The Confessions of a Tory MP

Cyril Osborne, Tory MP for Louth since 1945, often blurts out his thoughts on the state of the country without much regard for the embarrassment it must cause to his Party. He is a stockbroker, a company director, and an executive member of the Association of British Chambers of Commerce; he has a special interest in trade and finance.

He is gloomy about the present, and pessimistic about what comes after. Speaking to the staff conference of the Wholesale Textile Association at Oxford on July 9 he struck out in all directions; with force if not always with accuracy, if we judge by the report in the Times: “The Western capitalist system,” he said, is facing its gravest crisis since 1931, and “the communist powers” are not in better shape.

He found that in most countries excess manufacturing capacity has been built up in many basic industries, and “no one seemed to know how to increase consumption without starting galloping inflation”:

“They were all trying to export more and at the same time cut down on imports. President Kennedy was beaten by the problem and Germany’s exuberance was slowing down. The whole Common Market is losing its value, while Canada is down and out. Neither Government nor Opposition in this country is sure what is the right answer.”

Discounting some exaggeration, Mr. Osborne’s description of trade conditions in the Western world is indisputable. There are an increasing number of firms and industries here and across the Atlantic that are working far below capacity; not because they could not expand output by getting more workers out of the hundreds of thousands of job-seekers, but because they can’t find enough buyers who will offer profitable prices for their products. In some big industries, coal and railways, shipbuilding and aircraft production, the number of jobs is falling as sales decline.

It is a telling point Mr. Osborne makes that the countries are all trying to increase exports while curtailing imports, forgetting that one country’s exports are another country’s imports. (Mr. Osborne probably does not know that Socialists were making the point before he was born). And Mr. Osborne is at least getting a little nearer to the truth when he doubts whether the remedy is to be found in the Common Market, or in Kennedy’s policies, or in Canadian dreams of greatness, or in the way they run their trade in Russia. According to him, “the communist powers” are anxiously watching to see if we can find the key to the problem.

But first a word or two about Mr. Osborne’s personal and Party responsibility. He tells us now that the workers (and “the management”) have got to work harder and expect less, and put up with the loss of jobs that will follow the bankruptcy of many inefficient firms and that even so it is uncertain whether recovery can come “without the cruel harshness of an economic slump”: in other words, back to the nineteen thirties and the depression years.

He finds the root of the trouble in the outlook of this generation, “that has been told it can vote itself anything it desires.” But who told them that if they voted a Conservative Government back into power it meant voting to double the standard of living in this generation, and meant “Prosperity and Peace,” and “prosperity and opportunity for all”? Who told the electors in 1959 that 1951, when the Tories came into power, “was a turning point in British history”? Turning away from what to what? Surely it wasn’t supposed to mean turning to the grim outlook Mr. Osborne now threatens us with?

And it is transparently clear that Mr. Osborne knows no better than those he slates how to put things right. He wants the workers to work harder and expect less so that prices will be lower and British goods improved in quality. But just as it is impossible for all the world’s exports to expand if all the worlds’ imports are being cut—which Mr. Osborne sees—it is likewise impossible to make trading conditions better by having each worker producing more and buying less.

And while British industries are lowering prices and raising quality and producing more, what are the rest of the world’s manufacturers supposed to be doing? They will all be chasing the same elusive solution.

But note just how silly Mr. Osborne’s solution is. The problem, as stated by him, is “how to increase consumption” since many industries have excess capacity which will not be used unless consumption is increased—and his remedy is (hat consumption should be decreased (The workers must “expect less.”)

We have to correct one of Mr. Osborne’s errors, his belief that no one seems to know how to increase consumption without starting inflation. Socialists know very well how to do this and have been trying to get workers to heed it for a long, long time. All it needs is to bring the production and the consumption together. The world’s population needs, and would like, to increase its consumption of all kinds of things by very large amounts. The world’s resources of human labour, nature given materials, and machinery, etc., could vastly increase output of the things people want. Let Mr. Osborne tell us why the two should not be brought into direct relationship, with production solely for use without the complexities of buying, selling and profit-making that the Western and Eastern powers agree in supposing to be necessary.
H.