No Cuba Sir: Patrick Cosgrave . does Stuart Holland an injustice
in suggesting that he intends to construct a second Cuba in this country. In Cuba, all large-scale industry is stateowned. Stuart has only proposed that at most one quarter of the largest hundred concerns should be state-owned. The main thrust of his advocacy has been directed towards planning agreements, devices of Gaullist rather than Marxist, or even social democratic, provenance. Stuart is certainly no isolationist. He would aim to retain friendly relations with continental Western Europe—including, if possible, continued membership of the Common Market. In short, he is a mainstream social democrat of more advanced views than the unfortunate Dr Haseler.
I fear that he may also have done the present Secretary of State for Energy an injustice. Mr Benn's pronouncements and proposals seem to rest on two themes. The first, the need to strengthen British industry, is as old as the hills—and is compatible with more or less any political standpoint. The second, the recognition that it is important to get the consent of working people if policies are actually. to be implemented, seems eminently sensible in the light of the experience of the past few years. Most Marxist regimes ignore the problem of consent—though events at different times in the post-war period in East Germany, Hungary and Poland (twice) suggest that it does not necessarily vanish. Benn is less obviously identified with the authoritarian, elitist, and paternalist strands within the advanced social democracy of the misnamed 'Labour left' than Holland but it is by no means clear that he favours anything more radical than a mixed economy with some state ownership of manufacturing and a level of protection modest by comparison with that advocated by the late Joseph Chamberlain, not normally treated by historians as a Marxist totalitarian.
I doubt if serious advocacy of a Cubanstyle socialist 'siege economy' could be found outside minor Marxist sects of little importance even at badly-attended meetings of trade union and Labour Party branches. Socialist critics of the 'mixed economy' social democratic , consensus, regrettably a tiny band, are distinguished in the main by their grim and relentless oppos
ition to measures, such as import controls, which would take us towards a siege economy on the grounds that they are at best irrelevant and at worst positively harmful. Donald Roy
15 Rusholme Road, London SW15
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