Politics
The undramatic crisis
you may remember that recent adver- tisement by an insurance company in which an irritatingly cool voice reassures you: 'We won't make a drama out of a crisis.' Politics at present seems to be suffering from a reverse process — people are making a crisis out of what may be no more than a drama. Drama there is a- plenty. There is grand guignol on the picket lines, farce at Hobart House as Mr MacGregor, Mr Walker and Mr Michael Eaton explain contradictorily what each is doing, tragedy as a once-great union falls through the hubris of its leader, a mixture of all three as that leader looks to Libya to defend the interests of British workers. There are lurid leading actors, walk-on parts for bishops and judges, first rate crowd scenes, something of Brecht, John Arden, Shakespeare and Cecil B. de Mille.
Amid the confusion, excitement mounts and the question is not the famous one falsely attributed to Mr Callaghan when he returned from Guadeloupe, but rather: 'Crisis? Which crisis?' It is difficult when one sees policemen dodging bricks or Mr Scargill expressing his opinions or Col Gadaffi kissing Mr Roger Windsor, not to believe that civilisation is tottering and to 'go a funny red colour when anyone sug- gests that things are not as bad as they seem. But if one runs methodically through the list of current ills, one begins to wonder whether crisis really is the right word. There is not, for example, a crisis in the British working class, which has failed to display even a cajoled, let alone a spon- taneous solidarity with the striking miners. The Conservative Party is in one piece. The sterling crisis, apparently, does not exist. The lights are on. There is not even a crisis in the law, since, although it has been defied, it has also, so far and more or less, prevailed. There clearly is a crisis in the NUM, and so in the coal industry too. This has led people to suppose that this must mean that there is a crisis everywhere else. The Left believes that the miners spear- head the revolution, and so is beside itself with excitement. Tories remember 1974, and also Macmillan's supposed apothegm about miners, the Pope and the Brigade of Guards being the only fellows one shouldn't tangle with. The day of reckon- ing, they all agree, must come. Yet we have waited seven months and nothing much has been reckoned.
If there were crisis, rather than drama, all the rather plain, dull bits of our gov- ernmental arrangements would have altered. They would have been put on a war footing. Instead of which, under the starless ceiling of a drab room in the Cabinet Office, the Star Chamber has been meeting very much as usual. This commit- tee, misnamed after a misunderstood in- stitution of which Cardinal Wolsey made much use, is trying to balance the conflict- ing claims made on the public purse. Lord Whitelaw, Mr Biffen, Mr Brittan and Mr Younger (and, before his sad injury, Mr Tebbit) do their best to reconcile spending ministers with the not very frightening figure of the Chief Secretary to the Treas- ury, Mr Peter Rees. And among the subjects which they discuss, the effect of the miners' strike is only one, the others many. Mr Walker would like the artificially increased cost of electricity to be spread round the place in the hope that it will not be much noticed; Mr Lawson would prefer it to be passed on directly and visibly to those who use electricity. Given that elec- tricity prices, since they are set by a monopoly anyway, are semi-fictionafat the. best of times, some compromise can surely be reached. This is about the extent to which the drama has produced an econo- mic crisis.
I am not pretending that the scene in the Star Chamber is a cheerful one. I doubt whether Mr Rees's eyes are twinkling merrily through his Pickwickian spectacles over the claims of Mr Norman Fowler for his army of health service operatives, nor those of Mr Michael Heseltine for his real army. The point is that the problems which are being discussed predate the miners' drama. They have been with governments for years and years. Since 1976, they have produced — if one can have such a thing a permanent crisis.
Here are just a few of the difficulties. Defence spending's increase in real terms by three per cent per year is soon to end. Mr Heseltine has been planning, without good authority, on a two per cent annual increase in real terms after that. Even without planned increases, the cost of defence, if modern experience is anything to go by, always rises faster than costs generally. In the health service, the era of 'cuts' has brought a larger number of employees than ever before. The social services have to pay out to 300,000 more of the unemployed than they had budgeted for. There are farmers to be bribed, inner city areas to be placated (urban aid, for instance, giving with one hand what gov- ernment withdrew, in 'the form of local government grant reductions, with the other). These and similar have defeated every government: it will take no more than a mild winter to see Mr Scargill off.
Some accommodation will be arrived at. There will not, apparently, be a repetition
of the debacle in November 1980 when Messrs Walker and Prior went round tell- ing people that they had taken on Chancel- lor and Prime Minister and won, and Chancellor and Prime Minister retaliated by putting up taxes. Mr Lawson will have to use his contingency reserve and increase his estimate of the proceeds from asset sales; he will not beat back every claim and he may not be able to cut taxes very much next year. With that magic that 20th century governments have been the first in history to perfect, something like a billion pounds will 'get lost', and honour, as it is called, will be satisfied. But one has only to describe the process which culminates in the Star Chamber to see how it is unlikely to resolve the undramatic crisis of modern government. For months, Mr Rees sees departmental ministers in `bi-laterals' in which they present to him details of demands for spending which he could not possibly be in a position to counter; and they themselves, having no administrative tool for doing so, have not the least idea of what anything that their department does really costs. The Treasury does not have the power to investigate the cost control of any depart- ment. Even the tiny Efficiency Unit, the heir of the Rayner Scrutiny, can only look for 'waste' in administrative method, never seriously question the character of policy. The Star Chamber itself is rather expensive, since any spending minister on the comm- ittee will first have secured his own demands (Mr Younger has done it again for Scot- land); and by the time the arguments reach it, they have turned into political battles — Lord Whitelaw's adjudication can be no- thing more than an ad hoc way of ending what, in the phrase of the moment, is called a 'costly and damaging dispute'. Each year, the Government manages and disposes of a sum larger than any previously managed and disposed of in British history, and still it does so with an insouciance which sorts strangely with the rather respectable bourgeois characters which compose it. Most of these men, even those theoretically committed to economy. prudence and paying for their own lunches rather than burdening the public treasure, equate increasing the spending of their department with improving its work and bettering the lives of those with which it deals. Whether or not that is what they would like to be, they become people who know the value of everything and the price of nothing, which is really just as bad as the other way round. What all this means is that the Treasury's struggle each year to hold spending back — represented as the most savage attack on public welfare — is so crude and ineffectual that it cannot prevent increases, even when the aim of government is to do so. A Government failing to do what it says is its great task is, though one would not want to put it dramatically, a government in a crisis.
Charles Moore
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