The arms trade is no more necessary to the country’s well- being than canals

The arms trade is no more necessary to the country’s well- being than canals, steam engines, or tweenies. Professor Colin Robinson, professor of economics at Surrey, and editorial director at the Institute for Economic Affairs, says: “What happens over time is that economies change and people find ways of doing things better and using less labour.” Hunting is merely very inefficient pest-control and would on economic grounds be swept away. But the real point is that it ill-behoves a bunch of reactionaries and romantics like foxhunters to argue in favour of Soviet- style job creation, or even good sense.If fox-hunting is banned, riders will switch to something more vulgar: say drag hunting, which is if anything more dangerous (because even faster than chasing foxes), though more predictable and less romantic. Riders are likely to fulfil the prediction of the risk analyst John Adams, who promulgates the view that everyone has an inbuilt taste for risk (and he might just as well have added: expenditure), which varies from person to person but cannot be circumvented.

On this view, if you deprive a person of one avenue of putting himself at risk (or spending money), he will simply find another. So safer cars and roads simply produce worse driving: though the cocooned drivers may be contributing to thousands more virtual accidents to unprotected pedestrians whose response is to stop walking about – which is what most pedestrians have done.If hunting were to be banned, risk-seeking horsemen and women might take to the highway on Kawasakis. They might take up winter yachting (an idea that seems improbable only until you recall the nature of the activity whose banning causes us to hypothesise on the matter). They might decide to have exotic affairs instead of chasing foxes, and that would hugely increase their phone, restaurant and hotel bills. They might hunt abroad, which would delight the poor people among whom they desported. They would have to get their kicks and spend their money somehow and it might as well be here where we can delightedly keep our eye on them.. There was no interruption from a wild-eyed, air-stabbing member of another party There were no hard questions.

Among the scrambled eggs, smoked salmon and coffee, there was a great, murmuringly omnipresent desire by hundreds of business leaders to be

It did, however, provide a fascinating and useful foretaste of how Mr Major will campaign; what his main lines of attack will be, and the tone of voice he has chosen in trying to grapple with and pin down new Labour.
Let us begin with the voice. He was not then, and never will be, a silky or inventive orator; the jokes were almost endearingly lame, the sentences studded with redundant “most emphaticallys”, and the rhetoric replete with classic, anti-climactic Majorisms (“deregulation is like wrestling with a greasy pig – there is always a lobby opposed to it”).But those of us easily distracted by the fleeting image of anti-pig-wrestling lobbies are in a minority. These slight eccentricities of speech apart, Major was compelling, lucid, thoughtful and friendly. The nation may not yet be at ease with itself; but its Prime Minister most emphatically is.The central theme was that Britain is experiencing a golden economic dawn. It seems clear that Major wants to fight on the economy first, and the constitution second.Economically, he wants to focus the country’s mind on the remaining important differences of policy with Labour. Gordon Brown’s emphasis on tackling youth unemployment will be met with Tory insistence on the connection between the higher joblessness in France, Italy and Germany, and the minimum wage. Continental protectionism, Mediterranean social costs and Britain’s swollen share of inward investment were savaged and lauded as Major tried to convince us that we really are, this time, on the edge of economic rebirth.Of course, incumbent politicians have been saying that for decades.

With the exception of the Lawson hubris, economic success is perpetually declared to be “a real prospect”, “just around the corner” or “beginning to dawn” – a benign, curly-haired golden Godot who never quite makes it.Yet Major is a good advocate and much of his case today is not really contested by Labour (or Brown wouldn’t have signed up to Kenneth Clarke’s expenditure totals). On the other hand, like any good advocate, he ignored one half of the picture – our structural weaknesses, our underinvestment, the great swaths of failed and hopeless Britons. He was hot about the evils of job-killing minimum wage legislation, but strangely silent on the evils of poverty wages and exploitation.The Prime Minister did not dwell on Gordon Brown’s dramatic promises about income tax and VAT, merely noting – interestingly – that if the Tories won, there would be “relatively little tax changes in the next parliament”. He did ask a series of detailed questions about the legality, scope and scale of Labour’s proposed windfall tax – Tony Blair’s men now have ample warning about one persistent Conservative line of attack, and should be preparing their answers.I did not get the impression that Major wanted either VAT or income tax to feature much in the coming campaign, perhaps for obvious historical reasons. But that, if so, would represent a hugely significant tactical Labour success, vindicating Brown’s announcement at the beginning of the week. This, so far as I can tell, would make 1997 the first Tory campaign since the war not to feature Labour’s plans for income tax.Major was not, however, implying that taxation generally wouldn’t feature. He reasserted his pledge to concentrate on cutting capital gains taxes and inheritance tax and hoped to cut the basic rate to 20p.But he emphasised that all this would come “only when it is affordable”.