In its April 17th issue, the Economist devoted one of its editorials to: "Mr. Wilson's team. jn Easter report on ministers and ministries that have done well - and those who gould do better," Readers of The Week will of course be most interested in the journal of The City had to say about the left wingers in the Cabinet. What significance there is in the fact that Mr. Anthony Greenwood wasn't even mentioned it is difficult to say. If he hasn't pleased them he certainly hasn't angered them! But a few extracts will give an idea of how the article went:
"Mrs Castle's Ministry of Overseas Development is largely the Tories! Department for Technical Co-operation under a different name, with a lot more economists on its payroll but probably rather less aid to dispense; the career civil servants are now thinking up nice schemes to send the new academics to make economic surveys of the Falklands Isles...eLord Chalfont is indistinguishable from the Tory Ministers of State who were also working on disarmament..."
For Labour Party members the most revealing and, indeed, disturbing comment was on Frank Cousins: "..All his colleagues agree that he makes his views fully, indeed,exhaustively, known; but some colleagues, at least, rate him the biggest bore in the Cabinet. Not that Mr. Cousins is disposable. He is the one man in the Cabinet who could make himself a nuisance out of it; the sole viable rallying point for a dissident Left."
It is quite definite that Mr. Wilson is a regular reader of The Economist - not merely do many of his policies seem to be inspired by that paper but he even went to length of quoting it in his New York speech to the bankers. (The Economist commented we "could not agree more with this part of the speech if we had written ourselves; indeed, since the Prime Minsster quoted from our last week's issue, it appears that we partly did). It is to be hoped that Mr. Cousins and other left-wing members of the Cabinet read Lt: i004