Mrs Thatcher’s policies

Press, 31 December 1980, Page 12

Mrs Thatcher’s policies

Sir, — Arthur May finds some of my statements too sweeping. Perhaps so. Space limitations do tend to squeeze out the qualifying phrases. Britain’s unemployment problems originate further back than the present recession: they can be traced largely to decades of inadequate industrial investment coupled, more recently, with unrealistically high wage settlements, the whole being now compounded by the high exchange rate necessarily resulting from the Government’s remedial policies. Job creation and retraining — the short-term answer — are being applied successfully but are obviously limited. Any lasting solution must take account of the fact that jobs are not provided by the employer or the Government but by the customer. No customers — no jobs. Customers can be attracted back by the establishment of competitive industries, but, paradoxically, labour problems and modem technology have combined to ensure that a "competitive” industry these days is likely to be highly automated, as witness British Leyland’s new Metro pro-duction-line. —Yours, etc., K. W. ADAMS. December 30, 1980.