Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

My Lords, my economic adviser was not trained at the LSE or at any university that I know of. He is a very humble man who acts as a gamekeeper on the moors above the house where I live. He watches the road between Saddleworth and Marsden to two small towns. He always used to say that he could tell long before Selwyn Lloyd when there was going to be a credit squeeze, because when the employers in Marsden were going over into Saddleworth to poach the labour and to take them back in a coach, and when the employers in Saddleworth were going over into Marsden and doing the same thing and offering them more inducement to go to Saddleworth with the additional expense and overheads of running buses and scarce materials like oil and petrol, then, he said, “That is the time you are going to have a credit squeeze”, and in those days he used to be right. I went up to see him the other day and he said, “Hey, what’s happening down in London? It’s worse now than ever I remember it since the war. Why isn’t there a credit squeeze? I’m all wrong with my assumptions.” I said, “Having a credit squeeze is out of fashion. The government tried it as soon as they came into power, but they soon dispensed with it as a disciplinary method because they were scared stiff of creating unemployment, because elections are won and lost on employment.”

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations:

• ER: East Riding
• GM: Greater Manchester
• NR: North Riding
• NY: North Yorkshire
• SY: South Yorkshire
• WR: West Riding
• WY: West Yorkshire

Comment

Comment

Margaret Thatcher on that period:

Our sentiments should have been very different. The effects of the reflationary Budget of March 1972 and the loose financial policy it typified were now becoming apparent. The Treasury, at least, had started to worry about the economy, which was growing at a clearly unsustainable rate of well over 5 per cent. The money supply, as measured by M3 (broad money), was growing too fast – though the (narrower) Mi, which the Government preferred, less so.* The March 1973 Budget did nothing to cool the overheating and was heavily distorted by the need to keep down prices and charges so as to support the ‘counter-inflation policy’, as the prices and incomes policy was hopefully called. In May modest public expenditure reductions were agreed. But it was too little, and far too late. Although inflation rose during the first six months of 1973, Minimum Lending Rate (MLR) was steadily cut and a temporary mortgage subsidy was introduced. The Prime Minister also ordered that preparations be made to take statutory control of the mortgage rate if the building societies failed to hold it down when the subsidy ended. These fantastic proposals only served to distract us from the need to tackle the growing problem of monetary laxity. Only in July was MLR raised from 7.5 per cent, first to 9 per cent and then to 11.5 per cent. We were actually ahead of Labour in the opinion polls in June 1973, for the first time since 1970. But in July the Liberals took Ely and Ripon from us at by-elections. Economically and politically we had, without knowing it, already begun to reap the whirlwind (Thatcher 1995).

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Original

LORD RHODES
My Lords, my economic adviser was not trained at the L.S.E. or at any university that I know of. He is a very humble man who acts as a gamekeeper on the moors above the house where I live. He watches the road between Saddleworth and Marsden to two small towns. He always used to say that he could tell long before Selwyn Lloyd when there was going to be a credit squeeze, because when the employers in Marsden were going over into Saddleworth to poach the labour and to take them back in a coach, and when the employers in Saddleworth were going over into Marsden and doing the same thing and offering them more inducement to go to Saddleworth with the additional expense and overheads of running buses and scarce materials like oil and petrol, then, he said, “That is the time you are going to have a credit squeeze”, and in those days he used to be right. I went up to see him the other day and he said, “Hey, what’s happening down in London? It’s worse now than ever I remember it since the war. Why isn’t there a credit squeeze? I’m all wrong with my assumptions.” I said, “Having a credit squeeze is out of fashion. The Government tried it as soon as they came into power, but they soon dispensed with it as a disciplinary method because they were scared stiff of creating unemployment, because elections are won and lost on employment.”

260 words.

Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• 1973 oil crisis (1) ·
• Anthony Barber (1) ·
• Conservative Party (1834-) (22) ·
• Diggle, Greater Manchester (1) ·
• February 1974 United Kingdom general election (1) ·
• Heath ministry (4) ·
• Heath, Edward (4) ·
• House of Lords (4) ·
• Inflation (4) ·
• Labour Party (UK) (17) ·
• Marsden, West Yorkshire (3) ·
• Monetarism (1) ·
• Rhodes, Hervey (1895-1987) (3), Baron Rhodes of Saddleworth, WWI DFC and bar, mill-owner, Labour politician ·
• Saddleworth (6) ·
• Stagflation (1) ·
• Unemployment (4) ·
• West Riding of Yorkshire (147) ·

All tags.

Similar

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