Books

The sage of Ealing

Ferdinand Mount

The Crisis for Western Political Economy and Other Essays Peter Jay (Deutsch £14.95) Start Again, Britain Charles Villiers (Quartet 11.95)

Democracy Must Work: A Trilateral Agenda for the Decade David Owen, Saburo Okita and Zbigniew Brzezinski (New York University Press $16.50) What's-Wrong books are different from How-To books. For a start, How-To books on, say, gardening or pot- tery or ski-ing may be written by virtually anyone — by the greatest expert in the world, by a journalist who has mugged up the subject from scratch or by someone in between, an enthusiastic amateur who has taken the trouble to consult the profession- als. By contrast, What's-Wrong books are usually written by highly important people who have a little time on their hands. Publishers do not rush to snap up My Solution to the Dollar Crisis by E. J. Thribb. They hire Jay or Kissinger or Owen. It is thus not entirely accurate that 'History to the defeated may say alas but cannot help or pardon'. What history says is 'why don't you write a book about it?'

Thus there is a wrong-end-of-the- telescope feeling about many What's- Wrong books. They are written by those who, if only for the moment, are Out, and so, although they purport to offer prescrip- tions for the future in which they hope to play a part, they cannot help also offering justifications of the past, in which they undoubtedly did; indeed, it is often the justifying which is done with feeling, while the prescribing is likely to be a rather desultory rehash of the policies they them- selves tried. It may be that the policies were, after all, the right ones and they were wrongly discredited by political fashion. The trouble is that if they are to be revived, the case must be argued afresh and applied to new circumstances.

The most poignant example of this is to be found in Democracy Must Work. I do not mean that this is, on the whole, a poignant book; it is by turns turgid, ob- vious and patronising. For example, the conclusion to the chapter entitled 'Coop- eration or Fragmentation: The Political Response' begins: 'Effecting any change in the international system — no matter how slight — will be exceedingly difficult. Short of a benevolent world dictatorship bent on reform, we must work within the bounds of an inefficient, adolescent international sys- tem, with all the pain, crisis and irrational- ity which adolescence dictates'. For this we pay $16.50? You and your benevolent dictatorship, stay away from me.

This book appears under the auspices of the Trilateral Commission, that august body which spans in some mystic sense the United States, Japan and Western Europe — or rather the Social Democrats and their lookalikes in those countries. It is or was the Trilateral Commission's proudest boast to have 'discovered' Jimmy Carter — much in the sense of a Hollywood talent-spotter. And indeed, the three authors mourn the Carter era as the halcyon days when Dr Owen was Foreign Secretary here, Dr Okita ditto in Japan, and Zbig was big in Washington. And it is thus undeniably poignant when we come to their central recommendation: a fiscal stimulus in Japan, Britain and West Germany, in return for a substantial reduction in the US budget deficit. 'The best model for such a set of trade-offs', they say with a mixture of pride and melancholy, 'is probably the summit held in Bonn in 1978'. That was the apogee of 'concerted reflation' — a policy which was said to lack the snags of reflation in one country.

Unfortunately, 'It became fashionable a few years later to decry the effects of the decisions taken at the Bonn summit.' So it did. And are you surprised in view of the results? However, 'In our view this reac- tion is largely misconceived.' Well, so it would be. 'It is true that at the time of the summit, the expansionary forces already at work in the world economy may have been underestimated, and that, with hindsight, it might have been appropriate to apply a slightly more modest stimulus. But . . Do we need to read further? (The excuses they go on to give are, of course, the civil war in Iran and the doubling of the oil price). If the stimulus was not 'appropri- ate', then they were wrong, and they would need to adduce strong and new arguments why they would not be wrong again.

I do not mean to dismiss or undervalue many of the sensible things they say about acid rain and unemployment and so on, but when the central crucial recommendation is so thinly supported, one begins to look askance at the rest of the stuff. Is it really certain, for example, that the reduction of the American deficit and the fall of the dollar 'will give a fillip to other industrial countries'? Lower interest rates would, no doubt, help British firms, but would the damage done to exports by a dearer pound outweigh the lower inflation resulting from cheaper imports? I don't know, and nor do the Trilateralists.

Sir Charles Villiers's vintage period was a little earlier, but his book is essentially of the same character, though covering the domestic scene. This is a brisker Duke-of- Edinburgh sort of effort, vaguely military in style, full of maxims such as 'compete like hell in the market place, but collabo- rate everywhere else' and 'where the rub- ber meets the road is the vital spot'. It is a description of the 'manufacturing disaster'• which has overtaken Britain in the past decade. The causes to which the disaster is attributed are familiar: the class divisions of British society, the upper-class disdain for trade (much of this passage copied wholesale from Martin Wiener's English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit), the lack of communication between' boardroom and shopfloor and between government and industry, the inadequacy of our education and training — in short, much the same criticisms that have been made since Bismarck's day, except that now the most frequent complaint is: 'Why can't we be more like the Japanese?'

What Sir Charles wants, he says, is not a corporate state but an 'organised capital- ism' to transform Britain into a 'develop- ment state'. Hmm, sounds a bit corporate- ish to me. This organising and developing would be masterminded by a dynamic 'E' committee of the Cabinet under the active leadership of the Prime Minister and by a host of new or revived quangos: an Indust- rial Cooperation Agency, a Business De- velopment Board and other such. He quotes, as an example of how these bodies would go about their task, a report he wrote for Mr Heath when Sir Charles was Chairman of the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation in 1970. Alas, he reports laconically, 'Heath was in a non- interventionist Tory mood and he abol- ished the IRC five months later'. That being so, what is to lure an even more non-interventionist Tory government into reviving these bodies? Why would they be better this time, why precisely didn't the politicians like them last time, what would they do that the quangos we already have can't do? You seldom get answers to this sort of question in this sort of book which is why government policy in this country zigzags in the twilight. There is much less hindsight and more foresight in Peter Jay's book. Unlike the owl of Minerva, the Jay of Ealing spreads its wings quite early in the day. True, the book, has its poignant, self-justifying side, but it is more peculiar. The book is als0 something of a publishing con; not only is tt, wretchedly proofread in the traditional manner of Maison Weidenfeld, only about half the book could be said, even loosely, to deal with Political Economy or The, Crisis affecting it. The rest is made up odds and ends about the Fastnet Race, the ghastliness of religion, and a great deal about television news — which ranks about 97th on the sensible man's list of interest- ing subjects. But Mr Jay is interesting, not so much because of the soap opera — The - Rise - and - Fall - of - the - Most - Brilliant - Man - in - Britain — but because he is a genuine Prophet, one who turns out to be two- thirds right but a conspicuous one-third wrong, which paradoxically gives the Prophecy a continuing interest. In this, he IS not unlike his hero Joseph Schumpeter Who, while wrongly prophesying in the 1940s that socialism was likely to replace capitalism in the Western democracies, at the same time gave an analysis of the weaknesses of capitalism which has never been surpassed. Jay rightly, in a Times leader which for once was celebrated for Prescience, identified the Heath boom as the boom that must go bust'. And it is generally assumed to have been Jay who wrote the crucial passage in his father-in- law's 1976 Blackpool speech when Jim Callaghan told the Labour Party that 'you can't spend your way out of a recession'. Jay also, a year earlier, in the principal essay reprinted here, described the West- ern political process as 'a process without any sensitive or automatic regulator' — in Other words a society that must go bust. Trade union monopoly power forced governments to hype up the economy with bigger and bigger doses of inflation. Gov- ernments were faced with 'a choice be- tween politically unacceptable interference in the freedom of the labour market and an Inherently unstable policy of inflation accelerating, if not ad infinitum at least ad Weimar'. True, the political tolerance of unemployment was already higher than had been commonly supposed (this was in 1975), but 'the betting on the sudden suspension of the democratic demand for high employment . . . appears to be more of a gambler's despairing throw than a serious strategy for political economy.' In his introduction, Jay acknowledges that the political analysis 'needs to be modified, if only in its time scale . . . In the event, British economic masochism and political courage proved, at least tem- porarily, both to be greater than the author had expected'. Yet he sticks by his econo- Inle analysis; unemployment did rise into the low millions, as he predicted; and he continues to assert that the system is unsustainable.

From this he derives a belief that at least °Ile term in the equation must be trans- f.ormed. If it is trade unions which destabil- ise the system, then it is trade unions which must be changed into something different; and the only way of so doing is through 'a market economy in which the predominant enterprises are workers' cooperatives'. T.his is the only mechanism that can con- tinue to deliver stable democracy, since °aly thus can the deadly combination of Politicians buying votes and trade unions exacting excessive pay rises be dissolved. There are very considerable practical Objections to imposing Mr Jay's type of Cooperative as the uniform model for all firms employing more than a hundred People; his answers to the questions about

the sources and adequacy of investment are not entirely satisfactory. Yet I am sure he is on the right track.

It seems unlikely that the joint-stock company, itself such a recent creation, will survive into the 21st century unchanged or unchallenged as the model of all large enterprises; the spirit of individualism, the desire for personal ownership and satisfac- tion, the sheer egoism of our age are too strong. Neither the Trilateralists nor Sir Charles give cooperatives much of a look- in; they are too busy leading, managing and communicating to understand the force of what they are up against. It may be that in ten years' time Mr Jay's thesis will look tattered again. It may seem then as if once more he has been too Wykehamical, quacking away unstoppably in W.13, fail- ing to grasp the soft evasions and post- ponements of real life. But I suspect that, a bit further on again, what may now seem idealistic and silly will come to look like the most logical form of industrial organisa- tion, to which all sound men will subscribe.

Mr Jay himself goes in for rather too much of this. His pages are filled with examples of his brilliant wheezes which were derided at the time but later on. . . There are times when he is porten- tous, particularly in discussing television; his 'mission to explain' — mentioned half- a-dozen times in the text — is clearly a mission to bore rigid. Everyone at TV-am seems to bear a little bit of the blame for what went wrong, except somehow 'very top management', which failed only to communicate its 'philosophy'.

Nor are his definitions in 'What is News?' entirely free from flaw. To be eligible for protection under the principle of free speech and a free press, he says the report of an event must be an event in the public domain; 'I have never believed that the private lives and transactions with other consenting parties of any person should be included in the proper agenda of journalism'; no gossip about celebrities, in other words; free speech is not an absolute untrammelled good; it must take account of a right to privacy.

Mr Jay is entirely free to believe this, but other people are free to believe that the private lives of public people are just as relevant to the public weal as, say, their financial affairs. People who think like that may be prurient or priggish or both, but would it be right to prohibit by law their interpretation of the public interest? Would one be entirely comfortable if Britain were to go over to the Soviet tradition of total reticence about the pri- vate lives of the Politburo?

It is hard to suppress the feeling that Mr Jay wants journalists to be a little too respectful of the interests and sensibilities

of important people. In 1967, when himself a journalist, as Economics editor of the Times, he says that he, like others, 'was in the position, as a result of my normal journalistic enquiries, to write a story which would have led to so massive a run on the pound as to have forced a devalua- tion'. That in itself didn't bother him, since he believed that devaluation was long overdue and would be greatly beneficial. Yet he also believed in democracy and didn't believe it was for him to cause a devaluation which the elected government had not yet decided on. 'Therefore' (trum- pets, please) 'I withheld the story; and I have not the slightest doubt that I was right to do so.'

That was responsible journalism. Or was it? If the misplaced reverence for the fixed parity, along with all the secrecy and mumbo-jumbo, was harming the country, then perhaps some journalist somewhere ought to have blown the gaff and cleared the air; after all, if one newspaper report could force devaluation, surely the parity was already unsustainable. Of course, journalists should not pretend that they are really a superior type of Cabinet Minister, but equally they should not imagine that they are supposed to be part of the Civil Service either.

There remains something endearing and absurd about Mr Jay as a public figure; a kind of unguarded innocence. What other businessman would have written of his business strategy for TV-am: 'Of all the things required for the planned business strategy to succeed, three — and only three — were missing or deficient: the ratings, business nerves, and programme manage- ment'? He lacks the politician's sense of how things will sound. Even now, he does not seem to understand quite why it was a gaffe to tell the National Press Club that his father-in-law had compared himself to Moses as they were walking along the White Cliffs of Dover. He regards his mauling by 'sloppy journalists' on that occasion as being as unjust as that received by his own father when he said 'the man in Whitehall knows best', or by Harold Mac- millan when he said 'we have never had it so good', or by Harold Wilson when he said 'the pound in your pocket is not devalued'. All of these became 'notorious for supposedly expressing a sentiment which was in fact the precise opposite of the main point they were making in the context'.

Not so. What happened on all these occasions was that the phrase jumped out of the context and let the cat out of the bag — revealing what the speaker was really up to behind the conventional piety.

But it is this political tin ear, this same Wykehamical innocence which is also Mr Jay's greatest strength, because it leads him to drive on from inescapable facts to embarrassing conclusions, to point out the immoveable nature of problems which other people hope will go away, and to say things which other people would rather Leave unsaid.