The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 10

Wednesday November 16, 1983 10 THIEOT A curious kind of Keynesian the Secretary-General of the United Nations to continue with his good offices: It may be that such pious platitudes were the price of, broad agreement in the Turkish Cypriot assembly or were needed to bounce an urn easy Ankara into acceptance. But. until the UN has sounded out both the new civilian government in Turkey and the tested intentions of Mr Denktash, it would be wrong of President Kyprianou of Cyprus or Prime Minister Papandreou to lake any irreversible steps. The 1981 budget clearly did deepen the re-. cession, as they warned.

The rise in output since 1981 has been the weakest since the war, so that the gap between actual output and our productive capacity has widened. If Mrs Thatcher says this is not a recession, then she is merely re-defining an habitual economic usage. Every measure of national output continues to show that we have not even regained the level of the second quarter of 1979, when the downturn began, despite a substantial rise in North Sea oil output. Another indication is the continuing fall in employment. Until last month, some credence might have been given to Mrs Thatcher's claim that "the number of people in work has begun to rise again." The Department of Employment had provisionally estimated that employment rose by 20,000 in the second quarter.

However, its revised estimate now shows a fall of 8,000. Even this figure, like the series for the employed labour force which shows a slight rise, is something of a statistical freak, since it includes an artificial allowance for the under-recording of jobs which was revealed by the Labour Force Survey during the downturn. That under-recording may well not continue in the upturn, and the uncorrected figures for the second quarter show a continued fall in jobs on all measures. Mrs Thatcher and her Government may well feel complacent about their election victory, but they have no reason to be complacent about their economic record. The ubiquitous second row John le Mesurier, who died never a star; even in "Dad's Army," for which he will probably be best remeni bered, it was as the long-suffering second-iri-command to Arthur Lowe's irascible Captain Mainwaring that he grew inescapably familiar.

He was one of a gallery of second rank players who became all but indispensable to the British movie industry in its more prolific days. Just as you knew, even before he turned round, that the cabbie at the wheel would turn out to be Sam Kydd, or that the amiable footler in the pin striped suit was! bound to be Richard Wattis if it wasn't Geoffrey Sumner, so it became all but impossible to sit through a home grown com-; edy without expecting at some time to. justice which is at present far too arbitrary, and would thus be a valuable reform in its own right. Mr Denktash goes it alone The unilateral declaration of independence by the Turkish. Republic of North--em Cyprus is one of those events which change nothing and yet change everything.

It is, as the British Government profoundly observed yesterday in condemning the declaration, incompatible with the treaties of independence and guarantee under which the' Republic of Cyprus was established in 1960. Quite so. But, what, then, of the Athens-backed coup of 1974? Or the Turkish invasion which followed both that coup and the formal restoration of constitutional legality? What of the constitutional conflicts, the clashes and the intercommunal killings which degraded the name of Cyprus in i the 1960s? What of the gradual retreat of the Turkish minority into ghettoes. denied basic supplies by the government of the island (It matters not whether they were driven together by Greek Cypriot extremists or by Turkish Cypriot extremists). What of the Greek Cypriot attempts to alter the constitution in the early 1960s Or the Turkish Cypriot appeals to Turkey to intervene by force The truth is that the people of Cyprus nevertheless owe precious little to any of the three guarantor powers, Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

They signed on the dotted line and went their own way. If Cyprus is to survive as more than an island, partitioned by the racial origins of its peoples, a necessary, though not sufficient, condition must be the determination of Cypriots, Greek and Turkish, that they really want to live together. It is a paradox that a genuine sense of Cypriotness seemed to emerge on the Greek Cypriot side only after the disastrous coup engineered by the Fascist junta in Athens. Not until they were faced with de facto partition and exclusion from their traditional villages in the north of the island did Greek Cypriots value their Cypriotness above their Greekness. Equally, it is only the breathing space which partition brought to the minority which enabled them to think of themselves as Cypriots.

Mr Denktash insists that independence -is only a step on the road to a genuinely federal Cyprus. He wants negotiations to continue, and in particular, he appeals to make speeches urging alternatives to custody, and hope that others of influence in this area, such as the Lord Chief Justice, will also make similar speeches (which, indeed, he has done). But this is a somewhat hit and miss 'process, to say the least, and does not get to grips with the problem that has helped create the prison crisis the problem of our incoherent, anarchic, unjust and unaccountable so-called sentencing "policy. This crucial problem is addressed by Andrew Ashworth, acting director of the Oxford University Centre for Criminological Research, in a series of lectures published today. He makes a powerful case for reform, and in particular for the idea of a sentencing council to bring some consistency into sentencing policy.

As he points out, sentencing is a highly complicated and difficult task which should not be underestimated. The arguments for. diminishing the use of prison sentences are overwhelming, and have already gained significant acceptance. But as Dr Ashworth points out, there are various barriers in the way of progress. The first is the sentencers' reluctance to concede that although each case must be evaluated on its own facts, sentences still draw on principles and policies, and on value judgments which should be declared and reshaped as society develops.

The second barrier is the dearth of systematic knowledge about the thinking which leads judges and magistrates to pass the sentences that they do, and the third barrier is "the ragged state of procedure in sentencing, in which the Court of Appeal does not even regularly refer to its own sentencing precedents. There is no good reason why this mish-mash of practices should not be reshaped into a coherent policy. This is where a sentencing council could be of great benefit. It would not fetter the discretion of judges and magistrates in individual cases but would provide a policy framework against which their decisions would be taken. This would not only make for good criminal and penal policy, but it would greatly improve the democratic accountability of the courts since we would know for the first time what reasoning and principles underpinned their practice.

Tackling sentencing policy in this way would amount to tackling the prison crisis from the right end the cause rather than playing around with ad hoc, opportunistic palliatives such as increased parole or earlier release. But it would do far more than solve the problem of prison overcrowding. It would introduce consistency and fairness into a system of It must be at least a year since any British Prime Minister has addressed a Lord Mayor's Banquet with a speech as contentious as Mrs Thatcher's on Monday night. She invoked in vain the writings of Lord Keynes, duly attacked the 364 economists who criticised her 1981 budget, and cited some thoroughly dubious official statistics in aid of her cause. The result is merely to reinforce the impression that she might usefully apply to one of the 364 for a short course in Lord Keynes's writings, if not elementary economics.

Keynes, like all economists of his generation, did start out in life as a trenchant exponent of the orthodoxy of his time, which bore an uncanny resemblance to present monetarist and Treasury lore. He is rightly renowned not for his early advocacy of the conventional ideas of Marshall or Pigou, but for his more mature critique of them. By April 1929, for example, Keynes's "Programme of Expansion" had developed a critique of official thinking which has appalling modern relevance. It is the orthodox Treasury dogma," he quoted the then Chancellor as telling -the Commons, "that whatever might be the political or social advantages, very little additional employment and no permanent additional employment can in fact and as a general rule be created by state borrowing and state expen-' diture." The argument, which might be inserted verbatim in the Prime Minister's homilies, was entirely without foundation," Keynes wrote. By analogy, he argued that businessmen do not divert capital from other productive uses, but from more Unproductive uses.

To suppose otherwise was to assume a shortage of credit when Britain has surplus savings which she is accustomed to lend abroad on the scale of more than a hundred million pounds a year." To bring up the "bogy of inflation," he said, was like warning a patient who is wasting away from emaciation of the dangers of excessive corpulence." Mrs Thatcher is similarly misinformed about the views of the 364 economists, as Sir Bryan Hopkin argues in today's paper. encounter tnat lnimuaDie oranu ji 1 A chance for bewildered persistence unaer nre wmcn jl Mesurier made his own. Very occasionally, someone or other was snatched from these ranks of nature's supporting players and consistency transtormea witn various degrees oi conviu-tion into a star. That was never John Le Mesurier's lot, nor would he have expected it. Yet the character he cumulatively created will be remembered when others more famous are forgotten, not just for the skill of his playing but because he somehow embodied a symbolic British reaction to the whirlpool of the modern world endlessly perplexed by the dizzying and incoherent pattern of events, but doing his courteous best to ensure that resentment never showed.

The reference books say that he once made a record entitled Whatever is going to become of us all and that certainly seemed very often the question which lingered half-formed upon his lips. No wonder so many whose lives were very different from his own came to be so enormously fond of him. The crisis of prison overcrowding has long been a commonplace among social problems. Everyone knows about it most inveigh against it successive Home Secretaries solemnly announce that they intend to do something about it. Mr Leon Brittan, indeed, has expressed his concern and indicated his intention to divert lesser offenders away from prison sentences to alternatives to custody.

The trouble is that it is difficult for a Home Secretary to translate such an aim into practice, because the people who actually do the sentencing, the judges and magistrates, are notoriously touchy at any suggestion that the Government might be interfering with their judicial discretion. So all the Home Secretary can do is LETTERS TO THE EDITOR GZtnPiepated Why it's Question Time for Sir Robin himself it is almost transparently an attempt to prepare a fig leaf for an intervention A National Security Council meeting more than three months ago in Washington discussed options for "problems" in the Caribbean region and, one report says, the decision to use force against Grenada and Nicaragua was taken then. This thesis is supported by the report of an unguarded remark by the US Ambassador to France in a television interview, when he said the Grenadian invasion could not be linked to the Beirut explosion as it had been planned two weeks before. When the OECS met in Barbados two days after Maurice Bishop had been killed, it was joined by the US Ambassador Milan Bish. An inside source from that Sir, Your Leader on Grenada, Does a round of applause make it right (November 12), makes some important points, but I question whether it goes far enough.

Returning last Wednesday, after a week in Grenada and Barbados, I conclude that there is a number of. questions unanswered about the US's causative role in the whole affair. America had clearly laid plans years ago for the invasion of Grenada as soon as the opportunity offered the Amber-Amberines exercise of August-September, 1981, is the clearest single indication of this. Plans were laid earlier this year for a Regional Defence Organisation" by the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, which is so far-reaching in its proposals that meeting stated that, after a consultant academic had presented a paper demonstrating that an invasion would have no basis in international law, it was Bish and Edward Seaga, the Jamaican Prime Minister, who led the arguments against this. The same source indicated that Eugenia Charles, Prime Minister of Dominica, came to the meeting with a draft of the letter of invitation already agreed, with American assistance.

Reports are also surfacing of the extent of the US knowledge about the divisions in Grenada's People's Revolutionary Government. One of the ministers, is named, in the Antigua Outlet newspaper as the source of that information. The Outlet source indicates that this minister had links with the US Embassy in Antigua. The question then arises as to whether the Americans were responsible for exacerbating the political differences None of this is to suggest that the US Government originally intended the deaths of Bishop and his ministers any more than Coard or Austin did. As this was the result of what appears to have been US-provoked desta-bilisation, however, the question arises as to whether at least some of Maurice Bishop's blood is not on President Reagan's hand.

Yours (Rev) David Haslam. War on Want, London 7. Trident) and elevate third-order questions' (Polaris) and caricature a policy called unilateralism A specific policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain, alongside alternative forms of defence and an active diplomacy designed to bring about a freeze and then reductions in the armouries of. both superpowers was described by Sir Robin and other presenters as unilateral Sir Robin was still referring to "unilateral disarmers in his recent reports on the Labour Party conference. To be fair to him, it is not clear whether he means to caricature the peace movement or whether he is just too busy or too bigoted to read its policies and publications.

There is also the matter of the questions which Sir Robin and others did not ask. Why did he not ask, in his odiously deferential interview with Mrs Thatcher, why this supposed multilateralist was not prepared even to entertain Mr Andropov's mulitilateral proposal to trade his SS-20s downwards in relation to Polaris Why did he not pursue with his famed abrasiveness the matter of the dual-kev? Why did he not probe Dr David Owen or David Steel about the manifest divergence within the Alliance between SDP and Liberal policies on cruise and Polaris Sir, Sir Robin Day (Letters, November 11)- chair lenges pe, in tones of injured innocence, to justify my titiarge that he has used his position as a supposedly impartial interviewer to caricature the policies of the peace movement. My reply might commence with a BBC-1 Question Time some three years ago when he barracked and interrupted a new member of his panel, Mary Kaldor, playing to a rapturous studio audience with the question: "Oh, so you would have us shelter under the American nuclear umbrella If he had bothered to read any of Ms Kal-dor's (or END's) writings about an expanding nuclear-weapons-free zone in Europe between both superpowers, he would have known that tine question (to which he did allow Ms Kaldor to reply) was' not only ill-mannered, but also irrelevant. This sets the tone for his performances. I have only once had the experience of being interviewed on The World at One, on the occasion of the publication of a book Zero Option during the last week of the Falk-lands War.

Although I was not asked about this war, I slipped in a comment that at least one of the British warships lying sunken in the Falklands Sound might have nuclear weapons on it. One of Sir Robin's assis again and again concerned the future of Polaris, as well as something called unilateralism," while questions about cruise and Trident should be dropped out of view as quietly as possible. Sir Robin Day drilled day after day on the nerve of Labour divisions about Polaris. One interesting case was his Election Call (May 23) with Roy Hattersley. Sir Robin led in with a question about Labour's defence policies, and Mr Hattersley came back with strong answers about cruise, Trident, and the arms race.

Sir Robin kept interrupting with questions aimed to expose a gap in the matter of unilateralism between Mr Hattersley and Michael Foot. Eventually Mr Hattersley with a dignity which I wish that others could show demanded the right to explain Labour's policies in his own way, over that large area where there was agreement. Sir Robin replied testily that he was the one who was asking the questions. His manner was that of an inquisitor who had got a culprit into his police station to assist him in his inquiries Throughout the election the questions which Sir lobin put on defence wre designed to exploit disagreement in the Labour leadership obscure the first-order questions (cruise and tants, who was interviewing me, jumped up and switched off the tape-recorder, exclaiming: "You can't say that on the programme! And the remark was, of course, edited off. the tape as broadcast.

This reinforced my conviction that all of Sir Robin Day's programmes are carefully crafted the selection of performers the differing degrees of deference or abra-sivehess displayed towards them the sifting of incoming phone-calls the editing of tapes. But above all, the conditioning of the public mind the manufacture of consensus is done by deciding which questions are relevant, and which may not even be asked. Sir Robin asks If there are strong majorities of the public against both cruise and Trident, how can I or Mr Walden be said to have interfered with the public mind But the proper question should be because the majorities are against cruise and Trident, how did it happen that in a general election which was s-'pno-sedly fought in some irt around defence," tK -e same majorities returned government which is in favour of both And the answer leads us back to the broadcasting studios. For it seemed as if it had been decided in these studios that the electoral questions to be asked Advertisement NICARAGUA SO WHO CARES? And if he could not think up these questions for himself, he would have found them all. set out in my Defence of Britain, which was' duly delivered to his studio's desk two weeks before the election.

But Sir Robin Day says he would like to discuss all this further in relation to any "item, interview or programme." I do not keep these archives in my house. But if he will open the BBC's archives to me, and to a researcher of my nomination, I will gladly craft my own programme of selected clips and tapes, with my commentary, to be followed by twenty minutes in which I question Sir Robin Day with just a little of the same abrasiveness which he metes out to some but not to all others. How about it, Sir Robin This is a serious proposal. Are you willing to take a little of your own medicine? Yours sincerely, E. P.

Thompson. Worcester. Sir, In all the arguments over the presentation of broadcast news, which have been toing and froing in the Guardian recently, there has been one vital facet of process which nobody has had' the temerity to highlight. The principal feature of news distortion is, of course, the nature of the media themselves, and the audience to whom they relate. To defend one's own professional ethics as do Sir Robin Day and Alan Proth-eroe (Letters, November 11 and 9) against the attacks of the those who claim misrepresentation is further to -fudge an issue rarely considered outside of a few militant organisation and academics.

An idea passed from the mind of one person into another by the means of the spoken language, is not reformed in the mind of the receiver in exactly the same way as it was formed in the mind of the conceiver (the source of inspiration notwithstanding). How then can an occurrence or an idea be passed through the news "system" into the minds of the audience with- In 1972, 20,000 people were killed when an earthquake struck Nicaragua. In 1977, three years of war began in which 50,000 people lost their lives. Then four years of peace and progress for Miscellany at large A screen of secrecy that should be folded their tiny country. But now.

in 1983, with fighting already taking place on its borders, 65,000 people have already IP TELL You had to abandon their homes. Most are poor I MY LOWERED SECRETS ACT Sir, The apostrophe is a long time a-dying, and printing designers are by no means the only people who try to kill it off. Nearly 20 years ago, when I was de-. signing a new letterhead for the Publishers Association, the association's secretary deleted the apostrophe from my proof, saying the association was about publishers but did not belong to them, and was not wholly an association of publishers as he was no longer a publisher himself. And you are doing much to keep the apostrophe alive; from last year's Guardians I remember bombing it's cities and the Frank's Report and only the other day, one of your headlines included "Your's." Yours (sic) faithfully, Hugh Williamson.

28 Thorncliffe Road, Oxford. Sir, The Official Secrets Act is being grossly misused by the Government the latest example being the referral to Scotland Yard and the Director of Public Prosecutions of the alleged attempt by a civil servant to leak a document on the effects of Government spending policies on education. The Official Secrets Act was intended to safeguard the interests of our country as opposed to those of a 'Potentially hostile one. It was never intended to be used to conceal the intentions of one political party in these cases the Tories in the run up to an election. This Act is being used to prevent the people of this country from having access to information which could influence the way they vote.

This is only the latest in a series of attempts to silence, by fear, the voices of those peasant families, now living in tents and makeshift homes. Oxfam has been working in Nicaragua helping to train health workers, helping to grow more food and funding the wide ranging literacy campaign. The results of this painstaking work were dramatic. Diseases being eradicated, food production up and thousands of poor people now able to read and write. But all this now seems to be at risk.

WE HAVE SPENT ALL WE CAN TO HELP. But the many poor families who are affected desperately need help and it can cost as little as to help provide food and shelter for a family. to term deliberately used ascribe sinister intentions responsible people who seek only to present the truth to the general -public, who would otherwise be kept in ignorance of facts and information on domestic issues which could be of no conceivable interest to a foreign power. Readers will no doubt remember the vast amount of time and effort devoted to the so-called mole a out simply becoming a sti who sought to tell the truth to the people during the steel industrial dispute. Too much secrecy is being maintained to conceal from the public the real intentions of the Government, and people' are acquiescing too readily.

(Mrs) C. G. Leyland. 48 Meadow Walk, Gosport, Hampshire. Sir, The springtime found Apostolic Pro-Nuncio Bruno Heim distributing a letter in which he wrote off more than a million of the electorate as idiotic pawns of a foreign state.

The exposure of. that political campaign lit up the manifestly Christian character of Mgr Bruce Kent's work with CND. Did the bishops then begin to repond to that work? Did they at least recognise an undoubted vocation No. I telephoned Archbishop's House on Monday. The message was that some ecclesiastic was dealing with the problem of Bruce Kent." Mgr Bruce Kent is not a problem.

The problem is whether the Church which refused Henry VIII as its head is about to appoint Mrs Thatcher. Yours truly, J. A. Emerson. Sutton Courtenay.

Sir, Prince Andrew says I think being shot at is the most character-forming thing of one's life" (Guardian, November 14). So Stephen Waldorf was just getting a helping hand after all, Yours sincerely, Robert Miller. Newcastle upon Tyne. Sir, I always wondered if Tony Benn had a normal sense of humour. After reading his article (Agenda, November 14) I know he has not Yours faithfully, Geoffrey FInsberg, MP.

(C. Hampstead and Highgate), House of Commons. mulus to tne aireaay prepared human receptors, where vision forms behind i a 1 ine vyv aim uui uwm. The real deception and distortion with which we all live was built into the system in this country during the 1926 General Strike. The medium A COUNTRY DIARY MUST IT ALL HAPPEN AGAIN, OR WILL YOU HELP? I enclose my donation for Oxfam's work in Nicaragua.

10 25 50 Name Address Postcode wmcn carried tne message or British broadcast news for the first time was the emo- rlSnnkownA rt til A 1Q4An establishment. Three geneV rations ot auaience minas are now fitted with appropriatae "filter" to de- clde what is important and This sudden abundance in a typical habitat is most likely not due to an unusual dispersal of native stock, but rather to a phenomenal influx of continental birds which has been reported from the East Coast. Such an invasion, rather than regular migratory movements, is considered to be due. to a combination of over-population and a failure of normal food crops such as acorns beech-mast, on the home-grounds. W.

D. CAMPBELL. At this season, jays garner acorns in this fashion and cache them in tussocks of grass for retrieval in times of winter scarcity. I have no doubt that at least some of the peanuts In the present instance are being hidden I also can report jays in and around my garden for the first time in 13 years of observation, for although (in spite of keepering)' they abound in the extensive woodland a mile or so away one rarely encounters them in more open country nearby. land on the wall, some 10ft, from the house, and fill their crops with 13 whole peanuts, and then pick up a 14th in the beak, and fly off; 30 minutes later they are back, and the process is repeated.

The booty in fact, does not get swallowed, but is pouched in the throat, and long ago, from newly-killed jays shot from marauding parties devastating rows of green peas, I found that by holding the corpse by the feet and shaking it a good handful of peas spilled out. OXFORDSHIRE A reader from Hyde, Cheshire, who has been feeding birds in his garden for the last 23 years, has this autumn been surprised by the first-ever attendance of jays at the bird-table, and although their striking plumage has been much admired at close quarters, their way of dealing with the peanut supply is causing some concern, particularly since this popular bird-food has this season increased by 9o per lb. According to my informant "They WJJai ion wjjab ia 11 uc ana what isn't. Send to Guy Stringer, Oxfem, Room GU79, Freepost, Oxford OX2 7BR. (No stamp required.) IWHM itenn sun ruies low key lrYours faithfully, (Mr) L.

R. Rushton. 172 Merlin House, Ponders End, Middlesex. MHIMII.