I love newspapers: national, local, daily and weekly. I spend at least two, sometimes three, hours every day reading them. On arrival in any new place, almost the first thing I do is buy a copy of the local paper. It is the quickest way of getting a sense of what the place is about. And almost always the best bit is the letters page. Nothing tells you more about the nature of a newspaper and its catchment area than the views of its readers. Indeed, a friend of mine used to say that when the revolution arrived and he became chairman of the committee of public safety, his first act would be to send for the bound volumes of the Daily Telegraph and round up all the people who had written to it over the previous 25 years. There might be a few injustices, he reckoned, but he would probably catch most of the potential counter-revolutionaries in one go.
Much the same could be said, in reverse, of the people who write to The Guardian – so much so that there is probably a thick file on them at the headquarters of MI5. What’s more, I suspect that the Royal College of Psychiatrists may spend a bit of time studying the letters pages of both The Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. In their different ways, they provide interesting evidence about the formation of public attitudes. Sometimes they also yield up interesting facts which might otherwise escape public attention, but have an immediate relevance to current events. One such bobbed up on The Guardian’s letters page last week, just after the newly-created Office of Budget Responsibility had published its first report on the British economy. By and large, its analysis supported Chancellor George Osborne’s plans for massive cuts in public spending and public employment.
The letter writer was Professor Robert Davis of Glasgow University and he wanted to remind the chairman of the OBR, the somewhat right-wing economist Sir Alan Budd, of something he had said on television 18 years ago. Budd had been chief economic advisor to the Treasury during Margaret Thatcher’s years in power and this is what he said in retrospect about the vicious cuts programme carried out by his political masters in the 1980s. “The nightmare I sometimes have about that whole experience runs as follows. There may have been people making actual policy decisions who never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation.
“They did see, however, that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment. And raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes… that what was engineered there, in Marxist terms, was a crisis of capitalism which recreated a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since.”
This, of course, is what many of us on the left were saying at the time about the ultimate purpose of Thatcherism, as planned in advance by people such as Nigel Lawson, Nicholas Ridley and Geoffrey Howe – the people in Budd’s nightmare vision. Their whole intention was to smash the trade unions, which they believed had become monstrously too powerful, and (with a little help from Arthur Scargill) they set out to destroy the unions’ bargaining power by throwing their members on the dole.
It worked, and they were able to do it largely because of the financial bounty of North Sea oil revenues, which easily matched the gigantic cost of unemployment benefit for more than 3 million trade unionists. Without that cushion, the whole strategy would have been impossible – the British taxpayer would not have stood for the tax increases required to meet the Thatcherite bill.
Davis ended his letter with a gentle hint to Budd that he may be participating in a similar scam all over again. “We can only hope that Budd is this time confronting the political agenda behind his economic analysis with his eyes wide open”, he wrote. But let us be realistic: this Government is far, far worse even than Thatcher’s. Not even the Iron Lady would have dared to attempt the kind of scorched-earth strategy Osborne is pursuing. His clear purpose is to return this country to the conditions which existed before the Second World War. And he is doing it with the willing participation of the Liberal Democrats.
What a moment, then, for the Labour Party to be engaged in an internal spat (I would hesitate to call anything so bloodless a battle) to replace Gordon Brown. At the very moment when we desperately need a tough, hard-hitting opposition at Westminster, its heavyweights are poncing round the country in a series of so-called hustings, leaving only the gentle-voiced Alistair Darling to do the business of opposition.
It is the ultimate condemnation of Labour’s imbecile constitution, wished upon us during the Bennite insurrection which wrecked Michael Foot’s leadership. And here is a paradox: Michael was the most left wing leader the party has ever had, yet he was elected exclusively by its MPs, without the participation of the constituency members or the unions. The Bennite constitution gave us Tony Blair and the Iraq war.
