POLITICAL COMMENTARY
The play's the thing
PETER PATERSON
Not very long ago it was fashionable to deride the annual April Budget as a total irrelevance, even a handicap to the proper running of the economy. That was around the time that Chancellors of the Ex- chequer—Conservative Chancellors, if I re- member correctly—started to introduce crisis, or emergency, or mini Budgets out of season. Annual Budgets, it was then con- veniently argued, bore no relation to the actual time-focus of the economy, detracted from the serious business of the Treasury and the Bank, depressed the people by vary- ing—upwards—the price of staples like cigarettes and, worst of all, drowned serious discussion of the country's true economic prospects by concentrating all minds on the Chancellor's proposals concerning the ex, cise duties on beer, wines and spirits.
If you look at the Budget purely in terms of economic argument, the critics may be right, and a glance at the newspaper head- lines after successive Budgets confirms that making this an annual fixture, like the Boat Race or the Grand National, promotes the trivialisation of serious issues. Chancellors who fail to impose heavier taxes on the in dulgences of their fellow citizens tend to be dismissed as dull, plodding fellows, and an unhealthy streak of masochism has crept into the relationship between government and governed: Stafford Cripps, the Daily Express's 'Iron Chancellor', remains, accord- ing to Paterson's Instant Poll, the only saintly political figure in post-war British politics. The mistake, however, is to regard the Budget as purely an economic occasion. No one would seriously argue that next Tues- day's exercise, for example, is an irrelevance, whatever impact it has either on the drink- ing classes or on the academic economists.
This is simply because events—past and future—have restored the Budget to where it belongs at the very centre of the political life of a government. At a time like this, what distinguishes one Chancellor from another is what he makes of the oppor, tunity to deliver a set-piece message to the nation on a date early in each April—an opportunity available to no other minister.
Of the Chancellors I have heard, only two, Harold Macmillan and Roy Jenkins, have fully exploited the opportunity that fate has given them—and the best test, always, of how well a Chancellor is doing on Budget day is to study the face of the Prime Minister sitting on the front bench behind him. Mr Heathcoat Amory I have no recollection of, nor Mr Thomeycroft, though both, no doubt, had their fans among the economists. Loyal and steadfast Mr Selwyn Lloyd didn't, seem to be aware that any opportunity existed. R. A. Butler seemed only too well aware, and Mr Reginald Maudling (dimly recalled in my mind's eye from the days when people worried whether Labour could even pro-, duce a convincing Chancellor), seems to have spent hours perspiring like a City financier at a bankruptcy hearing.
The great Budget secret, then, is not how much is going on a packet of fags, but with what style and panache the Chancel-, lot exploits his day of glory. Chancel- lors who deliver a Treasury brief without breathing life into the statistics never give Prime Ministers sleepless nights, nor do they become Prime Ministers themselves.
Harold Wilson, we have been assured, never has sleepless nights, but during those moments between sleeping and waking when the day's events and worries cross the mind, he is surely haunted by the de-tribalised Jenkins voice, its ethnic origins betrayed by ,references to the economic `si-tooation', as he outlines this year's Budget strategy, Impossible, surely, not to recall how Mr Jenkins's mannered performances seem in variably to be followed by animated discus- sions about the identity of Labour's next leader? Or to ignore the awful truth that the timing of the general election, and even Labour's prospect of winning, depend heavily on that Budget speech.
Less distinguished members of the par- liamentary Labour party not privy to Mr Jenkins's little secrets. also have their anx- ieties over his intentions—to say nothing, as yet, of Mr Heath and his hordes. There has been a remarkable conversion among Labour MPS in recent months to the Con- servative doctrine that people are overtaxed, and that freedom demands that the social wage shall not leave too little in the wallet, In other, cruder, words, they want the Chan, cellor to reduce income tax.
Certainly their consciences are still stirred by the claims of groups like the Child Poverty Action campaign, poignant reports like Dr Joy Holloway's recent study of the plight of vagrants, and figures on tbe startlingly high number of wage-earnei:: who actually receive less by working than they would by going on the Welfare. Bui Labour MPS have developed an almost Lenin-like streak of political ruthlessness as they calculate the opinion poll swings and roundabouts against the size of '.`neir own majorities: 'The b w.-6" to-deal with these agonising problem t they say, 'is to make sure Labour is re-elected.' It might, of course, be difficult for a harassed social worker to see the connection between a humane policy towards the stragglers of the affluent society and the urgent need to relieve the burden of income tax on the overtime earnings of engineering workers in the Mid- lands—particularly if they take recent wage movements into account. But the connection is clear enough to a sufficiently large seg- ment of the Labour back benches for Mr Jenkins to feel their hot breath on his back next Tuesday.
Which brings us to the delicious plight now facing the Chancellor. That he has money to distribute, no expert doubts, though some think he ought not to. The range seems to be between £200 and £300 mil- lion—a sum that may be disbursed out of, as it were, the nation's profits, a reward for the hard slogging days promised us at the time of (and even before, as I remember) devaluation. We now have our longed-for surplus, and Mr Jenkins is in the fortunate positkin of having been at the Treasury' when it arrived. He is entitled to crow about it, and surely will: since Tom Paine's splen- didly robust criticism of Pitt, who appar- ently began the whole wretched thing, that he 'sometimes amused himself by showing what he called a balance of trade from the custom-house books' is no longer fashion- able. Mr Jenkins will flourish the custom-.
house books until the pages fall out. But will he come to the aid of the party by dispensing an electioneering Budget (a title normally conferred by the Opposition)?
With that sick feeling of apprehension which must now be gripping a good many Tory stomachs, Mr Maurice Green, editor of the Daily Telegraph, doesn't doubt it for a moment. Mr Jenkins, he observed re- cently, was a politician long before he be- caine Chancellor, 'and as far as is known is not prone to any political death wish.' There are plenty of people on the Chancellor's own side, however, who are not nearly so certain as Mr Green. If politicians divide themselves into Gentlemen. and Players, Mr Jenkins must be counted a Gentleman, and there are Labour NIPS who believe that he would live up to that tradition by watching the Government lose the election with good grace and fine sportsmanship, par- ticularly if winning depended on his stray- ing from self-imposed and impossible stan- dards of integrity. Their nightmare, ob- viously, is a Budget speech exhorting the nation to more deeds of endurance without giving very much away to anyone, a pro- spect which I believe may be put down entirely to pre-election neurosis.
That anyone should think such a thing, even in a time of understandable stress, marks Mr Jenkins out as a Chancellor of more than usual interest. Certainly his pre- decessor, Mr Jim Callaghan, was never such an enigma to his colleagues. Even at the Home Office he can be relied upon, what with the confiscation of skinhead haber- dashery and other law and order measures, to work his heart out for a Wilson victory.
Precisely how much heart Mr Jenkins puts into this objective in what should, by normal rules, be the last Budget of this administration we shall all know by early on Tuesday evening. Mr lain Macleod, the Shadow Chancellor, could also be playing his role for the last time. It would be sur- prising if he were not spending some time this weekend, like a veteran theatre critic about to attend a play he knows all too well, starring an actor he has his knife into, arming himself with a battery of critical phrases with which to demolish the final Jenkins Budget. For each of them, it's not the technicalities like the borrowing require- ment, but the play's the thing,
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