From Hammurabi to Hattersley
Ferdinand Mount
The fatigue is terrible. Steam rises, sweat pours from 'the government front bench as from a rugger changing-room. Weary bodies flop against one another; tired subordinate clauses dwindle into inaudibility. At the same time, there is a kind of weird nonchalance in the air, like that carefree quality often observed in soldiers who have spent too long in the front line. `I'm afraid he's bomb-happy today', one ADC said of his Minister, after yet another statement on the crisissituation-emergency-dispute-chaos. The first sell-out is rarely agreed before the next lot are out on strike. There comes a point when you no longer care what you are saying. It doesn't matter where you finish up in a statement or an argument, anything to escape from that dreadful, incessant booming of the opposition guns and the unnerving rattle of sniper fire from your own left wing. Oh for the tranquility of the ministerial limousine and the deep, deep peace of the private office.
How else can one explain the strange, fantastical things senior ministers are saying, almost all drawn out of them towards the end of a gruelling bout of questioning? You rub your eyes and wonder whether the Prime Minister really did complain that 'this is a totally acquisitive society.' Does he seriously believe that greed can really be what is wrong with a people whose standard of living has actually declined under this government? And in what way are the acquisitions of Sussex farms and Caribbean suntans exempt from this Tawneyesque stricture?
Then an hour or so later you rub your eyes again and wonder whether the Attorney-General really did say, 'It depends whether the intimidation is of a lawful character.' Can there exist a code a law anywhere which provides for lawful intimidation? And indeed it turns out with embarrassing rapidity that, if there does, it isn't ours. Mr Patrick Mayhew reminds the Attorney that the courts have held that 'intimidation' is to be given its everyday meaning and that it is a criminal offence.
And did Mr Albert Booth, the Employment Secretary. really say that 'I am more likely to be guided by what Frank Allaun says than by the remarks of the two gentlemen to whom he referred', the two gentlemen being the Governor of the Bank of England and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Mr Allaun being a sanctimonious pacifist loony of the far left? Ah, slight correction here, the correction itself indicating a certain mental fatigue. Mr Booth, it seems, thought Mr Allaun was referring not to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Mr Joel Barnett, a Labour politician, but to the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Douglas Wass, a civil servant. Speedy apologies to Mr Barnett. As for Sir Douglas and the Governor, presumably they can go jump in a lake.
Even Shirley Williams joins in this craven flight from collective responsibility, or indeed from responsibility of any kind. Yes, she regrets that some schools should be closed by the caretakers' strike, serious repercussions, sympathises with parents, children, teachers, strongly believes that schools should be kept open, wherever possible, regrets often not possible, regrets she can't do anything to interfere with independence of local education authorities. There's nothing like a picket line for reminding Cabinet Ministers of their impotence.
All this is coherence itself compared with the daily verbal self-strangulation of the Home Secretary, Mr Merlyn Rees. The convolutions of his paragraphs twine and intertwine into one of those nightmares of snakes so common on Freudian couches, except that there is a bland, unfrightening quality about his delivery which reduces the tangle to the quality of overcooked but underseasoned spaghetti — now where was I? If I have got it down right Mr Rees seems to be talking about 'people in Liverpool being buried in cemeteries on top of lots of other bodies or not quite certain where other bodies are buried. I am not prepared — my Rt. Hon. friend is not prepared — to have dead bodies used as political footballs but something has gone wrong.' What Dickensian horror lurks here? Are there bodysnatchers at work, scurrying through the back streets of Anfield and Everton to deliver their grim cargo in time for Saturday's cup-tie? Or has Mr Rees been at the embalming fluid?
But hush, now Mr Rees has moved on to talk about people who are afraid to give evidence of extortion to the police and he says: if they are afraid, they deserve all they get.' He himself would not be afraid, his father would not be afraid, his father walked out of Wales because of picketing. Brave as lions, all the Reeses are: give them a police escort and half-a-dozen men from the Special Branch and they're a match for anyone.
These ramblings of a dying ministry are neither haphazard nor purposeless. They demonstrate, with the lambency of fatigue, the instincts of the present Cabinet; on the one hand, the terror of insisting that it is of the essence of a free society that the law be observed; and on the other hand, a readiness to spawn further bureaucratic controls and new Bills. They would rather pass new laws (indeed, it is only the lack of a Parlimentary majority that stops a flood of them) than enforce the ones we already have.
So it is that, leaving aside as they should be left the Prime Minister's desp erate appeals to the TUC to patch up some kind of pre-election concordat (no, we don't call it a social contract any more), the Government's only concrete response to the present imbroglio is the Bill to give fresh powers to the Price Commission to control prices. The effect on the retail price index will be minuscule; indeed, in the dim dead past (November 1978) Mr Hattersley used to insist that the Price Commission was an instrument for sharpening competition and not designed for any purpose so vul gar as that of operating directly upon the retail price index. But this was before the Prime Minister let it be known that the removal of Section 9 of the Price Commission Act 1977 was the way to reform this acquisitive society.
How sadly our modern price controllers have fallen away from the self confidence of their forefathers. When Hammurabi imposed a wage and price freeze in ancient Babylon there was no bureaucratic jargon about removing Sec tion 9 and no cant about the acquisitive society. He simply pointed out that 'Ham murabi, the protecting king, am I. Difficult points have I made smooth, and radiance have I shed abroad.'
The Emperor Diocletian, too, as Robert Schuettinger and Eamonn Butler record in their gripping Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Control (Heritage Foundation), condemned with a magnificent certainty 'those practices by which the raging and boundless avarice is inflamed' — imposing the decisive sanction of the death penalty for breaches of his pay and price guidelines.
From Hammurabi to Hattersley it is a melancholy declension; the same remedy — wage and price controls — being sought for the same malady — the government clipping the coinage or printing too many banknotes — and failing in the same way.
One shakes one's head with the Tudor economist John Hales: 'I marvell therfor that this foresaid auctorrite is not taken a waye frome the foresaid officers, seinge that the longe experience haue so well declarid that the foresaid settinge of prices of victuall, do nothing at all bringe downe the highe price thereof. But I marvell mouche more at those men which have not only all Reddy seine the successe of price settinge, but also the suc cesse of the moste parte of proclamacons and penoull stattutes, and yet will holde oppinion this present derthe of victuall may be redressid bi setting of prices uppon victuall.'
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