The Farce of Financial Planning
It is hard to believe, after the presentation on Tuesday of supple- mentary estimates of Government expenditure reaching the appalling figure of £148,000,000, that sanity remains anywhere in the British economy. The next General Election will arrive soon enough in any case, but it is the solemn truth that If Parliament really grasped the dangers of our economic plight—dangers which both the great parties kept put of the recent election argument— the present Government might have fallen the day after it opened. The British people must be punch-drunk to allow announcements of this sort to slip by without a concerted protest—a protest of the kind that must be listened to even by such irresponsible squanderers of public money as Mr. Aneurin Bevan, whose department demands the fantastic additional sum of £98,730,000 for the National Health Service. How many people realise that this £148,000,000 asked for as a mere afterthought represents more than a shilling of the standard rate of Income Tax, or that the supplementary £98,730,000 demanded for the health service represents an error of over 37 per cent. in the estimate for 1949-50 presented a year ago ? And this is a performance put up by a Government and a party which claims to represent planning. In fact what these supplementary estimates show is that the element of planning once present in British governmental finance has been not increased but reduced. Never before has Treasury control been reduced, to such a farcical plight. How can the public take the pretence of planning seriously when the declared policy of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who said last year that there must be no more supplementary estimates except in very special cases, is set at nought by other Ministers, and above all by the present Minister of Health ? What chance is there of holding down inflationary pressure when the Government itself sets such an example ? Some dam must have broken not only in the State financial system but in the minds of British people to let in this flood of insane spending.
Previous page
