Young Stephen pulls out the load-bearing beam and showers Gordon with bricks
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
That creaking sound from the public finances, those tell-tale symptoms of shifting and settling — can it be subsidence? Please, not again. Think how much it cost to fix last time, and all the times before that. Gordon the Builder claimed to have sorted it, but that was before he planned all those extensions, and the weather has turned against him, as it always does. Now he and his colleagues are softening us up for the bill, (There's a war on. There's a recession on, too — well, maybe not here, but across the road and round the corner. Wouldn't you want to pay more for a better job, anyway? Come on, guy, you know how it is.) This is no time for a cocky apprentice, young Stephen, to pull out an insecure load-bearing beam and shower Gordon with bricks. If he had wanted to weaken the public finances, he could not have done better than by junking Railtrack. The railways will still need financing, but it will cost more, and more of the bill will come back to Gordon and therefore to us. Worse still will be the effect on Gordon's partners. He has tried to spread the financial load by entering into these partnerships, which have helped to build and operate such major projects as hospitals, but having seen Railtrack's fate, what are these partners to think? They are bound to take less on trust, to run fewer risks and to insist on better terms. At this of all moments, young Stephen has brought a new risk to investment, and must rank with Edmund Curti, the publisher, whose biographies were said to have added a new terror to death.
Wither the state
IT must soon be borne in on Gordon and Company that spending more on providing public services as they are provided now, but more expensively, will get them nowhere. They should then turn to Tim Ambler at the London Business School, whose paper Withering the State tells them how they could save £30 billion a year. He begins with the tax and benefit systems, which are so needlessly complex that more than half of the nation's households are caught up in both. He wonders whether we need as many people in the Ministry of Defence as we do in the armed forces, if their effect is to make military procurement more expensive. His most striking savings come from cutting back on that great modern growth industry, regulation. Apart
from its direct costs, he says, there is ES billion in corporation tax to be gained from companies relieved of the heaviest burdens, and another £4 billion from higher growth in the economy. Regulation has been in demand because, as Professor Charles Goodhart says, it is perceived as a free good. The gains are obvious, the costs are hidden. As with the top hat in the expense account, we may not see them, but they're there.
Spot the hat
STUART LYONS is a businessman and can spot the Department of Trade and Industry's hidden top hat. In A Department for Business (published by the Centre for Policy Studies) he argues that if the DTI gave up promoting social change for social purposes, it would save one-third of its cost, let alone what would be saved on other people's costs. It would be more use, he thinks, if it were more businesslike, but with its eight ministers (count them) that might be asking too much. Even in a department for business, they would insist on sponsoring industries and picking winners. We have been here before. I am pleased to learn that Edmund Burke once carried a motion abolishing the Board of Trade. 'Commerce, the principal object of that office,' so he argued, 'flourishes best when left to itself.' Just think what that reform would save now.
Tower? Lower
IN the first week of September, Barclays Bank ordered itself a new tower. It would move out of Lombard Street after three centuries and reach for the sky from Canary Wharf, where Citibank and HSBC are already engaged in a contest worthy of San Gimignano: my tower is taller than your tower. The second week must have brought second thoughts. Now the argument has moved back to the City, where Gerald Ronson wants to build a 37-storey tower in Bishopsgate and has taken his case to a planning inquiry. In the opposite corner is English Heritage, in his corner are the Lord Mayor and Corporation of London. They think that the City must have more towers or it will never attract the international business it needs. I think that tall towers — and, for that matter, enormous head offices — have been exposed as an out-of-date form, as in San Gimignano. In the City, they have always proved more vainglorious than practical, and the dreariest of them is now surplus to the requirements of the Stock Exchange, its owners. The Queen, who opened it, comes there next week for a bicentenary party, and if she brings a hammer with her, she can start to knock it down.
Wait for it
THE bill, please. Waiter? L'addition. Ii conto. Blast. I thought that this hand signal was universal. Er, cameriere? You might think that restaurants would want their tables back, but, when they cannot sell you anything more, they lose interest, and some of their staff seem to be moonlighting for the Equitable Life, where the hardest thing to do is to take a loss and go. It might take three months but nobody knows and no one can tell you when your bill will come. Catching the head waiter's eye, I am told that his harassed staff keep getting long letters from policyholders, and that when these take a long time to answer, the policyholders write again at greater length, so that the effect is cumulative. Excuses, excuses. I suppose that you could get his attention by offering him a repeat order.
Candles' end
NOT content to sell the nation's gold — or, worse still, to trade it for euros — Gordon Brown has moved on to sell the Treasury's silver. Under the hammer at Bonhams & Brooks next week go its 17th-century candlesnuffers, of no further use to a department which (as the the greatest of chancellors, Gladstone, claimed for it) used to take pride in saving candle-ends. The six lots of silver may fetch six figures between them, and at this Chancellor's rate of expenditure will keep him going for one forty-third of a second.
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