Up the Garden

By MICHAEL FOOT To make sure I had got it right, I read two sentences in your editorial last week six times. 'The point of the Piccadilly affair,' you wrote, 'is that the London County Council—Socialist-con- trolled—has been responsible for what has hap- pened. And if land were publicly owned, as Mr. Fool would like it to be, would that have made any difference?' Indeed. Is that all Mr. Bernard Levin intended to say in his brilliant article of a few weeks ago? I had supposed that he was also interested in other, if kindred, issues such as the drive for profit, the complexities of land acquisi- tion, the whole pitiful failure to establish respect for architectural standards and the public interest. Do you really mean to tell us that the public ownership of the land of central London would not have vastly eased, at any rate, one problem which intelligent town planners have to solve? Of course, I know that a fatheaded, bureaucratic Council, no less than money-grubbing developers, can still step in and botch the whole business. The cure must be to stop the bumbling bureaucracy as well as the money-grubbing. But please don't tell me that the whole case for the public ownership of the land, so long propounded by a sequence of distinguished town planners, is thus so simply destroyed. You will be telling us next the Sermon on the Mount is a dead duck because a few Popes were found guilty of incest or sodomy. And who ever told you, by the way, that the. LCC is Socialist controlled? Sir lkd Hayward, not William Morris. is the man in charge.

The case for the theory is obvious. if a public authority owns all the land in a city it can plan the roads and the places for the buildings, not to mention the drains and the car parks, without worrying whether each individual plot of land is necessarily going to bring the maximum return in rental per square foot. Moreover, as the amenities are supplied, the appreciation in the value of the sites and properties flows into public coffers in- stead of private pockets. How rich would the LCC be today—and how much better able to resist the temptations of moronic developers—if it had been able to buy up all the land of London, say, in 1920! But of course, I know from my study of Spectator economics that anyone who talks of theories will be dismissed as a Bible-thumping evangelist. So that was why, in my Daily Herald article which you criticise, I described how the public ownership of land in the centre of cities had been applied in practice with considerable success. Plymouth and Coventry could never have started their reconstruction programmes without it. And indeed, if you stop to think, every housing estate in the country is built on publicly-owned land. Some are built well and some are built badly, but if you told any intelligent City engineer or archi- tect that it did not—in your words—make 'any difference' whether the land was publicly or

'If I did not know you to be so trans- parently naive,' Michael Foot says this week of the 'Spectator,' I would damn the lot of you as a bunch of Machiavellis.' This criticism from the Left has been echoed (though not for the same reasons) on the Right; and in an article which will appear next week the Warden of All Souls, John Sparrow, argues that we owe an apology to the authorities for our intemperate criti- cisms. Mr. Sparrow has been objecting, in our correspondence columns, to our inter- pretation of the report of the Privy Council Committee on telephone-tapping; and as the correct interpretation appears to us to be a matter of considerable importance, we asked him to set out his views in detail. Bernard Levin will comment on them in 'A Spectator's Notebook.'

privately owned they would laugh in your face and tell you you could never have actually seen the leading lights on their local Ch#mbers of Com- merce. So please can you or Mr. Gaitskell, or Mr. Roy Jenkins, or Mr. Douglas Jay, or Mr. Anthony Crosland, or any other of the regular writers or inspirers of the Spectator tell us regular readers why a principle that is good and practical and indeed essential on the LtC estates becomes visionary or absurd or irrelevant when applied to Piccadilly Circus or the City or the whole clut- tered, ugly mess in between and round about?

I realise, however, that your view about the public or private ownership of the land not making 'any difference' is all part of the more comprehensive economic philosophy, preached by you for many months, that the public or private ownership of everything else does not make any difference either. I doubt whether this extreme view will be accepted by the shareholders, com- paratively small in number when contrasted with the total population, the value of whose property increased by £6,100,000,000 in the year 1959— just about £1,000,000,000 more than the whole sum spent in the same twelve months by the national exchequer on education, pensions, H- bombs, and every other item of Government expenditure. Let that pass. Merely to mention these indelicate figures is to expose oneself as an old-fashioned class warrior.

What I am really wondering is how many other people agree with your daringly novel thesis—for example, does Mr. Gaitskell, whom you so often hail as a worthy alumnus of your own ultra- modern school of economics? I imagine I under- stand Mr. Bernard Levin's views about public ownership; he thinks (a) (and here he shares the editorial opinion) that anyone who believes the issue matters a tuppenny damn must be a crack- pot; (b) that anyone who tries to apply the idea in practice will bring the economy to a standstill; and (c) that the idea, however advantageous for the nation, has been rejected by the electorate and must, therefore, be abandoned in the interests of the new Radicalism or the higher morality. But does Mr. Gaitskell or, say, Mr. Roy Jenkins agree with all these contradictory propositions-or any of them? If so, they should join M r. Grimond or take over your City Column from Mr. Nicholas Daven- port, who so often disturbs your editorial hallucin- ation that the economic millennium arrived with Mr. Heathcoat Amory (or was it Mr. Peter Thorneycroft?). If, on the contrary, Mr. Gaitskell and Mr. Jenkins still hold to the faith of their fathers that public ownership does make a differ- ence, should they not boldly explain why and where and, in particular, how big is the difference they want to make? The word of praise for their candour they might thereby win from Tribune might compensate for the loss of the weekly huzzas now lavished by the Spectator on these misunder- stood, if not so reluctant, heroes.

As for the issue itself, it really is a bit late in the century to be told, even in your carefree columns, that the whole business does not matter.

Like it or not, one of the most spectacular events of our age is the comparative success of the Com- munist economic systems. Khrushchev tells the Russians quite as plainly as Macmillan tells the English, that they never had it so good. Consider- ing the tumultuous forty years through which the Russians have lived, the achievement by any reckoning is stupendous. Or does the Spectator dissent from that judgment? And does the Spec- tator really ask us to suppose that public owner- ship and the allocation of resources it makes possible are irrelevant to these achievements? Do not tell us, please, as the clinching, spacious argument in reply to the challenge of nationalised sputniks and the Soviet industrial revolution, that British Railways do not always run on time or that they sometimes serve cold soup in the dining cars. Given even the most modest effort by the Government to establish a co-ordinated transport system, British Railways could have been put on their feet with even a small trickle of the funds handed out in subsidies to private industry. And. if you want to be so modern, take a glance at the aircraft industry. There. Duncan Sandys is busy attempting to secure many of the technical advan- tages of nationalisation; calling it something different, of course, and dishing out large dollops of public money to keep the shareholders and the Spectator sweet.

Or why not take a look at the Commonwealth, where the Spectator has campaigned so nobly for the establishment of liberal principles without Worrying your little heads, it seems, about the economic systems which the independent ter- ritories will need to use their newly gained free- dom to establish? Do you not consider it a point of some interest that almost all the figures of sonic substance in the Commonwealth—Nehru, Manley, Eric Williams, Mboya, Nkrumah—call themselves Socialists? Do you suppose they think they can lift their people from poverty without the primary lever of State power, central planning and public ownership? And do you think they Will be able to get the steel and steel products they Peed from a British steel industry which has failed le' expand so pitiably that every time British Industry as a whole has expanded for one or two Consecutive years our domestic industry has had to go short or buy from abroad?

Do you seriously imagine that there is no chal- lenge from the Communist States on this level? And who do you think will win the contest if we stumble on as we are—the Communist States, which are not afraid of full production, or the Western States, which have .still never achieved for any considerable period full production and full employment without inflation? Yes, who will win—the Communist States, who are turning out trained technicians at an unexampled pace, or the Western powers, who contentedly spend more on advertising than education? Or may the argument he further illustrated by appealing to the example °I one of the Spectator's favourites; fortunately for himself and his country, President Nasser does not follow your economic advice. He nationalised his canal and it looks as if he is making a mighty fine business out of it. One day he will get his dam, too: that will be another monument to pdblic enterprise. Just about the same time, I suspect, free enterprise Britain will have squared all the vested interests necessary to lay the first bricks round Piccadilly Circus.

Altogether, the proper case for public owner- 31-I1P is concerned with our prospects as a nation °n a whole series of great questions, many of them 1.nterlinked. Education (yes, the schools are pub- licly owned, you know, and they are shockingly starved): roads (so far as I know there are no toll- &ties on the 41); pensions (only the State's insur-,

ance can insure the whole nation); the rebuilding of our cities (see above); the protection of our countryside; the need for a much larger national investment programme; the need for State fac- tories in the areas of chronic unemployment, a need soon to be vastly enhanced if general dis- armament becomes a reality or if automation is to go full speed ahead; the need for much bigger assistance to backward areas—all these and many more items which could be cited are examples of the kind of topics about which the advocate of public ownership has a highly relevant case to make. Many will oppose that case. Naturally I understand that and 1 should have thought a principal task for Socialists should be to devote their energies to exposing the fallacies of this opposition and to showing—what I believe to be of paramount importance—that only by adopting and adapting the advantages of public ownership can we protect and enhance the political and cul- tural freedoms which are the supreme treasure in our liberal heritage.

But what should a party of the Left do about this situation? That is the great question of debate inside the Labour Party upon .which you and your contributors have offered such Olympian advice. Should the Party of the Left insist, even in the face of tides of opinion apparently flowing against it, on showing as audaciously and imagina-

tively as possible the wide ramifications and poten- tialities of public ownership, hoping thereby to create the public mood in favour of radical change which alone has made possible the election of Left-wing governments in the past? Or should it strive always to appease the prevalent mood, to divorce so far as possible any connection between the reforms it does propose and the central theme of public ownership and communal exertions, to dodge and manamvre, to keep its ears and nose as well as its feet firmly fixed to the ground and its eyes on the Gallup poll; indeed, should the leaders of such a party go farther and all the while behind cuffed hands assure wayward non-Socialist allies like the Spectator that they did not care a fig for the few stray items of public ownership still left in the programme to mollify dunderheads?

This second prescription, I had thought, was the one already applied by the Labour Party in the months and years before October, 1959. It is sad and surprising to see the Spectator hailing this strategy as one so Napoleonic in conception and Wellingtonian in effect that it must infallibly be tried once more.

Sir, if I did not know you, Mr. Levin and your associates to be all so transparently naive, I would damn the lot of you as a bunch of Machiavellis determined to lead my poor leader up the garden once again.