SENSE OF PURPOSE
Sitt,—I returned the ether day from Switzerland--a country full of 'efficiency and equity'- ato read with wide-eyed amazement Mr. Henry Fairlie's article, 'Sense of Purpose,' in your issue of August 3. Mr. Macmillan. according to him, is approaching his finest hour: and a lot of Conservatives are going to be 'shamefacedly grateful for his leadership six or nine months from now.'
Why? Because he has been moving, with great deliberation, to decision after decision which throws on to the people of the country the responsibility for choosing what they want.' According to Mr. Fairlie, the public has been genuinely shocked to discover how inequitable is the present system of rewards and incentives, and how unjust, especially to those who work in the public services. But the inequity has been of the public's own choosing. The decisions have been made by them, and not by the Government, with whom they do not lie.
Let's have a look a* the record over the past ten years. On the economic front we have 'dashed for freedom'; stopped and gone—with the wind; main- tained taxation on earned income at punitive levels; encouraged speculation, particularly in the fields of real property and commercial television, to a degree which the country has not known since the South Sea Bubble; abolished building licences; held down the pay of nurses and teachers; cut grants to the universities at a time when higher education was never more desperately needed; done little or nothing for an impoverished rentier class, in whose cause Dame Irene Ward so persistently and elo- quently pleads: and legalised gambling in every form.
With what result? Britain is fast becoming a paradise for 'spivs.' Our rate of economic growth lags far behind that of the continental countries of Western Europe. And the main reason for this is that the only way we can't make enough money to put by is by doing an honest day's work. No one, at any level, in any profession, industry or trade, can save out of earnings. Luxury flats, hotels and offices rear their ugly heads on every side, while the housing shortage in the Midlands and the North remains acute. To take a concrete example, St. Paul's Cathedral, which, with an avenue down to the river. might have provided one of the most beautiful sights in Europe, has once again been obliterated.
As a natural gambler, who seldom fails to lose, it ill becomes me to take a high moral line on this subject. But when I see the people of this country, who are nearly all natural gamblers. being deliberately encouraged by the Government to believe that the best and easiest way of making money is by playing the horses. the dogs. the pools. chentin-de-fer. or Bingo. I feel dismayed. There are, or should be, better ways than that.
If Mr. Fairlie thinks that the public have chosen all this, he has another thought coming. Let him compare the present price of War Loan with what it was ten years ago, and ask himself whether the wretched holders, who bought it on patriotic grounds, and on the assumption that the credit of the Government was at least as great as that of the property or television companies, wanted it this way.
What the electorate has been trying to tell the Government. in recent by-elections, is that they don't like it. And, to do him justice. what the Prime Minister is now trying to do is not to divest himself of the responsibility that rests squarely on the shoulders of his Government, but to assume it. It may be that he is too late. Who can tell? If he is to succeed, he must accept the advice of your own correspondent, Mr, Nicholas Davenport, and stop advocating a fall in profits, which are the essential condition of economic growth and expansion. He has only to re-read his Keynes; and that should not be difficult, because he was his publisher. If, on the other hand, the tycoons (not the public) have already made an irrevocable choice. the reckoning is still to come.
Previous page
