Verse
Scheele, Roy
a strict and blanket limit on everybody's rise in earnings. But the government is absolutely insistent that there must be yet another year at least, in which the pay policy continues. Without...
...But they will not have an easy time of it, especially since price rises-in January went up by an exceptionally large amount...
...namely the hostility of business to any sort of tightening of the price-control system...
...The crisis of British capitalism, then...
...This is why it has been necessary for the government to tighten up its control of prices...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 O0 ROY SCHEELE THE DAY TRIP Among other things forgive me, Muses, for while on Parnassus we missed the spring...
...But as soon as you say that, in criticism of government irrationality or cowardice, you are faced with another example of the same thing on the other side...
...is one in which economic realities and political realities seem to be drifting apart...
...this: 29 April 1977:264...
...The tendency of most parties to the debate, when such a situation arises, is to say that one or other of these "realities" is not a reality at all...
...Similarly, the trade unions tend to say that refusal to concede price (or import) controls is simply a device of businessmen who want to keep up profits...
...Neither, of course, does the other current political "hot potato"--"devolution...
...The economic problems will remain...
...It would be tempting to think that in such a situation the extension of participation in decision-making within industry is the only long-term answer...
...But the point is that it does not address itself to the questions that most bother people: for all its fundamental idealism, worker participation has little to say to the immediate question of prices and wages...
...Without giving evidence of a willingness to control price rises, it has no hope of getting a renewal of the pay policy when it comes up for renewal in the summer...
...But after a few days of rejoicing, and some mildly enthusiastic noises from the unions themselves, the government seems to have decided to scrap any plans it might have had to implement that report...
...But as soon as the government faces up to one reality--namely the need to give something to the wage-earners and especially the wage-earners with skill or responsibility--it falls foul of another...
...In other words, the policy of tighter price controls, however necessary politically, makes economic nonsense...
...Only by a combination of tax cuts and price controls (and perhaps some import controls too) can the government have any hope of swinging things in its favor and preventing a breaking of trade union ranks on a catastrophic scale...
...Like the Bullock concept of extending participation in industry, the "nationalist" concept of widening participation through some form of self-determination for Wales and Scotland is basically a means for "managing" a situation which is beginning to look unmanageable on any other terms...
...Nothing which gained the concerted hostility of industrialists to the extent that the Bullock Report did could be totally lacking in good ideas...
...This is why it is virtually inevitable that the Chancellor of the Exchequer will have to make big tax cuts in the budget in early spring...
...But even the new policy on price rises just announced will not be enough: f o r - - as Mr...
...Thus, if Tony Crosland was right in his last important contribution to Labor party economic strategy, the cuts in public expenditure demanded by the business community (and the IMF bosses) as a condition of getting the big IMF loan at the end of last year were similarly irrational: that is to say, they made no economic sense, however necessary it was politically to make them...
...If either comes to pass, it will be more for political than economic reasons...
...That is why, in the short term, the defeat of the government's devolution plans is only a set-back, not a rout...
...Hattersley, the price minister admitted--even the new controls cannot do much by themselves to stop price-rises, and hence demands for corresponding wagerises...
...There have long been those (including many proponents of that curious body of thought known among Catholics as the Church's "social teaching"--as though there were any other...
...Without this, they say, there is no hope of controlling inflation...
...But the government's job is surely to face the awkward fact that both kinds of pressure----economic and political---are real...
...Thus, the Confederation of British Industry, representing business, has tended to say (and still says) that the tightening up of price controls is simply an unwarranted "capitulation" to trade union pressure...
...The recent arrival on people's desks of copies of the "Bullock Report" might have been calculated to warm the cockles of such people's hearts, for it suggests far-reaching legal and other reforms to ensure the presence of workers on company boards of directors, through elections conducted by trade union machinery...
...The businessmen say, with some justification, that price controls don't work where they are supposed to, but do have damaging effects where they should not...
...Like so many others before it, it seems destined to gather dust on some bureaucrat's shelf for many years to come...
...who have diagnosed the basic ills of industrial capitalism in terms of lack of involvement in decisionmaking at the level of the firm or industry...
...And this is not because it is a piece of nonsense...
...BRIAN WICKER (Brian Wicker & Commonweal's regular correspondent in Great Britain...
Vol. 104 • April 1977 • No. 9
