Spending and saving
THE GREAT domed head of Robert Culpin glows with pure intellect. 'Real ones, Chancellor?' he asks. 'Or cuts in the projections? As you know, the Chief Secre- tary' — Jonathan Aitken wakes up and grins — 'is conducting a series of extensive bilaterals with the spending departments. And we could fiddle the contingency reserve again. And we've got a nice low inflation figure for upgrading benefits. But somehow the cost . . ."Awful. I know. Let's rub out a lot of dotted lines on the map and say we're economising on the road pro- gramme. And put anything else down to private finance. That all right, Steve?' Yes,' says Stephen Robson, whose speciality this is, tut we really ought to start doing some- thing. Anything. Alastair Morton's getting restless.' He's always restless. Savings, now. When I was a lad there was always a set piece about them in the Budget speech tribute to some old toffee-maker up in Hal- ifax who ran the National Savings Move- ment. Whatever happened to it?' Mr Hud- son starts burrowing into some files. 'Any- way, when we were in Madrid, Nigel and I' — Sir Nigel Wicks, the veteran sherpa, looks saurian — 'got the Group of Ten countries to set up a study of savings. There aren't enough, I told them. We need more. Dammit, I need more. There's Tessa, of course.' Mrs Keswick, his adviser, puts her teacup down. 'No, sorry, not you, the sav- ings scheme that the Prime Minister thought up — obviously we'll keep that going, but I need something new . Robert?' Mr Culpin is stroking his authori- tative beard, which gives off sparks. 'Chan- cellor, you remember asking the Financial Secretary — the previous one, that is — to make a study of savings and investment?' `And you found the file in his out-tray?' In his pending-tray, Chancellor. But we thought that with some adaptation and refinement . ."Go on, Robert, cough it up.' 'We thought that you might like to have a new regime to cover every kind of long-term saving. Reward the individual, levy the institutions, get your claws into the pension funds, start Capital Gains Tax at a million — it wouldn't cost you anything.' 'I rather like that. Where's the file?' In the safe, Chancellor.' I thought so. What else?' 'Well, Gus O'Donnell wants to know about monetary policy."Oh, yes, that's his neck of the woods now, isn't it? Change as good as a rest, eh? Well, I never hear a squeak from Tim Congdon, so I dare say our monetary policy's as right as rain. Just shows what comes of not having one.' Mrs Keswick sug- gests that the speech needs a reference to Gordon Brown and his contra-post-classical theory that modern economies, if not prod- ded, stop growing. 'We mustn't be political, Chancellor,' murmurs Sir Terence, 'but you remember what Nigel Lawson used to say — that if growth depended on neo-Keynes- ian stimuli we'd still be living in caves.'
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