Political commentary
The hatching of Sir Keith
Ferdinand Mount
Some politicians are everywhere. The bustle, they buttonhole. You can't avoid them. Not Sir Keith Joseph. He is a rarer bird, of solitary habit. Sometimes, at dusk, you may glimpse him at the end of a deserted corridor, stiff-shouldered and walking rather slowly, always with a bundle of papers under his arm, his hair corrugated in sympathy with his forehead, his whole being lost in a perpetual quest for self-enlightenment.
Then suddenly, wow! It's all Joseph. In the space of ten days, Mrs Thatcher's Secretary of State far Industry and erstwhile Svengali, has opened a debate on regional aid, answered Commons questions on Industry and made no fewer than four important statements of government policy, not to speak of an equally important statement on the future of British shipbuilding which he ought to have made but left to his understrapper, Adam Butler. While the Cabinet and the headlines have been concentrating on the government's search for another £1,000 million-odd to cut off public spending, Sir Keith has scarcely sat down. His plans are now well and truly hatched.
Throughout their long and surprisingly silent incubation, the business of psychologising their author —always a popular pastime at Westminster — has boomed. According to the 'Mad Monk' school, the confrontation with the reality of Britain's inditstrial decline has driven him into a permanent state of frenzy and despair. 'Wrings his hands the whole time, can't take a decision, Margaret is fed up with him, carried no weight in Cabinet, civil servants have to write everything for him' — thus the low view of those who like their politicians to look chipper and sure of themselves and to stick to the conventional wisdom.
But from other quarters, rather closer, comes a different picture. In private, we are told, Sir Keith radiates a kind of austere glee: 'it is all as we said, our analysis was right, we can do no other'. After a lifetime of self-confessed boo-boos, the prophet is entering into his own, no longer Job complaining but Isaiah fulfilled. Sir Keith built tower blocks and people hated living in them. He reorganised the health service and bureaucracy spread like ragwort on the ruins. He invented a cycle of deprivation among the lower orders and speedily had to uninvent, it. Being Keith seemed to mean always having to say sorry. But at last he thinks helias done something which he has got right.
But has he done anything much? First reactions to the cutting of the National Enterprise Board were that it was only a light trim, the hair being destined to grow back to the same length in no time — not exactly the Chiswick Solution proposed by John Biffen, in which the NEB would be shrunk into insignificance by being exiled to a couple of rooms in West London, After all, the three biggest stretcher cases — British Leyland, Alfred Herbert and RollsRoyce — are to remain in intensive care. And even the more hightlown aspirations of state capitalism are not discouraged; Sir Keith is ready to use the NEB as 'one means of familiarising the market with new technologies'.
That's a typical Joseph phrase, provoking huge Labour guffaws. It's not colourful or even particularly expressive; it may even have been thought up by some civil servant. But it does let the cat out of the bag with a kind of lumbering tactlessness, like Sir Keith's famous speech on the mores of the working class in which he referred to the poor with the best will in the world — well, with nearly the best will in the world — as 'socio-economic groups four and five'. If the market is so marvellous, why does it need familiarising? Other politicians have such phrases presented to them in their briefs, but other politicians cross out such phrases. Joseph seems not to hear in his head just how crass the phrase is going to sound.
Even the unfolding of his industrial master plan was dogged by parliamentary snafu. First, he intended to reveal his plans for regional aid by means of a written answer, sincerely believing that they contained too much complicated written material for MPs to digest on first hearing; then he thought that the plans for the Harland and Wolff Shipyards could be revealed in the same way, because the Northern Ireland Secretary was responsible for them, not he. In both cases, the government was to be questioned verbally later, but later is not soon enough for MPs. Immediacy, not intellectual grasp, is what matters to them.
The ensuing argy-bargy only furthered the impression that the reforms themselves were modest. To have reduced the proportion of the population covered by industrial subsidy from 40 per cent to 25 per cent does not sound very much, particularly when the reduction is not to be completed before 1983. The changes arc less abrupt, as Joseph himself pointed out, than Labour's withdrawal in 1976 of the Regional Employment Premium at two weeks notice. But until Sir Keith plucked at our attention, no politician had really laid bare the self-defeating nature of regional aid as doled out in Britain. The paradox had been smoothed over by the phrase 'a range of inducements'. Firms were bribed a lot to build factories in areas of high unemployment; then they were bribed only a little less to build factories in areas with aboveaverage unemployment; and so on until half the country was subsidising the other half. Much of this public money was bound to be wasted; some projects could not be shifted from the Midlands and the South-East far love or money. But the net 'effect of a gradual range of inducements has been to make the grey areas — often pleasant places like Plymouth or Harrogate — more attractive than the real black spots like Merseyside. In return for an only slightly reduced subsidy, the businessman gets access to lovely country, nice houses and a docile workforce.
It is because Joseph:also insists on arguing the case for private shareholding in nationalised industries that this awkward, tactless but essential man forces both parties to confront their own hypocrisies. For if it is right for the state to buy a stake in this or that private induStry — as every Labour manifesto and party conference urges — then why is it not right for individuals to buy a stake in a nationalised industry?
Because Sir Keith makes people think, it does not follow that he will succeed in changing the way they behave, Labour MPs and not a few Tories seem confident that in the grim winter ahead the government will re-trace even those few faltering steps towards a free economy.
But we are in a rather different world this time. Even Mr Callaghan has told us that we can no longer spend our way out of a slump. The costs of lob creation' programmes to other unidentifiable workers whose jobs are destroyed as a consequence of the extra taxes required are now more widely understood. The scheme for the gradual contraction of the shipyards, like those for the contraction of the steel industry, are coordinated with and underpinned by the EEC. It is hard to pretend that any later upturn in demand would be big enough to justify Britain's present capacity, in view of the stiffening competition from new rivals like Spain and South Korea.
Above all, the doctrinal commitment this time reaches deeper than the afterglow of a couple of days at the Selsdon Park Hotel. This is the first goverment since the war which has not immediately and instinctively sought to counter rising unemployment with rising subsidies. The Cabinet's agreement to cut public spending again demonstrates the cOntinued supremacy of those Ministers who believe that employment and' growth will pick up only if the public sector is squeezed and the private sector is given room to breathe. The Thin Men are still in charge. And if you doubt Svengali's nerve, remember that in this show Trilby herself is calling the tune.
Previous page
