Letter: Marr's question needs a reply
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Your support makes all the difference.From Sir Fred Catherwood
Sir: Andrew Marr's new book, Ruling Britannia, is as important for the nation's political system as Will Hutton's is for our economic system and we ignore them at our peril.
Mr Marr cannot be written off as another "panacea of the fashionable left" (Andrew Neil's Comment, 15 September). He has hit all the nails on the head as sharply and as hard as Mr Hutton and if he is not as firm on the political remedies as Hutton is on the economic, it is because they are more fundamental and because sovereign power rests with the institutions that have a vested interest in the status quo. It is also a good deal more difficult.
Mr Neil bases his argument on the current fashionable but unsubstantiated dogma that indicative planning in the Sixties and the social contract in the Seventies failed and "hastened the decline they were meant to be reversing". I've just had to look back at the figures, which were so stark that I put them in an appendix in my memoirs, just published. In the late Sixties, unemployment was around half a million; the trade balance recovered strongly; and, between 1964 and 1970, investment in manufacturing plant rose by 45 per cent, a level it did not regain until the export- led recovery of the late Seventies, which put our trade once more into surplus. Some decline!
The Eighties were an unmitigated disaster. Investment did not regain the 1979 level for nine years, and by 1993 it had dropped back again to the level of 15 years before. Trade was even more disastrous. The non- oil balance had dropped from a respectable pounds 1bn surplus in 1980 to a crippling pounds 24bn deficit in 1989, by which time the huge trade surplus in oil (a one-off pounds 43bn squandered over 10 years) was petering out, and in place of our throbbing export factories were shopping malls selling imports to those who still had jobs.
All this happened under a Parliament that is said to be sovereign and therefore responsible. Andrew Marr's question cannot be evaded: "If the British Parliament is indeed sovereign, then why is it so weak?"
Yours sincerely,
Fred Catherwood
Cambridge
15 September
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