The event which did most to stir me up was not an economic one but the Suez invasion. This has been analysed to death in many places; and I will just focus on one aspect: the assertion made in letters to the Daily Telegraph that foreign policy could not be judged morally. This linked up with another hobbyhorse of mine. Oxford moral philosophy was widely criticized for analysing moral language instead of providing moral guidance. My complaint was the opposite: that under the guise of analysing moral language, it was smuggling in some highly conventional morality. The result of my cogitation was 'Morality and foreign policy', finished in 1957, but not ] published until much later when it became part of my Capitalism and the Permissive society (Brittan 1973a, pp. 326-42). This essay explains the difference between my own rejection of war on most occasions and pure pacifism. This thinking is also reflected, but not repeated, in the later 'Choice and utility' (Brittan 1990a, which itself builds upon the earlier (Brittan 1983a) 'Two cheers for utilitarianism').

The next traumatic experience was indeed in the economic field. In September 1957 the Conservative Chancellor Peter Thorneycroft out of the blue raised Bank Rate from 5 1/2 to 7 per cent, a previously almost unheard-of rate not reached since the 1920s. I was away at the time and first heard about it on the telephone from Nigel Lawson who, allowing for differences of temperament, was as horrified as I was.

Much of the economic world was shocked because Thorneycroft, on the advice of Professor Lionel Robbins, insisted on making speeches about the supply of money, which was supposed to be the basic cause of inflation. Having come across pre-Keynesian economics at Cambridge, this doctrine was not the thunderbolt for me that it was for so many commentators when it came up in 1957, and more seriously in the late 1960s and 1970s. In the Thorneycroft period it was verbiage, as the actual policy was a conventional squeeze.

It was the apparent abandonment of full employment policies that shocked me most. (The whole episode is recounted in my Steering the economy Brittan 1971, pp. 211-19.) In the end Thorneycroft resigned at the beginning of 1958, although over public spending and not monetary policy; and the quasi-monetarist rhetoric was dropped. Since I afterwards came to be associated with positions similar to that of Thorneycroft in 1957, a word of explanation is needed. My slowness in seeing the light can be explained, but not excused, by the appallingly unconvincing way in which sound-money policies were then defended. They were put forward in terms of defending the sterling exchange rate (and with it the sterling area), not as a convenient intermediate objective but as a matter of honour. Above all, the distinction between a steady inflation and an accelerating inflation, and the likelihood of full employment policies producing the latter, was not made by the sound money men who were too shocked by the very idea of inflation to go further into the matter.

In 1960 Newton made me economic correspondent, as he had been intending to do all along. He was primarily interested in my writing features and leaders. As far as I know, I was the first economics correspondent as such on any paper. Previously the economy had come under City editors. Lord Drogheda, then managing director, had queried the idea, asking, 'Are not all our stories economic?' He had a point. With my limited typing abilities, and secretaries going home at the end of office hours, there was no chance my attempting more than a sample of economic news stories, however narrowly defined. Newton's attitude was simple: 'Write them when you have something to add.'

My main intellectual influences did not, however, then come from economics. I was much more swayed by Karl Popper's The poverty of historicism, which put into analytical form the teachings of The open society which I had read at Cambridge (Popper 1945; 1960). I was also absorbed by Thomas Mann's novel, The magic mountain (Mann 1927), where there are two characters who battle in all alpine sanatorium for the soul of a young engineer, Hans Castorp, and who brought out for me the age-old fundamental division between liberty and authority, hidden from public view by the superficial Conservative-Socialist argument. One is Settembrini, a somewhat operatic Italian liberal who proclaims, 'Democracy has no meaning whatever if not that of an individualistic corrective to state absolutism of every kind.' He favours both national self-determination and the abolition of war through international law. A passionate aesthetic who 'lives in a garret', he loves 'form, beauty, freedom, gaiety, the enjoyment of life'. His more formidable antagonist is a would-be Jesuit, Naphta, who believes in 'discipline, sacrifice, the renunciation of the ego, the curbing of the personality'. He is also a revolutionary socialist, who looks forward to a new authoritarian order to be achieved by the proletariat. His favourite quotation is from Pope Gregory the Great: 'Cursed be the man who holds back his sword from the shedding of blood.' I would still summarize my creed as a battle against the shades of Naphta, although allowing myself the odd laugh at Settembrini.

But I do not enjoy being constantly on the ideological front line. One reason why I have never made the leap from economic to general journalism is that not everyone need know what I think about everything; and those who read economic journalism receive it in suitable wrappings.

{6 The Move to the Observer, 1961 >>>}