedly electioneering, made a second-rate and slightly unsavoury speech. Mrs Thatcher spoke too fast and for too long. She got bogged down in detail, as she has before in this kind of debate, but not because of the stale jibes of her adversary.
Both are hobbled by the past twists and U-turns of their parties and also by the unmentionable probability that their present positions on incomes policy are not so very far apart. The Labour Party, like the Tories, are now posing as Good Germans. Both rely essentially upon a strict monetary policy allied with cash limits in the public sector, and both look for an overall consensus as to how much the nation can afford each year, within which there can be room to be flexible.
Mrs Thatcher has a further problem on these inflated occasions — the presence in large numbers of Labour's lumpen intelligentsia who keep up a ceaseless barrage of guffaws at their own jokes, above which a woman's voice cannot rise without sounding shrill. There you will see Dr Oonagh McDonald (lecturer in moral philosophy) prolonging an unconvincing fit of hysterics at the wit of Mr Brian Sedgemore (barrister and former civil servant), Mr Robert Kilroy-Silk (university lecturer) or Mr Neil Kinnock (WEA Tutor), all equally paralytic with forced mirth. They are like some hideous left-wing version of Dornford Yates's appalling Berry and Co, with Dr McDonald as one of those peabrained girls, Jill or Daphne or Adele, who are always 'shaking with merriment' at the jests of their menfolk. These are the kind of people who give laughter a bad name. Their tactics, however, are not without effect, and the Prime Minister may have squeezed some consolation from what might otherwise have been a week of unrelieved humiliation. The defeat of the squalid attempt to extend union power in the docks was a reminder both of the Government's lack of friends in Parliament and of its embarrassing friends outside.
Yet the most curious and perhaps revealing episode of the past few days has been the Assumption of the Blessed Denis. This story, like so many incidents in the Lives of the Saints, is a mass of apparent con tradictions and changes of heart which seem inexplicable except in terms of divine inter vention. For months, the Treasury had been stoutly refusing to disclose its estimates of future unemployment. The Commons Select Committee on Expenditure had tried and failed to extract an explanation for the increase of £117 million in the Government's estimates of the cost of unemployment in the financial year 1978-9. Accordingly, the Committee wrote a rude report denouncing these obstructive tactics. But while the report was at the printers, out of the blue came a letter from Denis Healey himself to the Committee chairman, revealing that the Treasury was working on the assumption that unemployment might be as high as 1.7 million by next March — an increase of 200,000 on the present figure of 1.5 million.
Shock, horror, sensation. All the time the Government had been cheerfully telling us that unemployment was beginning to fall, the Treasury had been budgeting for a further marked increase.
That was last Wednesday evening. And the Treasury view at that stage was that this was indeed the latest available assumption but it was only an assumption, not a forecast. What, you may ask, is the difference? Well, in Treasury lingo a forecast is 'an expectation' while an assumption is only 'a possibility'. This does seem a bizarre use of language. Surely an assumption ought to be the firmer of the two, because real money is being set aside as a consequence of the assuming, whereas forecasts are for playing around with, particularly these days when Mr Healey loses no opportunity to point out how unreliable they are.
By the next morning, though, everything had changed. The 1.7 million was no longer the latest available assumption. Far from it. That was what had been assumed last autumn. But since then the Government had been assuming things virtually non-stop. And oddly enough, all these assumptions had been revised in a downwards direction. As early as last December, the Government Actuary had had the figure down to 1.65 million. In May he reduced it further to 1.55 million which, as you see, is not far off the present figure of 1.5 million.
In this week's pay debate Mr Callaghan climbed a new peak of imprecision by stating that 'it is our view, although we cannot Plat statistics to it, that unemployment is on a falling trend.' A 'view' it appears is an assumption without the statistics attached, a sort of economy model — and very nice and handy it sounds too. Yet one still cannot forebear to ask what Mr Healey was doing budgeting for 1.7 million people out of work, seeing that he had previously claimed on several occasions that unemployment had already passed its peak. That first assunq tion of 1.7 million may have been somewhat reduced in later assumptions, but as Madame du Deffand said, on hearing that St Denis (of Paris, not Leeds) walked two leagues after bein.g beheaded, carrying his bead under his arm: C'estlepremierpasquicot2te • It is the first assumption that is so costly to Mt Healey's reputation for scrupulous probitY. The question that sticks in the mind is why on earth he ever wrote to the Committee at, "all. Why did he not just go on stonewall10g7 And if he was going to write, why did he not at least point out that the 1.7 million assunill" tion was now out of date and had been revised downward? Was it a genuine desire to help? A sudden access of remorse? Or a hitherto unsuspected enthusiasm for open government? Somehow none of the explanations seems quite plausible. Mr Healey is not one to give way gracefully or to let cats out of bags. The only likely explanation seems to LI? that at the time the Chancellor just didn t think the admission really mattered. Una!" ployment has been so high for so long that, n the absence of riots or hunger marches, Ministers have come to take it for granted that people don't mind very much what the level of unemployment is, give or take a few hundred thousand. The ritual pieties of care and compassion for the 'appalling waste dt. human lives' still have to be exchanged. Yet in private a rather less agonised view is taken by politicians no less than by other wellupholstered persons. The Labour Party, like the rest of the Establishment, has undonht' edly come to regard unemployment as a fat less pre-eminent and pressing problem than it used to; the party has traded on what looked like public acceptance of a necessaq but, if cushioned, tolerable evil entailed in the defeat of inflation.
Suddenly that public acceptance seems t° have melted away. First Gallup, now all di, polls put unemployment as easily peoPle s most Pressing worry. To start with, Labett.l. supporters were inclined to dismiss this dramatic change in public opinion as the result of their own success in bringing down the rate of inflation; people didn't have ot worry so much about prices, so they started worrying about unemployment insteadi Perhaps, but a loser is a loser. The gene" belief remains that the employment Pros' pects will not look much brighter in the autumn — and it doesn't matter whether rti call that a forecast or an assumption.
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