Stepping stone
I disagree with my old friend Enoch Powell when he recommends increasing taxation to close the deficit gap. It is true that extra taxes restoring neutrality to a budget produce deflation, but surely only when the figures are small. When they are overwhelriaing as now — the proportion of public s'et•or. current and capital expenditure to the Gross National Product in 1973 was 53.97 per cent-7,ilapth sides of the budget are per se inflationary.. On the income side fresh direct taxes put up prices indirectly and fresh indirect taxes put up prices directly. On the expenditure side the various government programmes compete all the more purposefully with the programmes of private industry the larger they are, and this too, through shortages of manpower and materials, leads to higher prices. In 1984, of course, you reach the Stalinesque stage when the sheer weight of government collapses the private sector entirely and crushes all competition. But by that time Big Brother is telling you you are free when you know you are in chains.
I hate to see Mr Powell, of all people, putting down a stepping stone to this nightmare era.
Apprentices' havoc
There is not a single aspect of Britain's affairs that is not faulted and hamstrung by civil servants. Since the war poor Britannia has been caught up in a spider's web of international bureaucracy. In the United Nations there are 400 — or is it 40,000? — Lilliputians whom, like Gulliver, we can only throw off once in a while by the use of the veto. In NATO there are several score of interlocking generals producing reams of paper tying honest British Tommies to some corner of a foreign field that never will be England. In Brussels the civil servants are paragons of industry, gnomes would be a better word, veritable Nibelungen, delving and shovelling away at the foundations of this rocky island of ours, this jewel set in a silver sea, and carting it into a market much too common for us to have anything to do with.
Democracy has seen to it that all governments enlarge the number of bureaucrats and charge them with ever-increasing duties. Frankenstein created the monster but, not unnaturally, people are more frightened of the monster than of Frankenstein who, if I remember rightly, was a polished Ruritanian count who spoke several languages. Democracy is the best government we have, as Lord Butler might say, albeit that E. M. Forster could only raise two cheers for it. He left the third cheer out, I am quite sure, because of the awfulness of its progeny. Democracy is quite a nice old sorcerer. It is the apprentices who wreak-the havoc. I will resume my attack on them next week.
Getting nowhere
None of the Budget resolutions was opposed by the Tories when the Chancellor sat down. Mr Heath said, "Once again we have a Labour Government which is running very true to form. We see all the tax increases to which we are accustomed." Presumably this means that if Mr Heath had not called the election the Budget pills might have been less bitter. Which gets us nowhere. But there is a dictionary derivation of the word 'accustom' as meaning "go alongside, wear the same dress." This, taken with the lack of lobby opposition to the dreadful resolutions as they succeeded • each other, might indicate that Tories and socialists are now barely distinguishable and that a coalition is intended ultimately, and on Mr Healey's terms. ,"Sic transit gloria Britanniae."
Victor Montagu
Previous page
