MR. It H. S. CROSSMAN and what the Minister of
Pensions so unkindly called his `skiffle group of professors' had been riding very high after their resounding triumph at the Labour Party Confer- ence. It must have been galling to read Mr. Boyd- Carpenter's almost casual announcement at his own party conference that they had made a lot of howlers. It cannot be pleasant to be told that you are a little matter of £2,750 million out in one of your most important calculations (the estimated surplus after ten years); but what must have hurt most was the fact that several of the miscalculations •were not matters of abstruse mathematics but matters of common sense, such as taking into account the cost of administering the scheme or noticing that revenue from North- ern Ireland might possibly entail expenditure there. These are mistakes which Mr. Crossman's weak reply in The Times, complaining that the Minister never published the relevant informa- tion, cannot really deal with. And for Mr. Cross- man to suggest that Mr. Boyd-Carpenter was rather a cad calling Professor Titmuss and Co. a skiffle group since the Government also consults them sometimes did not help very much either. Obviously they were the best people available; the question is did they really get it all wrong?
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