Darling's retro politics are a joke

IT'S hard to walk into a high street shop these days and not find some product that is a nostalgic throwback to the seventies. Whether it is flares, hipsters, glam make-up or platform shoes – most of this retro gear is available from the decade of exceedingly bad taste where the music was far better than the clothes. I know – I lived through it in my youth!

If today's teenagers or those wishing to relive their youth want to delve into the kaleidoscope of purples, oranges and brown, then why shouldn't politicians feel the same urge for prices and incomes policies, beer and sandwiches with the unions and appeals against strikes?

Well, you shan't be disappointed because our 70s-sounding Chancellor is doing just that. He has started calling, on a regular basis, for greater wage restraint, especially in the public sector.

Let's remind ourselves of one of the great lessons that Margaret Thatcher and her government taught us – wage increases do not create price inflation.

Throughout the seventies, that faux Conservative Ted Heath, then Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, exhorted the workers to pull back on their pay demands fuelled by climbing prices as, they alleged, they only fed into higher prices.

This was always nonsense. Wages were only able to rise because Government spending was increasing well beyond the productivity gains of the nation. Too much money chasing too few goods.

With inflation at 28 per cent, Dennis Healey was told by the International Monetary Fund to turn the taps off, but it was too late for Labour. So he and Callaghan sank in the strikes that were a direct consequence of them granting unparalleled union power while trying to buy workers off with taxpayers' money.

It took almost ten painful years for the inflation to come under control.

Alistair Darling shows astounding naivety if he believes below inflation wage increases are the solution to rising prices – because they are not the cause. Wages should be left free to be determined by the supply and demand for particular skills or qualifications – thus attracting people into the jobs which are willing to pay them to learn, move or get their hands dirty.

The real problem is this Government's intentional expansion of public spending and the huge growth in public sector jobs that has accompanied it, but to admit that would be to admit it is all Brown's fault, so instead the workers must be blamed.

If Alistair Darling wants to live in the parallel universe of Jimmy Osmond and Lena Martell then so long as his friends are consenting and children and animals aren't harmed it should be allowed – but we are also entitled to laugh out loud that he believes people can't remember just how bad the political fashions of the seventies were.

We need coroners
LAST year, the double death of the Sunday Herald cartoonist, Harry Horse, and his wife – a sufferer of Multiple Sclerosis – surprised Scotland's polite society. It appeared to be a suicide pact.

This week we have learned that while Mr Lamont died from an overdose, his wife suffered fifty-six wounds from a sharp instrument – suggesting a frenzied attack by her partner.

The truth will never be established. In England, suspicious deaths would have automatically gone to the coroner for public examination, but in Scotland we don't do that. We let the Procurator Fiscal decide if a Fatal Accident Inquiry is required, and not even explain why an inquiry has been refused.

Mrs Lamont's friends and relatives are entitled to know the truth, as indeed is the public. It is time for us to adopt the coroner's system and take away the discretion of the Procurator Fiscal.

Real policing pays off
YET more evidence has now surfaced that the way to reduce alcohol-fuelled crime amongst the young is to have the police do their jobs the way the public wants – out there on the streets, highly visible and in the faces of the small minority that make life a misery for others.

After similar initiatives in Edinburgh and Glasgow showed that more police on the ground brought large reductions in crime, new statistics from an operation in Ayr show staggering results.

Politicians that want to be soft on criminals – like Justice Minister Kenny McAskill – should recognise that when, in the eighties and nineties, we were liberalising our drinking laws and councils were allowing more city centre bars to open, and open later, the numbers of police on the streets to handle this relaxation was actually being cut back by do-gooders like him.

The rise in alcohol-related youth disorder is no surprise, but it's the fault of politicians and chief constables who preferred CCTV to real policemen doing real policing.

Sensible drinkers, young and old, should not have to pay for the mistakes of politicians who will do everything except chase down the louts.