In the City
The promised land
Nicholas Davenport
Some hilarity was roused when Ambassador Peter Jay was filmed saying: 'On the White Cliffs of Dover Mr Callaghan told me he saw his role as that of Moses leading the people of Britain out of the desert into the Promised Land'. But that is exactly — and not jokingly — as I see him. You will remember that Moses had a lot of trouble trying to make his people stop worshipping false gods. Moses Callaghan has precisely the same problem. Some of his people — the Wilder sort — are now worshipping the false Eastern God of Communism ('nationalising all the means of production, distribution and exchange' etc) although the Lord God told them in 1960 in a New Statement of Aims engraved on the tablets of the Party's Rule Book that they must only worship the Mixed Economy. Moreover, they prostrate themselves before the Golden Calf of Egalitarianism although the Lord God has told them that every worker is born unequal in a union and conscious of his differential. They even get so drunk with union power that they fight among themselves in the v!iorship of this Golden Calf instead of getting on with the job of making motor cars. No wonder Moses Callaghan is very angry with them and has told them bluntly that they must stop worshipping false gods, stop whoring after the false God of the Offshore Island and lift up their eyes to the EEC. It is my fervent hope that Moses Callaghan, supported by Aaron Healey, will come down from the mountain this week and address the congregation at Brighton in the following non-biblical terms. Children, I have brought you at last into the promised land flowing with oil and gas. You have done nothing to deserve it — it was the act of a benign God who decreed ,a financial recovery without an economic recovery — but because you were obedient over the past two years in not taking more of the manna that was offered to you in the incomes policy you will now be given some relief from taxation. This [can promise you because government receipts from North Sea oil, which will be only £320 million this year, will go on doubling each year until they wipe out the deficit on the government spending account. In fact, by 1980-81 the borrowing requirement will be eliminated. Because Aaron Healey over-estimated the borrowing requirement this year I need not wait for the elimination of the budget deficit but can ask him to give you a tax relief of some l to billion in the coming financial year. As I expect you to work harder when you have more incentive to do so. God has told me not to regard this tax relief as inflationary but reflationary.
I must, however, warn you that if you go chasing after 20 per cent wage claims in addition to these tax reliefs you will only cause inflation to mount and unemployment to worsen. This is a dangerous period for our export trade. A stronger pound — and the approaching surplus on the balance of payments must make for a much stronger pound — will cause our exporters to lose the competitive boost they have been getting from the exchanges. You may then find exports falling (there is still a world recession), unemployment mounting and the economy stagnating. The Dutch have found themselves exactly in this position since their sea gas brought them a payments surplus, and a strong currency. I beg you then, to use this miraculous time when North Sea oil and gas will be giving us a surplus on our balance of payments and a surplus on our budget account to do some real constructive thinking. What lies behind our island sickness? Why is it that it does not pay businessmen to invest and employ you more? Because you are simply not interested in making a profit out of new investment, because your productivity record is only 50 per cent of what your comrades in Europe achieve. So why not think out a new deal? If you do not want to smash up our society — and I am sure the majority of you don't want revolution and chaos— then you should reassure the private sector in our mixed economy that you will join in making new investment pay, that is, you will allow managements to decide the manning of the machines. This has actually been done in Fleet Street — at the Daily Express — thanks to Victor Mathews of Trafalgar and if it can be negotiated there it can be negotiated anywhere.
But you may decide that before you allow managements to manage you will require a share in the profits or a slice of the equity. This will have my and God's blessing. As no one has tried to work out the ingenious scheme propounded by Davenport in the Spectator for a public unit trust, which would allow all workers to share in the profits of national economic growth (although Ambassador Jay promised to look into it before he left the White Cliffs of Dover and confessed that it might be a better scheme than his own workers' cooperatives), I have had to fall back on the profit-sharing schemes in individual companies proposed by the Liberal Party, which is a stopgap. I have therefore agreed with St David Steel to insert his profit-sharing proposal as the next step towards industrial democracy in the Queen's Speech on the opening of Parliament. Those of you who are sane enough to reject the collectivist state, will take up this profit-sharing scheme as our last hope of survival as a great industrial nation.
For heaven's sake drop your ridiculous plan for any further attack on wealth. It is due to the concentration of wealth in astute managerial hands that we have survived so far. These wealth managers have so cleverly sold their services abroad and have so wisely invested abroad that the 'invisible' income from their operations makes good the short-flow of 'visible' earnings from the sale of your manufactured goods abroad. You workers on your own could not possibly make this nation a viable economy in world trade. You would fall so deeply into the red that you would have to go crawling to Soviet Russia, like Cuba, for slices of Brezhnev's bread which you will find very ndigestible.
Now that I have brought you to the promised land flowing with oil and gas I am not going to hand it over to a bunch of crackpots. If you do not forsake your false gods I will write my own manifesto and appeal to God and the country_ It will be you bolsheviks who will find yourselves in the wilderness. Standing for a mixed economy and for a profit-sharing partnership between capital and labour — pending the workers' slice of the national equity in Davenport's public unit trust — I believe that I would be returned with a huge majority. If you read the Bible you will find that the followers Of Moses had quite a long innings after getting to the Promised Land.
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