Political commentary

Reflections in an aquarium

Ferdinand Mount

It was warm and dark in the aquarium. Do they keep the lighting low so that your great moonface does not alarm the fish, or is it to give you the impression you are taking part in a Jacques Cousteau film? In practice, the deep-pile carpet and the cute nooks and niches make you feel more as if you are part of a submarine feature in Homes and Gardens rather than roaming the Great Barrier Reef. Fish I can take or I can leave alone; squamous is the word. Policemen are a different matter.

And one cannot help noticing that the aquarium is suddenly full of policemen, dark helmets swimming up out of the murk like a shoal of cod. And policewomen too, all going I'm-sorry-but-nobody-is-to-leavethis-this-place. None of them quite likes to say aquarium.

So there we all are for hours sitting on the carpet beneath the angelfish, with nothing to read except Sir Ian Gilmour's speech which had been thrust in my hand shortly before I left the conference to go up Blackpool Tower and wander round the aquarium beneath it. As far as consolation in the hour of need goes, Sir Ian, it has to be said, is not quite up to St Thomas-aKempis standard.

Why are we here? Can't be a bomb, otherwise the Lancashire constabulary would let us out rather than keep us in. Perhaps they hope to corner the mad bomber in the Crustacean section. Sneak a very casual look at man in anorak sitting next to me. He is eating crisps and listening intently to the aquarium commentary: 'Millions of year ago, the first lobsters . . You never can tell. It's often the quiet ones.

After an aeon or two, they let us out. Disappointing lack of crowd to greet our release, obviously the word has not got round that we are Blackpool's answer to the Spaghetti House siege. On the contrary, unfeeling passers-by have their backs to us. They are squinting up at the top of the tower. The West Lancashire Evening Gazette tells all: 'Anthrax Alert at The Tower: soil box find on level 17.'

Now in the old days, the average demonstrator did not meddle with soil boxes full of anthrax. Second Front Now yes. Ban the Bomb certainly. But one drew the line at wandering around the country with deadly samples of Hebridean compost.

What Lord Robbins never stopped to think of is that more scientists means more mad scientists. A knowledge explosion or information revolution means more nutters running around with no more sense than a catfish but with sufficient technical knowledge to make a petrol bomb, blow up a general, or treat the world as a left luggage office for anthrax samples — and all without personal danger to the nutter in question.

The 'technical surprise' — the phrase invented by Raymond Aron to describe the totally unexpected jump in the destructive power of weaponry between the beginning and the end of a modern war — now applies not just to peaceful protest but to peacetime generally.

The only thing you can be sure of is unforeseen consequences. All boxes are Pandora's. Take Mr Nigel Lawson, formerly Financial Secretary to the Treasury, now Energy Minister and one of the driving forces behind the government's economic strategy.

Now Mr Lawson is popularly credited with the authorship not only of this week's admirable selling-off of government North Sea oil and gas interests but also of at least two devices recently introduced — the Tax and Prices Index and the Rooker-Wise Amendment, more properly to be known as the Rooker-Wise-Lawson amendment.

The TPI was introduced on the grounds that simply measuring retail prices alone, as in the RPI, did not give a fair measure of the rise or fall in the standard of living unless tax changes were included as well. But today, because of the last Budget, the increase in the TPI is higher than the increase in the RPI, and the trade unions are using it to justify higher wage claims.

The Amendment required the Chancellor, then Denis Healey, to raise income tax personal allowances in line with inflation, instead of the Treasury scooping the extra revenue automatically. Under the Conservatives, this requirement has turned out extremely embarrassing to a hardpressed Chancellor. In this year's Budget, he had to refuse to index the allowances; will he have to do so again next year?

Thus both Lawson wheezes have backfired, leaving his own Government with a faceful of carbon monoxide. This is not unusual. Every fresh effort to tax income, subsidise allegedly desirable activities, rig interest rates, or control imports calls forth countervailing efforts to elude the controls and divert as much cash as possible to undesirable activities. Government statistics and Finance Acts are there to be used by your enemies as well as your friends.

Now when government first becomes aware of the energy and ingenuity of its citizens, its first reaction is to try to suppress the knowledge and stop up the loopholes.

Yet the one thing which is clear — one of the few things which Mr Tony Benn is almost alone in grasping, if not quite in the same context — is that there can be no go ing back, at least to certain kinds of controls and mystifications. British exchange controls may, as Mr Heath picturesquely asserts, once have been 'the envy of the world'. Yet now the assessment, even amongst the Treasury practitioners of the art, is that the effects of exchange control are fleeting. I feel much the same with formal incomes policies, even of the most benevolent and ingenious sort like Professor Layard's 'inflation tax'; indeed, these are precisely the qualities which would make such a tax so easy to evade.

There can be no going back to the money illusion. People are whippet-quick nowadays to detect changes in value. They can tot up a tax deduction on a payslip without Mr Lawson's help. The TPI and the Amendment cannot and should not be wished away. We cannot unlearn our knowledge of how inflation works.

Yesterday's methods relied on yesterday's illusions. People accepted modest pay rises and scarcely seemed to notice how inflation swelled the Inland Revenue's coffer. Those days of innocence are gone.

Any solution to our difficulties which relies primarily on controls is unlikely to work; it certainly won't work anything near as well as it did in the Forties and Fifties when people and markets were still waking up after the war.

And if we are to work 'with the grain' of society as it is, then we are more likely to achieve progress by breaking down the remaining controls, barriers and mystifications than by retreating behind rusty old ring fences. The practical presumption is in favour of openness.

These thoughts from the aquarium may not seem directly relevant to the titanic political struggle which is said to be unfolding. Will Mr Michael Heseltine break free with one bound? Will Mr Geoffrey Rippon turn out to be the Man on the White Horse?

Yet I feel increasingly that the one crucial and implausible factor in all alternatives — whether from Mr Benn, Mr Shore, Mr Heath, Mr Jenkins or Sir Ian — is the controlling or rigging of markets. And as soon as you seriously consider any of them, you cannot help becoming aware of the magnitude of the controls which would have to be imposed and the degree of force which would be needed to make them effective in the absence of the old illusions.

Still, it never does to underrate the appeal of bad old physical force. In the afternoon, we have the famous bomb scare in the conference hall during Sir Geoffrey Howe's oration — making a notable bomb'n' anthrax double for your correspondent. The heads of delegates duck and peer under their chairs for explosive devices, like a line of sugar-beet pickers. At the back of the hall, a steward runs through the melee waving white-gloved hands, as if modelling for Munch's The Scream, shouting 'move, move'. Accompanied by several distinguished members of the Conservative Party and the press corps, I move.