POLITICS
When selling power seems to lack selling power
NOEL MALCOLM
ust as The Electrification of the Soviet Union must be one of the most un- electrifying titles ever given to an opera, so 'The Privatisation of the Electricity Supply Industry' is somehow lacking in allure as the title of a debate. It certainly did not pull in the crowds on Monday evening, when by eight o'clock there were barely a dozen MPs on each side of the House willing to battle it out over Gigawatt hours, generator merit orders and bulk supply tariffs.
That is part of the problem. At least with coal or steel you can see the end product when they finally load it onto the lorry. In the electricity industry the stuff they pro- duce is invisible, and the CEGB seems on paper to consist of nothing but a fearsome- ly complex industrial structure, like one of those unidentifiable fish in foreign res- taurants which turn out to consist entirely of bones. No wonder that the small rump of Labour MPs who stayed to discuss the issue on Monday was made up mainly of North Britons who wanted to talk about the Scottish coal industry instead. There at least was a meal you could get your knife and fork into.
As the argument over electricity prog- resses, Labour seems to be suffering from a tactical disadvantage which is turning into a strategic one. The whole subject is so technical that the best line of attack is apparently to challenge the industrial and technological competence of the Govern- ment's plans. Opposition MPs can feel that they already have a powerful ally here in the form of Walter Marshall, the CEGB chairman, whose resistance to Mr Parkin- son's plans up till now must be measured in Giga-ohms. But Lord Marshall's bottom- line argument was not about whether to privatise the industry, but about how it should be done. And here the strategic difficulty opens up. Having to argue about technicalities, you start by suffering from the minor disadvantage of dullness; but you end by tacitly conceding that the real debate is between two different views of how to privatise. While you think you are still fighting the war, you are in fact supporting one side of a dispute among your enemies over how to distribute the spoils of victory.
More than once in this debate, and in the response to Mr Parkinson's initial state- ment on electricity two weeks ago, Labour gave the impression that it was fighting on the Government's own ground. John Pre- scott, the shadow Energy Secretary, was indeed in fighting form — the sort of form that would make you unwilling to meet him on a dark night, or even in a fairly well lit tea-room. But his blows were struck in all directions, and some of the directions were diametrically opposite to each other. Although his main argument was that the industry should remain a unified public monopoly, he complained at one point that the Government's plans gave too little scope to competition: 'it is a question of monopolies, oligopolies and regulated con- trol and has absolutely nothing to do with competition.' And on the privileged status of nuclear power he objected: 'This is intervention by the Government, which is totally inconsistent.' It was left, of course, to Mr Tebbit to welcome what he chose to call 'the announcement that the Labour party is now committed to consumerism and competition in the energy industry'.
In retrospect, the debate over privatising electricity will be seen not as a turning point but as a sign, a confirmation, of the fact that attitudes have already turned. The old belief that there was something natural and inevitable about the growth of public ownership (`Yesterday,' said Mr Dalton, 'it was coal; today it is cables. The Socialist advance, therefore, continues') has been replaced by an equal and opposite assump- tion. And the extent of this change is reflected in the sheer scale of the Govern- ment's confidence as it launches, less than six months after the biggest stock market crash in history, plans for a flotation which will be larger than all previous flotations put together.
So the interesting thing about these recent debates is not the half-hearted response on the Labour benches: It is the half-heartedness of the Tory back- benchers, whose distinctly tepid support has turned Mr Parkinson's moment of triumph into a rather routine-sounding piece of Government business. There are various reasons for this, some of them more tinged with envy and resentment than others. Cecil Parkinson is far better at handling the press, the public and the Prime Minister — PR and PM — than at !What do you want to be when you grow up?' handling his own party. (Certainly his dealings with the press could not be faulted when his victory over Lord Marshall was announced two weeks ago: paper after paper explained in loving detail his mastery of complex manoeuvres such as inviting people to lunch, asking other people what Lord Marshall had said to them, and telephoning the Prime Minister.) And the rehabilitation of Mr Parkinson has, it must be said, happened with enviable speed. As one Conservative agent told me, 'There are still little old ladies in my constituency who say they will never vote Tory again while that man is in the Government.'
But the real Conservative gut-reaction to these proposals was voiced, not for the first time, by Mr Eric Heifer. 'As, at the moment, people are getting a good deal, why do we need to change?' The system we enjoy at present does not obviously suffer from gross inefficiency or gross gov- ernmental interference — the two usual bugbears of nationalised industries. It pro- duces power which is cheap by world standards, and it qualifies as one of the handful of national institutions in which we can still take national pride.
There remains a sort Of folk memory in the Tory Party which hankers back to the earlier of this century's two phases of nationalisation. The later phase, under Attlee, preached the economic advantages of central planning: that argument has certainly been lost. But the earlier phase of nationalisation, which happened between the wars, was based not on economics but on an ethic of public service, impartiality, and responsibility. One example of a pub- lic corporation set up by a Conservative government during this period was the BBC. And another example was the Cen- tral Electricity Board, which was given control over generation and transmission. (The nationalising of electricity under Attlee merely completed the system, by including local distribution.) Many Conservatives feel inarticulate but deep-rooted misgivings over the privatisa- tion of electricity, just as English children feel surprise on their first encounter with Waddington's Monopoly, when they dis- cover that you can buy public utilities and railway stations as well as houses. The price of the 'electric company', I seem to remember, was £150. When the figure has gone up to at least £21 billion, however, you need better reasons than sentiment for refusing to sell.
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