Is 2024 the new 1979? Or is the Hon lady talking parsnips?
RACHEL Reeves, her comedic gifts having possibly been underreported, claimed in a City lecture last night that we were back to 1979. She presented herself as the new Sir Geoffrey Howe, who was shadow chancellor this time 45 years ago.
Beside gluey Ms Reeves it could be observed that the late Sir Geoffrey was a skittish mover, a veritable Michael Flatley of repartee. I am not being sarcastic. He did have a distinct, dry sense of humour. But how do other aspects of Ms Reeves’ claim withstand examination?
Is 2024 the new 1979? Or is the hon lady talking parsnips?
She prepared for her lecture by attending Treasury questions in the Commons. Give her this, she has a better barber than old Geoffrey did. Where he had corrugated pepper-and-salt for hair, she wears a satin-black bob.
Huddled beside her on the opposition front bench sat her three shadow departmental colleagues: James Murray, Darren Jones, Tulip Siddiq. Which one of these titans can we see as the bullishly intellectual Nigel Lawson, who was one of Sir Geoffrey’s lieutenants? Which of them compares to the regulation-cutting tax expert Peter Rees, who in May 1979 became a Treasury minister in the first Thatcher government? A 2008 Guardian obituary of Lord Rees said ‘it is easy to forget how interventionist, regulatory and generally left of centre the Treasury tended to be’ in the 1970s. The Thatcherites hacked away at that bureaucracy but the Treasury has since reverted to Leftist interference. Does Ms Reeves have the anti-regulatory instincts to stop that? Er...
The best of her team yesterday, if only because he understood the value of brevity, was Mr Jones. He’s the one who looks like the late comedy actor Richard Wattis. He asked why everyone was so miserable. Nigel Huddleston, financial secretary to the Treasury, lacked the wit to reply ‘because you lot are so brilliant at spreading gloom’.
Jeremy Hunt, our current chancellor, was on perkier form. His budget may have gone down to a fanfare of raspberries but Mr Hunt gaily celebrated the plummeting inflation rate and the economy’s return to growth, which he said was better than ‘Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Germany and multiple other countries’. Sometime trombonist Sir Oliver Heald (Con, NE Herts) asked about the film industry, Mr Hunt noted that the recent Barbie film was made in Hertfordshire. High-tech devices were used to ‘simulate Californian sunshine’, he said. Mr Hunt was a sunshine simulator all of his own.
For comparison I dusted down Hansard’s report of Treasury questions on March 22, 1979. The chancellor, Denis
Healey, also boasted about the inflation rate but it was rather higher than the circa 3.5 per cent that may be announced today. In 1979 it was 13.3 per cent. Mr Healey was quite pleased with that, saying it had been worse when Labour was elected. Mr Healey also had a grumble about economic forecasters at the OECD and their tendency to get things wrong. Today it tends to be forecasters at the OBR but they’re basically the same people.
DURING PMQs, which followed immediately in the House that March day in 1979, James Callaghan claimed that the 13.3 per cent rate showed inflation had been ‘overcome’. After Opposition complaints about the level of the national debt (then at 55 per cent of gross national product – it is now 85 per cent), the Callaghan government’s answer to Nigel Huddleston, the more staid Robert Sheldon, said the answer to those worries was ‘to pursue the vigorous policy of the prime minister’. In today’s money that is called ‘sticking to the plan’.
As far as European comparisons went, Britain in 1979 was to the back of the peloton.
Giles Radice (Lab, N Durham) pointed out that other EEC countries were doing better. Mr Healey spoke forlornly about ‘aiming at European growth rates’. Bryan Gould (Lab, Southampton Test) argued that we would have been better off if we stopped sending £1 billion a year to Brussels. I always liked Bryan Gould.