ANOTHER VOICE
How to live with the two-party state juggernaut
AUBERON WAUGH
There are certain truths which the British people simply do not wish to be told. Perhaps we 'communicators' — as the nation's scribblers are sometimes called should respect these areas of reticence, in the same way that we do not hoot our horns near a hospital, or give rowdy parties late at night in our hotel bedrooms. Sleep- ers have their rights, no less than sickies. To the extent that the nation's refusal to accept unwelcome truths, or to assimilate unfamiliar ones, is the product of general intellectual sluggishness, or even some localised failure of mental agility, it might easily be judged boorish or cruel to go on announcing them, rather like forcing spas- tics to dance the hornpipe. But crueller things than this are done in the name of physiotherapy, so here we go again.
For the last five years I have been boring everybody I could buttonhole by pointing out that there have been no Government cuts at all under Mrs Thatcher, that every major spending department has been in- creasing its expenditure in real terms ever since she came to power, that Government expenditure has been increasing as a per- centage of gross national product, and that the only important difference between a Labour government and a Conservative government (in office) is one of rhetoric rather than of performance. Both are prisoners of the voracious juggernaut they seek to steer. Whichever brand of rhetoric we choose to vote for — patriotism and self-restraint or compassion and generosity — the result will be the same: Labour's attempts to over-spend will be frustrated by the International Monetary Fund; Con- servative attempts to cut expenditure will be frustrated by the public employees. And the juggernaut of public expenditure will continue on its course, demanding ever more fuel to wreak ever worse havoc on the national economy.
Obviously such a gloomy picture re- quires some qualification, although last week's Treasury White Paper, setting out exactly how much expenditure has in- creased in real terms since 1978/79 in every major Government department, reveals that such qualifications are fewer and smaller than I had supposed. Last year I was prepared to concede that the Govern- ment had achieved a small cut in real terms in the education budget, and sure enough expenditure in '85/86 (at '86/87 constants) of £14.5 billion does show a minute cut of 0.7 per cent over the '78/79 figure of £14.6 billion. But an increase of E1 billion on education in '86/87 reverses this, giving the department an overall increase of six per cent, in real terms, since 1978/79.
This is much smaller than the increase in all the other major spending departments, by which I mean those departments dispos- ing more than £10 billion of taxpayers' money: defence has increased by 28 per cent; the National Health Service by 25 per cent; social security spending by 39 per cent. In fact the only department which shows a significant reduction — one can scarcely attach much importance to such low spenders as the Foreign Office or the Energy Ministry — is the Ministry of Housing, which has reduced expenditure from £6.7 billion (at '86/87 constants) in '78/79 to £2.7 billion in 1986/87. Well done, somebody or other. Does anyone know who has been Minister of Housing throughout this time? A more likely ex- planation, I should have thought, for the Government's success in this one field is that the Civil Service has no objection to throwing self-employed builders out of work — the dreaded 'lump', which has always been an affront to bureaucratic sensibilities. What civil servants will never be prepared to do is to preside over the disbandment of their own empires. The National Health Service, as I never tire of pointing out, has taken on 90,000 addition- al employees since 1978/1979. This ex- plains the atrocious decline in hospital services, despite a real increase of 25 per cent in spending.
The overall real increase in Government expenditure under Mrs Thatcher is set out for all to see. Since 1978/79, when total Government expenditure, at '86/87 con- stants, was £124 billion it has risen to £136.5 billion in '86/87, an increase of slightly over 10 per cent. This happened during a period when the national eco- nomy was shrinking. I lack the patience to construct a graph which would demons- trate how long it will take, at this rate, for Government expenditure to overtake the national income, but I imagine that it might easily arrive in my own lifetime.
A more enjoyable graph might show how long it will take, at this rate of growth, for the entire country to become one huge National Health Service. I believe that our NHS is already the biggest single employer in the free world. Of one thing we can be sure: when the nation's workforce is di- vided between those who are unemployed and those who are employed by the National Health Service, no medical ser- vices whatever will be available to the public. The NHS is the clearest exponent of Gammon's Law, that in bureaucratic systems every increase in expenditure is matched by a fall in production. But nobody in Britain wishes to know what has really been happening under Mrs Thatcher, least of all the Conservative or Labour parties. The only thing which interests them is which pattern of rhetoric is more likely to win the next election, and whether either pattern needs some adjust- ment to make it more acceptable. It is only when one looks at their reasons for prefer' ring either party that one arrives at the major qualification to my earlier sugges- tion that there is nothing to choose be- tween them. The only essential difference between them is in the matter of discri- minatory and punitive taxation. It is a large and growing part of the Labour creed that Tories hate the poor as much as Labour voters hate the rich' Perhaps they could not survive in their frozen attitudes without some sustaining myth of this sort. Remove Labour's ele- ment of righteous indignation to supple- ment its bitterness at being deprived 131 office and there would be no opposition at all to the inert consensus: the parliameir tary system would collapse. Any coneess: ion to taxpayers must be seen as an affrefl„` to the poor, or the terrible truth emerge that there is no difference at a!' between conservatives and socialists, their roles being simply to keep the state jugger- naut rolling on. It seems to me that in these circuroci stances Mr Lawson may be on a goo wicket. Under Conservatism, at least sortie people are happy: under Labour, everr body will be miserable. By establishing a difference, he preserves our precious par- liamentary system. Rather than reduce the, standard rate of income tax, he should abolish all marginal rates of taxation above .
the standard rate and raise the threshold alt which income tax becomes payable wirbcili n affording this extra relief to those 0L:: would have been paying higher rates. In the age of pocket calculators, such are easy, but I suppose we should allow him to recruit some extra Inland Revenue officers. Then everybody will be hapPY.
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