Another voice
Defeated by the civil service
Auberon Waugh
Has a single civil servant actually lost his job as a result of the Government cuts? Perhaps a few have but, if so, I have not seen it announced. On most evenings of the week we read of thousands of jobs lost in manufacturing industry and also, to be fair, in the nationalised industries of steel, coal, shipbuilding and car manufacture. But we seldom hear of cuts in British Rail or Telecom and never, in my experience, of cuts in civil service administration. On one occasion we heard that an entire level or tranche of the Health Service administration was going to be removed, and we all cheered like mad. Now it appears that every single person displaced by this exciting initiative has been re-employed somewhere else in the swollen ranks of the bureaucracy, so that the total saving is nil.
Nobody doubts, of course, that services have been cut, Roads are no longer properly repaired, schools do without text-books (in my day one copy of Kennedy's Shorter Latin Primer would last for about 20 generations of schoolboys, but I suppose that everything has changed with the New Latin), and it would be nice to think that those women still brave enough to have babies have fewer visits from social workers and frenzied lesbian enthusiasts for breast feeding. There is much to be thankful for in these Government cuts. But has a single civil servant actually lost his job?
If not, then the civil service's attitude to expenditure begins to take on a more sinister aspect. No elected government can govern without the help of the civil service, but it would be a constitutional innovation if this assistance were to be seen as dependent on approval. So far as Mrs Thatcher had any mandate after the last election, it was to reduce the burden of government on private citizens, reduce the public sector generally, bring public expenditure under control and so tackle the problem of inflation. If, on examination, it appears that she has been prevented from pursuing any of these policies by the deliberate obstructionism of the very people who are supposed to administer them, then the prospect begins to look very bleak indeed.
Poor Mrs Thatcher. At times it begins to look as if she is completely alone in her determination to rescue our collapsing economy — supported, up to a point, perhaps by Sir Geoffrey Howe, Mr Biffen, Mr Lawson and about half the Treasury, but alone in bearing all the odium for policies which are no more of her choosing than Aberfan was chosen by Mr Wilson. but the general failure of her Government — apart from its failure to end the closed shop and union harassment — has surely been in the matter of explaining itself. The press, too, is partly to blame. Although it is for the most part well disposed, it is simply too stupid to grasp that this new word `monetarism' does not signify some newfangled economic theory, or even a new system for regulating the economy, but an application of the simplest rule of all, that you can't spend more money than you have. One can understand crooked politicians arguing that this need no longer be the case, and one can understand politically committed journalists pretending to believe them. In fact the recent history of England demonstrates that a country can go on overspending for much longer than anyone previously thought possible. The temptation for politicians to keep it going just a little bit longer may well be irresistible. But there is no excuse for journalists who have nothing to gain from a change of government pretending to believe the lies of 'wet' Conservatives or `moderate' Social Democrats — let alone the ravings of Mr Healey or the Pied Piper whistlings of Labour's Left — that the economy can somehow be saved by printing more money, or by reimposing currency restrictions, or an interest rate `fence', or import controls.
The most frequently accepted of all these absurdities is that the day can be saved by 'reflation' or `injections into the economy' — in other words, by printing more money. That such large sections in public life can accept this preposterous notion as true may be a mark of the ignorance of the modern age, but it is also a mark of its conceit. What sanctions do they suppose applied against every other government since human history began which prevented it from printing money to its heart's content? Why do they no longer apply today?
Those who are actually directing the economy, whether they are Conservative or Labour, know perfectly well where the truth lies — it is only people without any responsibility for government, or those angling for power, who can pretend to ignore it for long. Has everybody forgotten that the Wilson-Callaghan government of 1974-1979 closed down 123 hospitals in its first three years, including 16,000 beds for the mentally sick? Nobody accused it of `monetarist' policies because it was never so daft as to embrace the idiotic word. Instead we had the ineffably smug David Ennals assuring us it was all part of a wonderful new policy to release sick people into the community.
When the press swallowed that, I assumed it was part of a wider understanding that government expenditure was indeed out of control, and any efforts by a Labour government to restrain it should be supported, whatever the humbug involved. Yet now it appears that practically every political commentator in Fleet Street or Grays Inn Road prepared to voice — or hint at — an opinion sincerely believes that compassion requires the Government to start printing more money. Compassion, if you please. So that those vacant, idiotic, unemployed school-leavers who seem to appear on television discussion programmes most afternoons can be pushed into nonjobs with no future and no usefulness to themselves or anyone else. Unemployed school leavers could be having the time of their lives now if they did not waste it appearing on television programmes. They live in what would seem unimaginable comfort to any middle-class school leaver of 25 years ago, with heated homes, hot baths, nn particular shortage of food or clothes and plenty of pocket money. Having watched three or four of these programmes, I can honestly say that not a single teenager appearing on any of them has struck me as being remotely employable in any capacitY, Yet they demand £70 a week, as if they had a family to support and a rent or a molt' gage to pay, for work which nobody in hiS senses would pay more than £20 a week for Will nobody cry `humbug' when politician5 start talking of compassion?
As things are, Mrs Thatcher seems hapPY to take the blame for every factory which has to close as a result of its own incompetence and unprofitability. These closures are not the result of her `monetarist' policies but of years of overmanning, idle work practices, overtaxation and featherbedding. It is this failure of MO Thatcher's Government to explain what is happening in the country which will lo5e Crosby to the hellish Mrs Williams and her troupe of whimpering schoolteachers. fri; stead of telling us the truth, she has allowed an unholy campaign of misrepresentation, mostly emanating from the press depart: ments of the various Ministries, but I honestly believe that not a single civil set' Niant has yet been declared redundant.
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