Storm cones—but where's the lifeboat?
The trouble is that a businesslike refusal to be panicked into premature action or meaningless rhetoric is very hard to dis- tinguish from helpless inertia. Mr Mac- millan's unflappability at least had a panache to which Mr Heath cannot aspire. To express disappointment in the Conser- vative government so soon would be un- reasonable and unfair: but that there should be some uneasiness is, in the cir- cumstances, inevitable.
The circumstances are, after all, pro- foundly disturbing to everybody in Britain capable of understanding them. 'He who is struck by a thunderbolt,' as Kai Lung said, 'has no need to consult the book of omens.' The final cause of. and the ulti- mate cure for, our present discontents may be matter for sophisticated argument: but the immediate implications of a 100 per cent rise in Tube fares and of the threatened 7d post (for a service which cost only 21-d as recently as 1957) are easy enough to grasp. And these are only examples.
A tidal wave of price rises and wage rises, to be followed by another and an- other similar wave, seems to be bearing down on us and threatening to overwhelm us. The latest outbreak of strikes in the motor car industry shows that voluntary restraint from the trade unions, let alone from the more militant trade unionists. continues to be wholly improbable. Mr Vic Feather, the TUC'S General Secretary, instead of trying to teach his members the facts of economic life, encourages them in what he must surely know to be the ab- surd belief that, if the Government only took the brakes off and encouraged 'growth', the consequent increases in productivity would permit real annual wage rises of 12 per cent.
Of course ordinary people are worried, even some trade unionists, who realise that the present wages scramble is des- tructive but are anxious not to be left behind. Of course they want, with growing urgency, some word of comfort from the Government, some evidence that this dis- astrous process can be, and will be, checked. Dedicated Conservative suppor- ters have, in a sense, the most reason to be worried, both because they have the greatest amount of trust invested in Mr Heath's government and because the only statement yet made on this central issue by any of the new Ministers—Mr Carr's warning that, if wage inflation continued. tax cuts would be impossible—fits badly with their hopes and with what they thought were the Conservative party's declared and pledged policies.
Mr Heath and his colleagues cannot claim that the gravity or the intractability of the economic situation took them by surprise. This was the main issue on which they campaigned. It was the main reason why they were elected.
Admittedly they never did spell out any convincing solution. Mr Carr's plan for dealing with the trade unions looked in advance almost as much of a paper tiger as the one which Mr Wilson abandoned; for he seemed to be relying on a degree of voluntary co-operation which, were it available, would render the plan hardly necessary.
But the fact—if, as people are beginning to'suspect, it proves a fact—that this Gov- ernment has no more idea than its prede- cessors how to stop wage inflation will not be taken by Conservatives as an adequate excuse for failing to cut taxes and cut them very substantially.
The conventional wisdom that tax reductions are inflationary and that put- ting up taxes cures inflation is simply un- true, or at least applicable to a situation different from ours. Tax cuts are only inflationary if the Government doesn't stop spending an equivalent amount of money. Since Britain is suffering from a cost-inflation, not a demand-inflation, a re- duction in taxes, by -increasing the real value of everybody's wage packet, should help to contain, rather than accelerate, the impetus to higher wages and therefore to higher costs and higher prices.
And, even if taxes were a partial answer to inflation, they would still be a very unjust one, since they penalise equally those in receipt of inflated in- comes and those who, since their incomes are fixed or lagging behind, are merely suffering from the already inflated cost of goods and services. This kind of brutal injustice, the use of taxation as a weapon. is another of the evils which the Conser- vatives were elected to stop.
Everybody, then, needs reassurance that the Government knows what it's doing.
indeed that it is doing—or is going to do- -anything effective. And Conservatives need special reassurance that the Govern- ment's professed conservatism is not again going to be stifled by administrative pres- sures and liberal orthodoxy, that another chance—perhaps the last—to turn Britain back from collectivism towards individual responsibility and freedom will not be thrown away.
The appallingly bungled affair of the South African arms has made an ominous beginning. Mrs Thatcher—so far alone among the new Ministers—has shown how these things ought to be done. By acting immediately to implement declared Con- servative policy and halt the forced des- truction of the grammar schools, she forestalled any argument or opposition except the inevitable chorus of indignant squeals from the left; a clamour the sheer impertinence and arrogance of which demonstrated the rightness of what she was doing. If. similarly, the South African arms deal had been quietly but firmly concluded within a week or so of the election, another Conservative pledge could have been fulfilled with infinitely less trouble than it will cause now.
Experience, in other words, both of past governments and of this Govern- ment's initial moves, does not make for easy confidence. Nobody wants gimmicks or another lot of promises or elaborately staged non-events; we had enough of those from Harold Wilson. But Mr Heath ought seriously to consider, if only as a gesture to human weakness, doing some- thing to reassure us.
Of course, if in six months' or a year's time, the situation is really seen- to be im- proving, conservative policies are being successfully introduced and the mood of the country has perceptibly changed. then no one will blame him restrospectively for a slow start. But the quieter he keeps now, the better the results will need to be.
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