Doom Days
rrLIE Government has never looked more I like an administration moving towards disintegration than it did as Parliament re- assembled this week. It floundered on in the economic swamps, the left wing remorse- lessly publicised Mr. Wilson's troubles in carrying his party with him on foreign and defence policy; the gruelling treadmill of life with a highly unpopular Finance Bill and a scarcely visible majority in the Com- mons was wearily re-started. There are times when a sort of doom overtakes a govern- ment and everything great and small seems to go wrong. The last government knew such times, and the present government is in the thick of one now. It does not matter whether it is a breathtaking triviality like Mr. Wilson's attempt to win the Beatle vote, or a major setback like the miserable trade figures for May : there seems no respite from the knocks. Sterling lurches nearer to 'the brink, the unions continue un- ceremoniously to tear the incomes policy to shreds, the threatening recession in the autumn looms larger, and Labour's. internal conflicts grow more menacing. The sense that the Government has been left helplessly behind by galloping events becomes more insistent.
It is not a rosy scene for anyone to con- template : not even for the most zealous of Tories, who even if their fondest dreams come true will have some hideously difficult times to survive. It is hard even to feel any particle of gratitude to Mr. George Brown for what might have been a welcome touch of comic relief. Mr. Brown, as the tatters of his Statement of Intent are swept away by the storms, is in one sense a figure to stir compassion. He took arms against a sea of troubles, and he has failed to end them. But his melancholy descent into claptrap this week succeeded only in throwing a squib of ridicule among his colleagues. Along with his allegations about a 'sinister con- spiracy' against the Government, a 'vast knocking campaign' by mysterious groups, he revived with new ferocity the hostility to the press which flourished when the last Labour government was on its deathbed, and he talked wildly of a 'counter- revolution being organised against us.'
The fact that Labour took office with an astonishingly fair wind in the City and in Fleet Street will have to be conveniently buried, of course. Earlier Tory squeals that Mr. Wilson had somehow nobbled journalists and the BBC will have to be for- gotten. So will the simple statistic that nearly half of the circulation' of the national newspapers belongs to Labour-orientated journals (and the proportion would be larger if the huge sums spent on promoting the Sun had been more fruitful). Did not the Economist advise its readers to vote Labour last October? And in the place of the record of this asset of often surprising good will will be planted the myth of the con- spirators and the counter-revolution.
In truth Mr. Brown's extravagances amount merely to one more symptom of a government nearing the end of its political tether. It is always the way with politicians to look around resentfully for scapegoats when the going gets tough. The commonest delusion at such times is that the party's policies are being tragically misunderstood, and this leads in the first instance to com- plaints about the 'presentation' of those policies. It was a clear sign that Mr. Mac- millan's administration was in deep trouble when these complaints, coupled with attacks on the press, began to be heard. The next stage is to discover 'sinister con- spirators' lurking in every dark corner : and characteristically Mr. Brown is the first to reach this stage. Will no one take him aside and say, The fault, dear Brother, lies not in our press cuttings, but in our stars? Per- haps Lord Roberis will undertake this service.
This week's , painfully disappointing economic news in fact emphasises all over again that not only have the Government's poliCies failed to heave Britain out of the morass, but that this failure has made the Government's political strategy even more implausible. The shopwindow full of wel- fare attractions which Labour had been urgently hoping to offer in the autumn now looks less likely than ever to materialise. Squeeze and restriction will go on. The trade gap has made nonsense of Mr. Callaghan's recent optimistic bumblings about the economic outlook. Sterling will remain under strain : indeed, it is beginning to seem that the pressure on the pound will continue inexorably until the Prime Minister acknowledges the realities and calls an election. Heaven knows that will not in itself solve the problems, but it may well be an essential prerequisite for any solution. It is the realities of the world's view of Britain's predicament, not some fatuously imagined conspiracy, that will de- cide our future in the storms ahead
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