Communists can make jolly good jam, too

Alan Watkins
Saturday 19 October 2002 19:00 EDT
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Before the collapse of Communism, I was talking to the late Lord Bauer, the great economist, who was maintaining that such regimes were always inefficient. I replied that the Polish state concern Krakus made excellent pickled cucumbers and beetroot, and jams of equal quality, available at competitive prices from all supermarkets; more cheaply, in fact, than the premium brands sold by British manufacturers.

Peter Bauer almost received a Nobel prize and was a very nice man. But he was not a great one for trundling round supermarkets. As a strong believer in empirical evidence, he did not have the evidence to hand. He had never heard of Krakus strawberry jam. He refused to concede that communist jam could in any circumstances be superior to capitalist jam. Mr Frank Johnson of The Daily Telegraph, who was the third party in this discussion, intervened to say that, whatever the merits of the products, he was fairly sure the Poles themselves did not see them.

This I was prepared to concede, as I was the thesis about the inefficiency of Communism. But it was, I added, precisely because of this inefficiency that Krakus jam was so good. The Communists adopted an old-fashioned method of manufacture, simply boiling the fruit with the sugar, putting the ensuing product into jars and selling it; just as the Women's Institute would at its summer fayre. They were less concerned with making a profit than with creating employment. It may be that, as Mr Johnson hazarded, we rather than the Poles benefited. But that did not affect the argument.

It is not an argument that would be accepted by Mr George Bush junior – or by Mr Tony Blair either. A few weeks ago Mr Bush delivered a speech in which he outlined the conditions that states would have to satisfy to render them safe from US meddling. One was that they should either possess or be on their way to possessing democratic institutions; the other that, if they did not already have a "market economy", they should be making it their business to create one.

The first condition, about democratic institutions, was very little different from what J F Kennedy said in his inaugural address about bearing any burden, paying any price, to advance the cause of freedom. The words were warmly applauded by the New Statesman of the time, though – as anyone could have predicted – they provided the pretext for military intervention all over the globe from South America to Vietnam.

But at no stage did Kennedy or, until Mr Bush came along, any of his successors lay down that to win the approval or even to secure the toleration of the US, a country must adopt Republican economics on top of democratic institutions. This is colossal cheek. It may well turn out to be wrong as well. Not only is it, by any standards, an illegitimate interference in the affairs of another country. The market economy may also have reached its zenith and now be in decline. There is no need to be apocalyptic. It is not going to come suddenly to an end, as Communism did in 1989. But neither in this country nor in the United States do things look as rosy as they did, say, three years ago. The fashion is to blame "terrorism" for this change. But terrorism has been around since the 1970s and before. One difference, however, is that its causes have been extended from a united Ireland and a Palestinian state to a sense of grievance among various groups of Mohammedans. The more important difference is that it has run beyond Europe and the airlines to the Far East and the US mainland. Americans are unused to danger.

It serves as an excellent decoy. Iraq provides an equally serviceable diversion. It is the oldest trick in politics. Things are going wrong or are not as right as they should be. Therefore blame somebody else: whether the enemy outside or the enemy within. Terrorism can be depicted as either or both, just as Communism was in the United States for virtually the entire post-war period – and just as usefully for the well-being of what the retiring President Dwight Eisenhower called "the military-industrial complex".

When the US looked as if it might blow up the world in the 1950s, the principal opposition to it in this country was the left wing of the Labour Party led by Aneurin Bevan. On the whole they have been proved correct, certainly over the level of rearmament inaugurated by Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour Chancellor, and maintained by his Conservative successors after 1951. But in respectable political circles there is still a marked reluctance to admit this.

Even in those far-off days, however, those who were supporters of the US in foreign policy were nevertheless clear that we ordered things differently in our domestic economic arrangements. Today their equivalents take a pride in running an economy nearer to Mr Bush's heart. This is as true of Mr Gordon Brown, a great enthusiast for most things American, as it is of Mr Blair.

One had only to listen to the Prime Minister's specious defence of the Private Finance Initiative at the Labour conference to realise how far the rot had spread. "More hospitals," he chanted, "more schools," like Ramsay MacDonald's "on and on and on and up and up and up", and how the delegates cheered! One of them, true, did liken Mr Brown's generosity to the capitalists to buying your house on your credit card. It is more like buying your house on a mortgage but handing it over to the building society once the payments have been completed.

The reason Mr Blair has supported Mr Bush as enthusiastically as he has over Iraq, even if it has been with qualifications, is not merely that he believes in the Anglo-American alliance or the special relationship as his deluded predecessors did. It is also that he wants to run a variant of Mr Bush's market economy. The French and the Germans do not. There was a notably silly article in the Financial Times a couple of weeks ago saying they could not go to war in Iraq because they were so weak economically. On the contrary: they do not want to go to war there or, indeed, anywhere else if they can help it because they had quite enough experience of fighting from the beginning of the French Revolution to the end of the Second World War. That, indeed, was why the European Union was set up in the first place.

It was a capitalist enterprise, what was called "a rich man's club" in the People's Party in the days when the party opposed our membership. But with Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and assorted Socialists as the principal parties, Europe was never an enthusiast for the market economy in the sense in which Mr Bush now uses that term. How like, how very like our own dear Labour Party to be giving its support to the market economy at the very moment when it may be going down the plughole!

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