Tony Benn: Conflicts of Interest: Diaries 1977-80 (ed. Ruth Winstone.) Hutchinson
Denis Healey: When Shrimps Learn to Whistle: Signposts for the Nineties Michael Joseph
This is the fourth volume of Tony Benn's political record of what he heard, saw and said in Cabinet, Party Conference and elsewhere, with his passing opinions thereon. A feature is his repeated frustration that the government of which he is a member should adopt policies which, as his own introduction puts it, came later to be known as "Thatcherism": - "Full employment is no longer on the agenda of a Labour Government. They haven't even got a strategy for the eighties. They simply haven't got a strategy." (8/3/77); "..there were we abandoning basic socialist principles while the band prepared for the Queen's Jubilee (21/5/77); " ..it is true that we are pursuing absolutely Tory policies and it is not surprising that the IMF like it or that the Labour movement should be getting restive (14/12/77); "This is the death of the Labour Party. It believes in nothing any more, except staying in power." (15/1/78)
Of the prospect of militancy being blamed for impending electoral defeat in 1979 he wrote: "...the reality is that we've had a right-wing Leader, a right-wing Cabinet, a right-wing manifesto and a right-wing campaign." (2/5/79) "I wouldn't worry about revolutionary socialism. I don't suppose there are half a dozen revolutionaries in London. There isn't a Labour Party - it's dead - and nobody has thought about socialism in this House for years." (20/5/80)
On oil revenues: "We are not putting it into capital expenditure or public investment of one kind or another; we are going to give it away in tax cuts: that is the measure of the Labour Government." (16/2/78) On "the sale of the century", the sale of BP: "We have provided a blueprint for selling off public assets in the future and we will have no argument against it. It is an outrage." (24/6/77) On Gerard Kaufman and closures in British Steel: "- the butcher, on behalf of the Government, of another great industry." (11/12/78) On going to visit a protest about closures in Corby, with its 72% Scottish workforce: "I couldn't tell them, but the Labour Cabinet had decided in February this year to support the closure of Corby. The guys are now faced with the prospect of 30 per cent male unemployment, and they have called in the Labour Party to help them fight. An awful irony; I felt terribly guilty." (11/9/76)
Of his colleagues: "When you get the so-called left of the Party so far to the right, then does it mean there is no support in the country for radical views?"
Some of the quotes from others ought to be written on their tombstones. Joel Barnett, to be made a peer of the realm in 1983, had this to say of proposed wage rises for Health Service workers : "...the trade union leaders have raised the expectations of people on £60 a week, who do not starve, and anyway 50 per cent of their wives are at work." (1/2/79) Roy Mason, Northern Ireland minister, when told that rising unemployment might cause civil unrest in Britain, replied: "Male unemployment in Northern Ireland is almost 30 per cent, and there is no trouble there." (6/7/78)
Throughout, he was hoping to make party policy more directly responsible to annual conference. Government policy, on the other hand, seemed not even to be in the control of the Government: "The Treasury doesn't want to upset the IMF, and the FO doesn't want to upset the EEC, and the Ministry of Defence doesn't want to upset Nato." (25/8/77) Pleasing the IMF led to what he came to call "the old Thatcher/Healey view on spending" (12/9/79) - "All this monetarist stuff is, in my view, absolute rubbish." He argued for protectionism against monetarism in the Cabinet on October 7th 1976, included in his previous volume Against the Tide. The previous December to that - Tuesday 9th - Healey had come to the Cabinet and said "We must get £3.75 billion cuts for 1977-78." By October 1977 Healey "for a disastrous policy" sat in Cabinet "radiating the approval of the world bankers."
Healey thirteen years later has some absorbing tales to tell about banking in his new selection of articles and speeches dating from 1947 until May of this year. The book takes its title from Kruschev's statement that the Soviet Union would give up Marx, Engels and Lenin only "when shrimps learn to whistle." Healey writes that "The future is now impossible to predict," and that advances in information technology "have made a nonsense of the old economic rules." The "globalisation" of computerised share marketing, deregulation, and "the invention of new financial instruments for hedging risk" now means that "nobody now knows where the risk lies if anything goes wrong." He says that it was reckoned in 1985 that 50 thousand billion dollars annually crossed the exchanges "in search of profit" as distinct from 2 thousand billion "to finance world trade." This former figure Healey reckoned three years later to have doubled to a hundred thousand billion.
There is instability caused by the strain of current world debts. An 80% increase in Third World debt, he says, has been caused specifically by conditions laid down by the industrial world and OPEC; eight hundred billion dollars have become irrecoverable in loans to the Third World from private banks. And America itself (May 1990) "has now got a very fragile financial system" - bailing out their Savings Banks alone is likely to cost "up to five hundred billion dollars." If he were the patriotic citizen of a poor Latin American country he writes, "I would be training youngsters of eighteen or nineteen to plant computer viruses in the banking systems in New York and then threaten to let rip unless the banks made a better deal than they are prepared to so far." Perhaps Tony Benn should have advised him to do the same to the IMF.
Then there is the new political instability to be feared from what Healey calls the "Balkanisation" of post-Gorbachev Europe. An "anarchy" of nation-states he says is an anachronism in a world with nuclear weapons. A new "world order" no less is needed, and he goes into some suggestions using the new Europe and the United Nations as the models. Then, having finished his twenty four pieces, together with signposts for a new world order, Healey sent the book to the publishers, who sent it to the printers. And then Iraq annexed Kuwait.
Some bits might still be useful here. In 1959 Healey wrote that Britain "..has a unique financial interest in the existing system by which Middle Eastern oil is produced and marketed. This special national interest is most dramatically illustrated by the stupendous contribution made by Kuwait to the dollar reserves of the sterling area and to the investment funds of the London capital market." It was the threat of withdrawal of funds from Britain by Kuwait in 1975, (Benn's diaries, July 1st) that forced a change in Government policy then. Regarding the influence of the debt crisis on the banking system, Healey wrote ten years later in 1985, "..the risk of breakdown is steadily increasing because the strains are becoming intolerable at both ends of the process." By May 1990 he could write, "Most of my American friends in financial institutions think the system would collapse if there were a recession."
In early nineteenth century Europe the newly-discovered ruins of ancient Empires were interpreted in two ways. Some saw them as images of past heathen civilisations whose ruination was a vindication of the values of the surviving civilisations of the present. Others including of course many of the Romantics saw them as in fact imaging a reminder and a warning of the future. Amidst all the present daily triumphalism about Eastern Europe, from newspaper ads about "super estates at silly prices" to pseudo-academic tripe about "the death of History", it seems to have been at least realised that Communism is not the only system that is capable of collapse.
