A letter to Prince Charles
Nicholas Davenport
Your Royal Highness, we are all delighted that you do not live in an ivory tower but we are not so happy to see you walking about factory floors and listening to backchat from managers and men. This is just the way to obtain superficial judgments of the state of the British economy. It would be better,! venture to suggest, that you sit down and read the economic facts about our industrial decline. For example, the last review of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research gave these figures for the annual growth of output per person over the five years 1973-77: for mechanical engineering 0.1 per cent, for metal manufacture 2.9 per cent. for vehicles 1.2 per cent, for construction 2.9 per cent, for total manufacturing 0.4 per cent, which compared with 4.2 per cent for the previous five years 1969-73. As the Institute said, productivity growth has slumped. It is enough to make any conscientious manager noncommunicative.
Mr Edwardes, the super-manager of Leyland, said recently that one of his North American competitors was employing one hundred British immigrant managers. British management skill is much sought after abroad. The one hundred left Britain Stein raikvd■s. nni,ite pubs,
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because of over-taxation and general frustration. I don't suppose that you. Sir, have money troubles but managers as well as workers have money troubles every month when they have to pay their bills with what little money they have left after tax.
It is not, of course, only money troubles which make our best managers emigrate. It is despair and despondency over the reluctance of the trade unions to co-operate with the managements in productivity plans. The motor industry is the worst example. The productivity of Japanese and German motor workers is two to three times greater than our own. It was recently disclosed that strikes and go-slows cost our motor industry last year £1,000 million in lost output and exports. Imports of foreign cars jumped up 27 per cent. But what can Mr Edwardes and his managers do? They know that they cannot prevent over-manning by universal dismissals — union power will prevent that — but they cannot even sack a man who is slacking without risking a strike. You complain of managerial lack of the 'human touch'. But managers are not allowed to deal with the human worker — only with the trade union apparatchik.
When you told your audience at the lunch of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee at the Savoy Hotel: 'Unions are not impossible to deal with. Bloodymindedness, if it arises, must do so because of misunderstandings' you show — with respect, Sir — that you do not understand what has happened in our industrial relations. The prime minister might have told you, when you spent a working day with,him recently at No 10, that unions can become impossible to deal with. We have an example in the Civil Service union leaders who suddenly decided to hold up the whole government machine even before negotiations on their pay claim had begun. Bloody-mindedness does not arise out of 'misunderstandings' but out of a bitter confrontation between unions and the Establishment which has been building up for years. The 5 per cent pay norm was the spark of the final explosion. I happen to have made a study of the psychology of the workers' movement in a book called The Split Society (1964) in which I predicted the alienation of the working class which we are witnessing today. Using pyschiatric terms I distinguished five historical stages — Stress in the nineteen-twenties culminating in the General Strike, Depression in the nineteen-thirties, Sublimation in the war years, Frustration and Disillusionment under the Labour regime of 1945-51 and Pathological Cynicism under the Tory regime of 1951-64. What is important to realise is that this mood of Pathological Cynicism was extended under the Wilson regime and its successor, for the Labour government imposed strict pay policies for three years and then tried to insist on a provocative 'shilling in the £' for the fourth. The grass-root objection to antiinflationary pay policies is that they hurt workers — through dismissals and general unemployment — much more than they hurt managers and private employers. They therefore generate a social revolutionary thrust.
You, Sir, are above the social system, but you cannot fail to have noticed that the British people have been behaving recently in a very strange fashion, which your illustrious ancestors would have called 'unBritish'. Striking ambulance men have refused to carry the sick and dying to hospital. Water engineers have cut off supplies of water to innocent and helpless people. Pickets have stopped firms not connected with their wage dispute from doing their lawful trade. Ronald Butt in a recent number of Encounter commenting on the British 'sickness' said: 'We are in a decline as a result of one of those historic shifts in the temper and psyche of a nation for which there is no easy explanation' (he cannot have read The Split Society). Lord Hailsham in a recent Spectator wrote: 'A sign of a disintegrating society is an unwillingness to accept the traditional values of a society or the authority of its established institutions.'
Lord Hailsham, of course, attributed the disintegration of our society to the fact that for nearly thirty years the policies of the left-wing parties in the country have been based on the politics of envy and egalitarianism. Myself, I think it is due to good intentions going wrong. I must repeat what I wrote last week. It was the build-up of the socialist welfare state with its vast bureaucracy, pouring out money through the 'social wage' until public expenditure topped £70,000 million a year (over half the GDP) and involved borrowing £8,500 million a year, it was all this extravagance, inflated by absurdly dear money, which brought about our over-taxation and overregimentation and a disintegration of the British psyche. This is the British sickness— alienated workers not trying to raise their productivity or even caring two hoots about it and managers too oppressed by penal taxation and trade union obstruction even to try creating new enterprise. I beg to suggest, Sir, that at this critical time it is essential for all of us to get down to a deeper analysis of the causes of our present discontent than is possible in a shopfloor tete-a-tete.
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