ANOTHER VOICE
Put up the interest rates, you pasty-faced coward
AUBERON WAUGH
In the event of anything terrible happen- ing to nice Mr Major, I have usually thought of Kenneth Clarke as being the least objectionable successor. He seems to be one of the very few Conservative front- runners with any noticeably human charac- teristics. So many are robots, or clones, or obvious crooks. But Clarke seems to have a sense of humour, to enjoy at any rate some of the good things of life.
At this time of year, when we read of Cabinet ministers leaving these shores for a well-deserved holiday in foreign parts, his is one of the few names whose absence does not produce an immediate lifting of the spirits. This may be because there is serious work for Mr Clarke to do which we are still waiting for him to tackle.
In the first place, before he can even think of reducing taxes he must sack at least 1.5 million of our 5.2 million public employees. At present nearly every penny the Government raises has to be spent on its own wages. What few services it supplies — unwanted inspections of our homes by local government sanitary officers, etc have to be paid for by the victim as part of the new prevention gang ethos. This appalling dead weight of public sector employment not only adds to the misery of those who have to suffer its officious minis- trations. It also acts as a perpetual drag on the national economy. But, unfortunately, Mr Clarke lacks the courage to sack 1.5 million public employees. He can play with the problem, merging a few more ancient regiments or nibbling at the grotesque pyramid of over-manning which is the National Health Service, but when it comes to the heart of the problem, closing down the departments of Agriculture, Education and Health, sacking three-quarters of all local government inspectors, Mr Clarke is not up to it. He can only go on raising taxes and borrowing more money.
This is a pity, because during his brief spell at the Home Office he seemed to have more courage than most, setting up the Sheehy enquiry into the police (whose recommendations Mr Howard funked) and encouraging the excellent - work done by Judge Tumin as Chief Inspector of Prisons.
It would be a sad thing if we came to identify cowardice as the chief characteris- tic of nice Mr Major's Government. People can describe it as an amiable openness to other people's opinions, and in this guise it might explain the extraordinary distortions of Messrs Major and Hurd on Europe. But old-fashioned cowardice is a simpler expla- nation, and nothing else will explain Michael Howard's extraordinary decision, supported, we must imagine, by the rest of the Cabinet, to deport two middle-aged, dotty Englishwomen, one an aromathera- pist, the other an accountant, to face trial in the United States for an alleged plot to kill Mr Charles Turner, a US state attor- ney, nine years ago when they were mem- bers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Cult in Oregon.
No hair of Mr Turner's head was ever harmed, and evidence for the existence of such a 'plot' comes from the excitable chat- ter of the Rajneeshis. The only evidence to link Susan Hagan and Sally Croft to such a plot was produced some time after they had left America by four members of the Bhag- wan's team who produced their accusations as part of a plea bargain with the prosecu- tors.
One may doubt whether such evidence would be admissible in this country. Cer- tainly, it would be treated with the greatest possible caution. If the behaviour of the other Rajneeshis seems questionable in tes- tifying — possibly falsely — against their former colleagues in this way, we must remember that Hagan and Croft were out of the country and out of the jurisdiction of the United States, where charges of this sort carry a 20-year sentence. They had not reckoned on the peculiarly horrible quali- ties of our own Mr Howard.
Cowardice is only one possible explana- tion for Mr Howard's contemptible deci- sion to kow-tow to these Oregon rednecks. He also hopes to expatriate suspected IRA terrorists (although seldom, I would guess, from Oregon), and the Foreign Office is tremendously nervous of upsetting the Americans for fear they will take away our permanent seat on the Security Council, which serves no useful purpose. I suspect a further explanation may lie in some gut reaction to the idea of Bhagwan's followers from our home-grown Oregon redneck.
But there is one necessary measure whose further delay will certainly lose the Conservatives the next election, and the only reason Mr Clarke fails to implement it now is cowardice. It is a commonplace to say that under Mr Major the Conservatives have lost their support in the middle class- es, but that does not do justice to the expressions of acute dislike you hear from those quarters. The reason for this is sel- dom mentioned because Englishmen do not like to talk about their savings, but savers outnumber borrowers in this country by a factor of 7:1, and it is a fact that all Mr Clarke's pathetic efforts to bring about an economic revival in this country have been at the expense of savers. The man or woman with £60,000 put away could rea- sonably hope for a net income of £80 a week. Now he will be lucky to get a net income of £40 a week. That explains the hatred in which this Government is held, and it explains why there is scarcely a safe seat left in the south of England.
Mr Clarke's reluctance to raise interest rates by two points — or better still three and a half points — is not primarily to be explained by fears that such a measure will slow down our rate of economic recovery. Raising taxes has a much more immediate effect in that direction. The real reason, I suspect, is that he is terrified of Mr Mur- doch, who has made it abundantly plain that low interest rates are the prime policy objective of his entire organisation.
The reason for this is not hard to see. Although people loosely talk of Murdoch's satellite and other projects as being in prof- it, the truth of the matter is that any nomi- nal profit immediately goes to service his gigantic loans. I have lost track of whether these loans now stand at £3 billion or £6 billion, but it does not need a mathematical genius to see that if interest rates in this country are raised by 2-3'/2 points, soon fol- lowed by interest rates in Europe and USA, Murdoch will be wiped off the face of the earth.
Any British Chancellor who raises inter- est rates will be venomously attacked by the entire Murdoch press. Any Chancellor who fails to raise them — and raise them very soon — will lose the next election. Has this crippling new spirit of cowardice also over- come Mr Clarke?
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