Heath's performance
Sir: In your leading article you quoted with approval Keynes's aphorism, 'in the long run we are all dead'. This cynical mot is normally used to justify all manner of quick, facile short cuts and ex- pedients such as debauching the currency. by.which irresponsible governments seek to evade present inconveniences and to leave the bill for posterity to pay. Is this the sort of thing you want?
Whom did Keynes mean by 'we'? Presumably 'we now living'. He forgot our children and their descendants, to whom it is our duty to transmit a country at least as prosperous and free as we found it. Unless we criminally misman- age our affairs, there will always be someone alive after we have gone.
Keynes's cynicism is pardonable in a childless bachelor : apres perhaps, he deluge. All the more credit to Mr Heath who, also a childless bachelor, affronts you by taking a long-term view. He has in this the support of Burke, who re- garded society as 'a partnership, not only between those who are
- living, but between those who are
living, those who are dead and those who are to be born'. Surely Burke was, in this instance, a better mentor for a Conservative Prime. Minister than Keynes—in the long run, at least, if I may use such an unpardonable expression.
Colin Welch 432 Upper Richmond Road, Put- ney, London sw15
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