CITY AND SUBURBAN
In which Ken and Eddie hunt woozles and go round and round in circles
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Jokier than Middlemarch and. more authentic than The Buccaneers — I can reveal that City and Suburban Classics are to film the works of A. A. Milne. An all- star cast features Eddie George, powerfully cast in the lead role as Winnie the Pooh, with Kenneth Clarke as Piglet. The first episode, 'In which Pooh and Piglet go hunt- ing and nearly catch a Woozle', begins with Pooh walking round and round in circles in the snow. Piglet asks what he is doing. `Tracking something,' says Pooh. 'Tracking what?' That's just what I ask myself. I shall have to wait till I catch up with it. What do you see there?' Paw marks . . . Oh, Pooh, do you think it's a woozle?' It may be,' says Pooh. 'Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. The great thing is to get in front of it. Let's put Bank rate up. That's what keeps woozles away.' So he goes on walking round, until he notices two sets of tracks, infers the presence of an extra woozle, and puts Bank rate up again. Then Piglet joins him on the trail, and round they go, and Pooh cries: 'Look! A third animal has joined the other two!' It may be, he says, two woo- zles and a wizzle or two wi77les and a woozle, but either way, he knows what to do about it. Piglet says that this is better than the old days, when they used to go faster and slower instead of round and round, and Pooh says that a stitch in time saves nine. It is worrying, all the same, when the tracks disclose anoth- er woozle, or as it may be wizzle. Can the woozles be catching Pooh up, after all? Can there be some other, simpler explanation? How high will Bank rate go before we find out? Next week: Pooh digs a Heffalump trap and falls in.
In Africa, honesty . . .
SOMETHING NEW out of Africa: a good example. Two plungers combine to keep Africa south of the Sahara at the bottom of the sink of poverty. One is debt and one is corruption. Money pours in — one tenth of the total output of goods and services is represented by aid — and pours out again through the plug hole, into numbered accounts far away in Switzerland or the West Indies. As Lord Bauer taught us, aid is the transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. Every so often well-wishers come up with well-meaning plans for debt relief, such as getting the International Monetary Fund to pop some of its gold in a good cause. The catch is that relief for the world's most hopeless debtors is a boost to the world's most hopeless governments, too. Karl Ziegler of the Centre for Accountability and Debt Relief wants to pull the two plungers out together. He has been arguing (as I have been saying) that the right condition for help is a promise of honest and open government. Now, in Uganda, his idea is catching on.
. . is the right policy
UGANDA IS just the place to start. Its once-prosperous economy — the pearl of Africa, as Churchill called it — was pillaged by a succession of rulers of whom Idi Amin was only the greediest and most appalling. It has been left owing $1,418 million to the World Bank group. That debt has swollen by $463 million in four years as compound interest piles up. It represents almost half of Uganda's public overseas debt. There can be no realistic chance of its being repaid or even serviced. Uganda's luck has now turned for long enough to give it a presi- dent, Yaweri Musaveni, who can see this and is looking for a new way out. At Westminster last year he promised an all-party group that he stood for good governance and account- ability. He is now ready to make the same promise to the World Bank and to invite it to see for itself. He will, as I understand it, offer to subject the public finances to rigorous external auditing for two decades. Over that time the debt to the World Bank would be first amortised and ultimately cancelled. If a successor government reneged on it, all bets would be off. I hope his good example spreads. Poor Africa needs it.
Off the rails
I COULD SEE what was wrong with the railways' finances when I met their missing customer. She was a director who, based in London, commuted to Warrington. Using the West Coast main line, I asked her? Not a bit of it — driving up and down to get the business mileage for her car. That should send the men in white coats hurrying round to the Treasury, which must be suffering from fiscal dementia as well as rising damp. The Chancellor now hopes to sell the main line itself, as an asset in Railtrack. Then he hopes to sell a franchise to run trains on it. Then he hopes to raise private sector finance to improve it. Then he gives a first- class customer a tax incentive not to use its fast and comfortable services but to wear out the Ml and M6 by slogging up and down them in the sleet. Barking.
It's daft, says Taft
WHAT IS wrong with the International Monetary Fund? Senator Taft could have told you. The US would put all the valuable money in and pour it down a rat-hole. The Guaranty Trust warned that this fund would enable nations to buy merchandise without being able to pay for it. The American Bankers Association complained that the IMF would determine the destination, time and use of its members' money. A Senator from Utah defied any of his colleagues to go downtown and get his shoes shined with for- eign bank-notes. These prophecies attended the IMF's birth 50 years ago, but it has lived to pour $17 billion down Mexico. Taft may have known something.
Feather bedding
WHEN THE Bank of England first pub- lished its Quarterly Bulletin, Roger Opie likened its impact to that of a feather falling lightly upon a blancmange. Personal- ly, I look forward to it, especially the pretty graphs. It is just a coincidence that at seven of the Bank's last eight briefings on its Bul- letin, I have fallen into a refreshing sleep. They are traditionally convened in an air- less upper room within that great stone citadel, immediately after lunch. I close my eyes, to concentrate. I am told that I stop short of snoring. Now the Bank has hit back, switching this week's briefing to the unheard-of hour of 9.30 in the morning. I take this as a test of my facility for sleeping after breakfast.
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