Notebook
The Economist has calculated that some 100,000 Indochinese refugees will die Within the next six weeks unless something is done to change the nightmare situation in the Far East. This is a terrifying thought. Beside it, the hesitations of the British Government in deciding how many refugees it is prepared to admit are beginning to look petty, even callous. France, for example, has already taken in some 52,000 refugees, the United States 240,000, China 250,000. Britain has admitted 2,500 and is committed to absorbing some 2,000 more. B. eyond that, we have promised nothing. It is said that the United Nations High Commission for Refugees has been asking us to accept a modest total of 10,000, but that Mrs Thatcher has resisted the idea, thus making any international agreement more difficult to achieve. It is true, as we have said before in a leading article, that the prime responsibility for the refugees lies with the United States. But this does not mean that Great Britain has no responsibility at all. Under both Labour and Conservative Governments, we consistently supported America during the Vietnam war, of which the refugee problem is a legacy. It is pointed out in Whitehall that we have already admitted some 730,000 funny-coloured People during the past ten years, as if that had anything to do with it. It is also pointed out that some 57,000 refugees have been given a temporary haven in Hong Kong, as if it were somehow to the credit of the British Government that this has happened. The truth surely is that Mrs Thatcher is trying to be consistent with her party's promise to curb immigration, not perhaps fully appreciating that such a gigantic human tragedy calls for exceptional solutions. In the light of the manner in which the tragedy has grown, it is a pity that the Conservatives rescinded the last Government's pledge to find homes in Great Britain for any refugees picked up by British Ships. It must now be sorely tempting for British sea captains to look the other way When they come across a boatload of refugees. Contrast this with the decision of the city of Paris to send out a ship to the Far East especially to look for refugees in distress. Meanwhile, we haggle with the Japanese about what to do with a mere 38 Vietnamese who were picked up and taken to Osaka by the British ship North Viking. (The Japanese, of course, have behaved a great deal worse. They appear to have admitted only six refugees, which is almost more absurd than admitting none. I have been wondering what the criterion for admission to Japan is. Maybe you have to be a trained computer programmer, or perhaps you are required to have fluent Japanese). The fact is that the prospect of allowing in a few thousand more refugees to Great Britain is not at all a threatening one. Most people, contrary to the belief of the National Front, have no feelings of racial dislike towards Vietnamese. People actually rather like them. Furthermore, our population is falling and a new injection of intelligent, hardworking people prepared to keep shops open at all hours and conduct themselves in a generally Thatcherite manner would do no harm at all.
Even the thickest-skinned Members of Parliament must now have some inkling of the harm that the House of Commons did itself last week. The savage heckling — from both sides of the House — when the Government announced that Members' pay would be increased in stages rather than at once, was undignified and pathetic. And others have drawn the contrast between the packed Chamber for this ugly brawl, and the Chamber an hour and a half later when all of three dozen Members listened to a debate on unemployment. Of course, MPs say that attending debates is not the only work they do. A Member is at work when he IS sitting in a Committee, or reading a White Paper. But that scarcely strengthens the claim for a massive pay rise. There may be good historical reasons for the payment of Members. There is also a good case (though it would be a brave journalist who advanced It in Annie's Bar) for not paying them at all. Or, as Andrew Alexander cruelly suggests, for paying them less rather than more than they receive at present, and then paying them productivity increases — when inflation, the public sector borrowing requirement or unemployment fall below a certain level. In all seriousness, if MPs were judged by the same criteria as other salaried employees they would be out on their ears. It is they who burden the rest of us with useless and ill-drafted legislation. It is they who have supinely watched the great inflation which they — not we — might have done something about and which has destroyed the value of their salaries and ours. If the free market were allowed to operate, then MPs need be paid nothing at all, for there never appears to be any shortage of potential candidates for the House of Commons. Another view is that they should be paid as little as possible, but just enough to enable them to live without the necessity of taking bribes. But whatever the right answer, we can all surely agree that a little modesty — a period of decorous silence on the subject of the money which they take off the taxpayer — would become our elected legislature.
We have referred before in this notebook to the iniquitous cost of air travel within Europe and the obstacle which this places in the way of any hopes that the peoples of the Common Market may somehow be brought closer together. This is not strictly the Common Market's fault, though there is no reason why the EEC should not have addressed itself to the problem. It is the fault of that notorious international cartel, IATA, which is dedicated to maintaining air fares at preposterously high levels so that all its member airlines can make more money. One of the harshest critics of IATA is Business Traveller, a lively magazine for air travellers. Its editor, Martin Page, points out that whereas the normal return air fare between London and Paris is £89, at least one airline provides the same service at a cost of £29 and apparently makes a profit. At any rate, it seems clear that European air fares could be cut by half and the routes would still be profitable. Mr Page is so incensed that he wants to take IATA to the European Court in Strasbourg on the grounds that the association is in breach of the Treaty of Rome. The Treaty not only forbids the charging of different prices in different countries for the same service, which is a practice most airlines follow. It also forbids price-fixing cartels within the EEC. Business Traveller's case seems so excellent that it is hard to understand why nobody has thought of taking IATA to the Court before. The only problem is money.
The magazine needs a lawyer of quality who is prepared to offer his services free. Impro bable though it may seem, I am willing to believe that there may be one such hero in the legal profession who is not obsessed only with the size of the fee.
Now that we are trying to create a fullblooded capitalist society, we should be more rigorous about dealing with its abuses. In America, incompetence or even business misfortune do not go unpunished. Here people have an irritating way of sticking around even after their connections with business disasters have been publicly revealed. Mr Edward du Cann, for example, was re-elected Chairman of the Conservative 1922 Committee almost immediately after it was disclosed that the bank of which he had been chairman had lost £17 million pounds by lending it to a young wheeler-dealer against virtually no security. Recently Private Eye has been investigating the affairs of Staflex International, a firm that manufactured equipment for the clothing industry until it was liquidated last year owing £19.4 million pounds to its shareholders. The chairman of Staflex was Mr Irwin Bellow, who was subsequently ennobled by Mrs Thatcher and made Minister of State in the Department of Environment. We can all be victims of bad luck, but Mr Bellow cannot be exonerated of having shown some lack of judgment. At the annual general meeting of Staflex in September last year, he concluded his Chairman's statement with the words: 'Your board therefore believes that with the continuing support of our bankers the Group can be restored to profitability by the end of 1978 and that the organisation which is being retained can make acceptable profits in 1979 and thereafter'. How wrong can you be.
Alexander Chancellor
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