Welcome back !
Sir: It is nice to be missed by Mr Rodds, and, perhaps, by other readers too. And though my absence from your columns may seem lengthy to them, it would have been shorter had you seen fit to publish one or two highly controversial letters I sent in towards the end of 1971. As it is, having just caught up with reading past copies of The Spectator unavailable to me during a January cruise to the West Indies on a Russian liner, I am flattered to find myself referred to in your columns in even more complimentary terms than those used by Mr Roddy about your racing tipster Juliette. Apparently he is prepared to see her dismissed as long as I take over some undefined duty during the coming Flat season!
I hasten to assure your correspondent that the sagacity he attributes to me is only exercised, in betting terms, when I lay out money on election results. For a start, therefore, after carefully reviewing the present chaotic political scene, and after properly discounting all the nonsense being written by commentators about Labour's standing in the country, I advise him to get the best odds he can in placing big bets on sweeping nation-wide Labour gains in this spring's local elections. I would further counsel him to plunge heavily on a big Labour general election victory which may be much nearer than many now think.
The Heath government, which is the most reactionary, pigheaded and unimaginative regime of my lifetime, has mishandled every issue inherited, or promoted by itself to accord with Tory party dogma. So grave is the near revolutionary hostility it is currently evoking, that one begins to doubt whether it can really weather the storm now engulfing it. Appeasement of the white racialist regimes in Africa involving Britain's humiliation at the UN, powerless to deal with an unemployment total of much more than the quoted million and with the ever-rocketing prices about both of which promised " at a stroke " action ' conned ' enough electors into voting Tory in 1970, forcing a reluctant and unconsulted country into the Common Market, its economic policy a mass of contradictions — all this bespeaks lamentable failure. This list could be widely extended, of course, to cover the Rolls-Royce, UCS and ' Milk-Snatcher ' disgraces. Pathetic stories mouthed by second-rate and ineffective Tory Ministers about "a boom around the corner" look as silly as their gross mishandling of the miners' strike. No foresight, and a clear reluctance to recognise that as long as the Government is bent on making the rich richer and the poor poorer, the non-co-operation of the country's organised wealthcreators is inevitable, is a recipe for disaster.
Labour had created conditions for a great leap forward in economic growth and for inculcating the spread of fair dealing and fairmindedness in the community. As things are, the task of re-creating this situation will be immense. Radical, drastic and dramatic measures will be needed if a disillusioned electorate is to re-engage itself with the Westminster scene. Chief, perhaps, among them, must be the early introduction of a substantial wealth tax which will he big enough to redress the existing and increasing unfairness which the Heath government surports, and which deeply insults all organised workers. I have in mind that 80 per cent of the rational wealth is still in the hands of a mere 10 per cent of our people. Many other steps will he needed to activate and unify young and old in a well-organised campaign to promote human betterment on 'an each for all and all for each basis.' It remains as true as when I first joined it forty-five years ago that the Labour party, with all its defects, is the only readyto-hand instrument in this country to secure political and social progress for all.
T. C. Sheffington-Lodge 5 Powis Grove, Brighton
Previous page
