Who pays for the dawn?

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Tony Benn, discusses some policies GUESS WHO'S going to pay for it all when the glorious Day of the Alternative Economic Strategy dawns?

Constructing models of capitalist expansionary measures which might with luck and no countermeasures begin to mop up unemployment, Michael Meacher (billed as 'a prominent supporter of Tony Benn') gave the answer in the New Statesman (August 14).

Labour could start by a massive devaluation of sterling. If other currencies did not retaliate, this could, it's been calculated, come up with one million jobs. If...

If workers take a cut in living standards. One condition for success is that "unions and professional and managerial associations accept a firm policy on incomes so that the huge job-creating potential of this exercise is not dissipated in a pay spiral to protect real living standards"

How depressingly familiar. Workers pay for crisis. And workers pay for 'recovery'. . (The inclusion of professional and managerial associations' is also depressingly familiar as a lie - when have these well-heeled types ever taken a cut in their standards, by the time they've worked through the perks, evasions and exemptions they're so good at wangling?)

Of course Bro. Meacher throws in a 'quid pro quo' which, he says, amounts to more than just dressing up 'naked pay restraint'. What is it? Participation schemes! (Participate in your own pay cut).

Plus, maybe, a tax return five years later or some shares in 'the firm's capital appreciation tomorrow to match pay limitation today'. RACHEL LEVER, a member of the Benn Campaign Committee, replies to M ichael Meacher Just in case we still had too much to spend that we were daring to buy up some of the good meant for export, it would be inappropriate' to expand public spending for the first couple of years, until the 'devaluation effects have reasonably fully worked their way through the economy'.

So meanwhile there's another four million out of work, prices are going skyhigh because devaluation will have driven up the price of everything that moves and much else besides, and we're still stuck with the Tory cuts.

And when reflation does come, in three stages 'in the latter half of a five-year parliamentary term' it'll be concentrated on capital projects: so don't expect a rise in your dole, grant, SS or pension.

Meanwhile, a completely free measure to increase jobs will be a ban on overtime: i.e. another cut in workers' income, since Meacher is not suggesting a cut in hours with no cut in wages.

It's interesting that nowhere in Meacher's models do the financial effects of unilateral nuclear disarmament figure. But maybe that is too much to expect for 'one parliament' Certainly full employment is reckoned 'too much' . Meacher adds up only three to 3½ million jobs, as against five million needed to absorb the unemployed and new schoolleavers - leaving one and a half to two million unemployed!

To improve this prospect, Meacher suggests that we test out a range of AES options 'on an appropriate {computer] model of the economy (not necessarily the Treasury one) to discover the optimum mix' None of these computer models, of course, has an equation for the effects of nationalisation without compensation and workers' control.

But now we know what Michael Meacher's AES looks like. And it's time we heard from other leaders of the Labour Left exactly what they mean by an Alternative Economic Strategy'.

Models, not rhet Last manae political editor, argued that to return Britain to full employment, government would have to create New Statesman, 14th August