Mrs Thatcher's morals

Murray Sayle

Tokyo Travel, they say, can often broaden the mind, as surely as the other end of the torso. A gloomier view sees the traveller carrying his (or her) troubles as hand bag- gage, hearing them in every boring speech of welcome and finding them, grinning, on the doorstep back home. The Prime Minister's just-completed peregrination through the Far East, part pilgrim, part

preacher, leaves this eternal dilemma Unresolved.

There is no doubt that Mrs Thatcher made, for a foreigner, an excellent impres-

sion in Japan. A woman head of govern-

ment, genial husband at heel, is still a thing of wonder in a country where a Japanese

14.'4 has just made headlines by being the first of her sex ever to reach the rank of department head in the Civil Service (she is,

in fact, in charge of the parliamentary

-rarY). Still, making adjustments where appropriate — like providing a Policewoman with a black belt in karate to accompany the Prime Minister to honourable hand-wash place — the

Japanese treated Mrs Thatcher as an thonora ty man, and thus fitted her without strain into a social convention in which no

woman has exercised real, non-bedroom Political power in 1600 years. The strongest British prime minister since Winston Churchill,'- enthused the businessmen's newspaper, Sankei Shim- bun, adding, 'Mrs Thatcher is determined

o accept the challenge from the labourers' unions. Our government leaders should

regard her as a model for behaviour.' From aPaPer normally obsessed with 'the English sickness', this is high praise indeed. 'Char- Ting Iron Lady,' said the Yomiuri Shim- n more gallantly, while noting that ritish unemployment had climbed from Per cent to 13.8 per cent during Mrs Thatcher's term, while Japan's had inched,

or millimetred up from one per cent to just over two in the same happy period. 'Super-

saleswoman Maggie', bubbled the Asahi ov er. a photograph showing the Prime Minister joyfully holding up a woolly sweater at an exhibition of British products 154 a Tokyo department store. (The price, there was Yen or £120, may partly explain why c. ere. was no queue of Tokyo housewives oghting to buy them.) t. And then, of course, came the recrimina- {.!°11s. They turn, as ever, on the trade ',Igures. Japan had (according to the British rePartment of Trade) a surplus with Bri- ,,al° °f around £1,200 million last year. For the first six months of this year — the

13ures became available just as the Prime Minister arrived — Japan sold £1,300 worth to Britain, Britain £344 million worth, including no doubt one or two £120 woolly sweaters, to Japan. The surplus, in short, is ballooning. Can idle factories, empty shipyards, rusting steel mills (in Britain, not in Japan) be somehow connected with this lopsided accountancy?

Mrs Thatcher, predictably, thought they were. The big trade deficit and high British unemployment are tending to feed protec- tionist sentiment in Britain, she told in- scrutable Japanese Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki, and protectionism could no longer be checked 'unless Japan opened its market wider'. Only 24 Japanese companies have made direct investments in Britain, she said, creating 7,000 jobs, which is not much of a dent in the current 3,300,000 out of work. American firms have made 1,000 in- vestments, and West Germans 180. (This looks very like an attempt to set up a Japanese-style contest, with a rope of pearls to the winner.) Japan imports, on average, only a quarter of the proportion of manufactured goods that other industrial countries do. 'Your trading partners are watching the position closely. You will understand if I say that we are bound to judge by results,' the Prime Minister added, in her best this-hurts-me-more-than-it-does- you tone. Translated from the French, this is the chanson that Francois Mitterrand was sing- ing out here earlier this year. The Japanese are, well, just not like us, are they? They might well reply, 'No, we're more suc- cessful,' but oriental politeness forbids. Ten years ago, Edward Heath tried to sell them Concorde, but the Japanese were doubtful that they could make money with it. Mitterrand offered the Mirage and the Exocet, as a start to the non-existent force de frappe Japonaise. Mrs Thatcher was, ac-

cording to the Japanese press (who have never forgiven the French sneer that Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda was a 'transistor radio salesman'), trying to unload the BAE 146 airliner and the Sea Harrier — just the plane you need if you have small aircraft carriers and remote possessions threatened by bombastic Latin dictators (Japan has, happily, neither). As to Japanese exports, Mrs Thatcher singled out fork-lift trucks and numerically-controlled machine tools as items the Japanese are selling too much, too soon, and far too cheap.

This is well-worn stuff and goes, in my view, nowhere near the heart of the matter. Europeans, with the world's biggest closed agricultural market, can hardly scold the Japanese for keeping out the butter and lamb chops they don't want to eat anyway. As to manufactures, what are we thinking about? The Japanese themselves already do a good, cheap motor-car, television set and washing machine, in case you haven't notic- ed. They are simply not in the market for arms (we told them not to be, remember in 1945), and if they buy any foreign weapons they will be American, as Uncle Sugar is defending them and Europe is not. Savile Row suits, French scent, German guard dogs? All are available in Tokyo, not in the supermarkets, of course, but are they in yours? The Japanese seem to make just about everything they need themselves, thanks.

More interesting were Mrs Thatcher's political and economic views, as expounded in private to the top Japanese businessmen, who turned up in droves to hear her. While she was in office, she told them, she plann- ed to turn the British Government into the world's smallest. As I (and the Japanese) understand her philosophy, it is not the business of governments to find people jobs, educate them, or transport them from point to point by air, rail or sea (not on non-military missions, anyway). All governments are supposed to do is to pro- vide a climate in which a 'healthy capitalism can flourish'. The enlightened efforts of everyone to get rich will, given time, bring us all to the shining city on the hill.

And if they don't? Well, the Invisible Hand better known as hunger gets to work, the labourers reduce their wage demands to the point where they can once again com- pete on the world market, and happy days are here again. The road to solvency may be rocky, of course, rockier for some than others, but enterprise must be rewarded, envy is sinful, life isn't meant to be easy.

This message, of state non-intervention, or getting honourable government off our unworthy backs, sounds odd indeed to Japanese ears. It is true that Prime Minister Suzuki is trying to cut down Japanese government spending, not for ideological reasons, but because the Japanese treasury in ten years has run up a bigger national debt, proportionately, than that of Britain and the US combined, and any Japanese politician who tries to raise taxes will be flung out on his fan by the indignant voters. The bureaucracy which is left, however, is the strongest in the non-communist world.

For example the dreaded MITI, the Ministry of International Trade and In- dustry, which is actually the lineal descen- dant of the wartime munitions military, has its forceful finger in just about every Japanese industrial pie. The men from the Ministry put the little 'passed' sticker, for instance, on your Japanese camera; they set targets for industrial production; they amalgamate companies; they order obsolete machinery scrapped and they promote the gigantic bank financing of successful export firms like Sony. They are, for instance, deeply interested in the fork-lift and computer-controlled machine tool deluge Mrs Thatcher was complaining about.

What's more, this daily intervention in the 'private sector' by the 'Japanese government' takes place mostly on the telephone. (I use inverted commas here not out of shyness but because the dividing line between the Japanese state and private in- terests is a wavering, imprecise one, all but impossible to map.) Many Japanese 'free enterprises' like, for instance, Nippon Steel, actually have bureaucrats from MITI sitting on their boards. So much for Mrs Thatcher's notion of government holding the ring while the healthy capitalists do their thing in the private sector.

Why does Japanese business so readily toe the government line? Partly because it would soon be out of business if it didn't. But more important is an element I can only call, with some trepidation, moral. Some businessmen actually get poorer, or fail to get wealthier, because of a MITI directive, but they obey, often grudgingly, anyway. Not because they are Buddhists or Shin- toists, but because they follow a religion or moral code which is not capitalist or socialist, but a bit of both, better described as tribal, collectivist, Japanese, or looking out for, not Number One but Number One Hundred and Seventeen Million, the cur- rent cohesive' total of 'us Japanese'.

The difficulty with Mrs Thatcher's economic remedies, from a Japanese point of view, is that they lack a moral basis. Not, I hasten to add, that the Prime Minister herself has ever done anything but conform strictly to the non-conformism of her ancestors. The problem is that the free market itself provides no moral basis whatever for social behaviour. If everyone simultaneously wants to get rich, and sees a way to do it, the theory might work, although using the principle of buying cheap and selling dear, as a substitute for the Ten Commandments, is exactly the unacceptable face of capitalism criticised both by Edward Heath and Karl Marx. But what if people just sit about drawing, ac- cording to pedigree, their dividends or their dole? Why, in Thatcheronomics, shouldn't they? The way things are, who can say that bone idleness is not enlightened self- interest?

There are, or course, large elements of non-economic energy in all societies, and Britain is no exception. A certain South American takes it into his head to use the British flag, a non-economic article if ever there was one, as a doormat, and in a trice the class war is stilled and debs join with dustmen in baying for Argie blood. The task force once safely home, asset-strippers relax on their assets, militants plan the over- throw of the whole rotten system, and the Invisible Hand resumes handing out redun- dancy notices.

Japan is certainly a functioning democracy, of the tribalistic kind (the Israel of the East, according to one Japanese writer) and, despite some unpleasantness in the past, Britain played a dominant role in Japan's modernisation and some Japanese, at least, are suitably aware of it. Japanese are not, however, converts to 'healthy capitalism' and neither the Prime Minister's `feminine charm' (Mainichi Shimbun) nor her unemployment figures have made believers of them. The 'Falklands spirit' has, in fact, come in for more attention, but in the economic, not the military field. To Japanese every new market penetrated is a Goose Green, every journalist who reports, say, a spectacular spurt in the sales of fork- lift trucks is a Japanese Max Hastings. Only grasp that, as Sebastian Flyte used to say, and you have the root of the matter.

A couple of incidents in the Prime Minister's visit demonstrate, I think, that the Japanese challenge has got rather beyond the point of exhorting them to be decent chaps and play cricket, or else. The one-time chemistry student is still deeply in- terested in technology, and at her request the Thatchers visited the laboratory near Tokyo run, inevitably, by the all-powerful MITI, which busies itself with research into the various forms of industrial robots. 'The party', according to the Japanese report,

'All the bomb sites in the world, and you have to walk into mine.'

`viewed a robot with three fingers that caa move almost as freely as a man's.' In a sod' den, gracious gesture, the smiling Prime Minister shook the creature by its cold, aly too-visible hand.

The implications here, for That' cheronomics, are disquieting. The British labourers are, we know, supposed to see, that their enlightened self-interest should lead them to reduce their wage demands t° internationally competitive levels. But robots neither drink beer, reproduce their kind nor go to football matches. Coo' peting with real live Japanese is alreaclY tough enough, but competing with some machine, eerily clanking away in an emPtY factory in Nagoya? Goose Green may be, by comparison, a picnic spot. As a parting gift, or shot, at a grand din' ner at the British Embassy in Tokyo, the Thatchers presented Prime Minister Suziol with a brand new, British-made computer' the Sinclair Spectrum. This is roughly the equivalent of sending a ton of Earl GreY tea to the President of Ceylon, and shows that the Stanley spirit is still with us. Urif°r' tunately, if you dismantle Spectrum, Ye)a", will find inside a ZX80 chip, the heart 0' the gadget, marked 'Made in Japan'. The, moral: the Japanese have now so insinuate' themselves into the industrial world, male' ing vital bits like ball bearings and elec' tronic components, that they can afford t° take an indulgent view of threats to drum them out. The last word on the Japanese leg of the journey should probably go to a writer in the Japan Times. 'Why,' he asks, in the sore of tone that needs an answer, `d° the British believe we have some sort of moral duty to invest in their country? After all' what does Britain really have to ofte,, Japan?' Japanese sentimental grail' solidarity, it will be observed, applies 01 to Japanese, and in matters of internatioll trade they are as utilitarian and unerrt°1; tional as the driest dry could want. Exact how, from the armoury of Thatcher thought, do we answer that one?

On to China, the 'mainland' as we used to call it, where healthy capitalism was wiped out 33 years ago and is making ottlY e slow, if any, comeback. The Chinese 31,, not buying any Harriers today, thanks, so the talks seemed to have turned almost ex" elusively on the knotty question of Hcnig Kong. This one should be, from the utilitarian

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standpoint, a piece of cake. Chinese strongman Deng Xiao-ping, who still see°:,,, to do most of the talking, is general described as a 'pragmatist', presumablYor polite way of saying a person of sliPPerY no moral principles who is just waiting `4`0' hear an offer he can't refuse. China gets per cent of its foreign exchange from H°11,,; Kong, selling things like pigs, chopstic' and even water for hard currency desperate' „ ly needed for China's sluggish modernisoci tion programme. Britain on the other hall„, offers no military threat whatever to China and is simply trying to make a few dollars from the quaint and improbable left-over of the great imperial adventure. With enlightened self-interest on both sides, it should be possible to hammer out a deal over a couple of pots of tea and some small sweet rice-cakes. Mrs Thatcher, cheerful in a summer straw hat, said almost as much when she launched the good ship World Goodwill, built for Hong Kong millionaire Yue-Kiong !a°, from a Shanghai shipyard, cutting the ribbon with a small golden axe (which, Come to think of it, is not a bad symbol for Thatcherthought itself). How better, she China, could the future partnership of '-aina, Britain and Hong Kong be express- ed than by this happy event? But it is been clear that absolutely nothing has ueen resolved about the future of the col- 911Y, and from here it looks as if things arc, if anything, more confused than they were before the Prime Minister's visit. Once again, I suspect a moral dimension !S being neglected. Far from being the Beij- ing version of the Vicar of Bray, Deng is, in my view, just as dedicated a communist and revolutionary as Mao ever was, but he belongs to the nationalist/bureaucratic school, like Stalin, rather than the internat- ionalist/romantic wing of, say, Trotsky (all Parties concerned will hate these com-

parisons, but I can't offhand think of bet- ter),

Like Stalin in his day, Deng is ready to do (some) business with capitalists, if he thinks it Will help the fatherland, but all ex- 4,1)ertence, from South Africa to Saigon, from Buenos Aires to Beirut, suggests that the most important element in statecraft is not material wellbeing but sovereignty, i.e. who is the boss. So, in their very first com- munique, Mrs Thatcher and the Chinese leadership agreed on their 'common desire to Preserve the prosperity and stability of duty Kong' — for Britain, we might add, a tut), of sorts, for Beijing just a good deal but the very next paragraph, inserted, it is !atcl, by the Chinese side as non-negotiable to the first draft, reiterated China's claim to sovereignty over the whole of Hong Kong. Kong Thatcher, as soon as she got back to 'long Kong, put forward her side of the argument, namely that the treaties by which imperial China ceded Hong Kong Island and Part of Kowloon to Britain in perpetui- ty are good, sound international law. From soaleone who has just fought a war on an 1. sue to f sovereignty this should not be taken 10.

Can the two positions be reconciled by the `diplomatic discussions' now under way? I hope so, for the sake both of Hong and China, but personally I doubt it. when were probably at their most stable ceben the two sides hardly spoke at all, dur- ing the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolu- oo, enabling the British side to talk about Crown lands', `building leases' and the other fictions our system requires, while the Maoists could look forward to Der Tag in be distant future when imperialism would ue swept from the motherland, meanwhile Pocketing their hard currency and keeping

their mouths shut. But when diplomacy of the agenda-and-jug-of-water kind begins, it speedily becomes clear that if healthy capitalism is morally right, communism is wrong, and vice versa, and sovereignty can- not effectively be shared by people who despise each other's moral positions.

In fact there is rather more capitalism (`bourgeois degeneracy') in 'mainland' China, inhabited by one of the world's great trading peoples, than the authorities are prepared to let on. Conversely, while Hong Kong is often advanced as a textbook case of the virtues of the ruthlessly free market — there are a lot of people driving Rolls-Royces through the slums — much of the motive force behind the colony's suc- cess is the desire of millions of humble folk, not to get filthy rich but to educate their children properly, pay due respect to their ancestors, and look after their extended families — motives which can only be called moral, practised from remote antiquity by one of the most moral people on earth. (I mean the local Chinese, of course.) None of these conflicting moral codes, we can be sure, contains the whole truth, but mutual understanding is rare, and toleration 'rarer.

Perhaps we should all, for a start, do more travelling.