Spending the nation's money - 23 May 1997

Once the British election was decided and it was safe for a commentator on this side to put in his two cents worth, we concluded that British and American election campaigns grow more and more alike.

That, to put it bluntly, the techniques of the advertising industry have taken over the old-fashioned routine of travelling up and down the whole country, speaking to rallies both big and minute, and hoping that the people present would go home, think it all over, weigh one side against the other and then vote. A procedure and a theory about why people vote the way they do which are as dead as the dodo.

But once we've had our fill of sound bite and sight bite injections and get down to the actual business of government, we come on several differences between the two systems that are disguised by the unfortunate fact that we have the same names for often quite different institutions. As, for instance, the Cabinet.

The American is not a Cabinet system. The House of Representatives is not really a lower house. It's the one, the Constitution dictates, where all money bills must be initiated, so the house is the institution, not the presidency, that in the end says how the nation's money will be spent.

Before we come to that though, I ought to mention one startling difference between British and American election procedure that I overlooked and that still produces unbelieving admiration in Americans. It's the custom of having the Prime Minister move into Downing Street overnight, barely giving the outgoing tenant time to pack his toothbrush and galoshes, let alone his furniture, his books, and his ever-loving wife.

It's an amazing custom and I don't remember it’s ever going wrong, but Americans who aren't familiar with it ask, "How long is the transition?" The answer is there is no transition, the period in this country between the first Tuesday in November, Election Day, and 20 January, the inauguration of the new president. The defeated man stays in the White House during all that time, over 10 weeks, while his new appointees visit their outgoing opposite numbers, try to catch up on current information and what's expected of them.

This busy consultation between the two sides reflects the fact that, in the American system, you don't have a small army of high permanent civil servants who serve one administration and the next, irrespective of party.

In the summer of 1945 while the Japanese War was still on, Truman, Churchill and Stalin met at Potsdam to try and shape the post-war world. The meeting had to be suspended for a day or two while Mr Churchill flew back to London for the General Election that had been called. Stalin and Mr Truman trod water until Churchill returned. He never did; he was buried by the Labour landslide.

And a day or two later, who should arrive in Potsdam to continue the talks but the new prime minister, Mr Attlee. Along with him came the identical negotiating staff that had accompanied Mr Churchill. To Mr Truman, used to a system in which all members of the previous administration, high and low, from private secretaries to messenger boys, are replaced, it was a shocker. To Stalin, who'd expected that Churchill would have fixed the British election, it was a great and sinister puzzle. It only deepened Stalin's suspicion of the sort of perfidy Britons were capable of.

Well, these colourful differences having been noted and commented on, now we have come to a stage, a topic, which I defy the most beguiling journalist in the world to make interesting to a foreign audience. Put it a blunter way and say if there's one topic more than another that will bore people at the mere mention of it, it's another nation's budget.

Take heart, there's lucky news. By a happening as improbable as the sudden reappearance of a rich uncle who was supposed to have died long ago, the country was saved from the disgraceful wrangle of two years ago, when the Republicans who accepted very little of Mr Clinton's proposed budget, denied the administration even the local anaesthesia of running expenses and shut the government down.

You may remember having seen shots of government offices, from the treasury, immigration, welfare offices, museums, national parks, the Statue of Liberty. Well, it was a dramatic gesture and one the Republicans have rued ever since. The memory of it played a large part in losing them the White House last November.

So what happened this time? Well, just let me remind you of the third difference in the two systems. Few Americans who haven't seen it can believe the sight of a Chancellor of the Exchequer arriving one day in Parliament and presenting... presenting his, the administration's, budget.

I once took a veteran American senator into the House of Commons to watch it. He was at first baffled, then incredulous and then in a permanent tremor of head-shaking. He wanted to know how many months will this thing be debated? I told him no months.

"You mean", he said to me as we walked out into the street, "That's it? The chancellor presents the prime minister's budget and that's how it's going to be?" I said there was the small luxury of a so-called debate of maybe knocking a penny off the price of tea, but if the government says there's going to be a 50p tax on cigarettes, that's it.

So in the past weeks, I've had to explain to American friends, not in government, that if the Conservatives don't like lots of M. Blair's ideas, they'd better wait five years and put in their own man. An old San Francisco friend of mine mused, "Mm. An interesting form of one-party government".

Well, we've been spared most of the dreadful hullabaloo of two years ago. Which was basically a knock-down, drag-out fight about how many billions could be saved in the total budget. In this matter, as in every other bill that involves money, the president goes, cap in hand, to Congress and says, "Please! Won't you consider my budget?" The Constitution, as I say, requires all money bills to be initiated in the House and ultimately nothing, no budget plan or item, will pass without a majority vote in the House. In the American system, when it comes to saying what the national budget is to be, the president is Oliver Twist, the House is the headmaster and banker.

Well, this year the two sides squared off, swearing, as always, to work together, to proceed in a new spirit of pious bi-partisanship, though the system was set up 200 years ago to make them natural enemies. And before they could start swatting at each other about how many billions must be saved on Medicare, how much on dependent children, suddenly a letter arrived for the Speaker of the House addressed to, no less, the Congress of the United States.

It was from a lady whose name will surely become immortal, Miss June O'Neill. She's the director of the Congressional Budget Office, the only bureau that both parties consult for indisputable facts about the budget. It is as neutral, as objective, as non-partisan as the Library of Congress. Its daily work is to check on receipts and expenditures and publish the official figures.

Miss O'Neill had a very simple thing to say. The administration had miscalculated the pending government deficit and, would you believe it, they'd made it too big. In other words, Miss O'Neill reported the government had underestimated the total tax money it would collect this year. It's the economy, not Mr Clinton or the Republicans, that had produced such a gusher of tax money that Congress would have $45 billion more to budget than it had guessed. And since they're budgeting for the next five years, they'll have an extra 225 billions to play around with.

Almost at once after the arrival of this bonanza, the president and the Republican leader of the opposition agreed, practically without a parlay, to the general shape and weight of a budget that would be balanced in 2001.

What it meant was that the Republicans had more money they could cut and Mr Clinton had more money he could spend, which was a godsend to him, because the Democrats were already mobilising a rump to protest his proposed cuts in welfare and social services. There is a wing of his Party ready to assert that their leader has betrayed the great Liberal ideals and the party, best exemplified by the now sainted Franklin Roosevelt.

I suppose it's inevitable that in getting down to the nitty-gritty of the coming budget, who gets how much, for what, both Parties may grow bemused by their 225 billion figure. Which, after all, is a projection.

As one old sour, but greatly experienced, commentator put it, "Our experience with these grand five-year deals is that the only year that really matters is the next one". Forget the vision of 225 billions. Plan to spend no more than 45 billions.

I said at the beginning, I'd never heard of a case where the quick trick went wrong. The quick-change artistry of one prime minister's moving in and the other out. I've remembered one. When Mr Churchill was surprisingly elected to his second term of office at the not-so-spry age of 77, he and his belongings were all stacked up in the entrance lobby to Number 10. But they couldn't be opened and arranged until Mr Attlee's belongings were off and gone, but they were still piling up.

It seemed Mr Attlee was upstairs in bed. He had a painful foot infection. Also, Mr. Churchill's right-hand man had slipped on an airplane ramp and damaged a knee. He couldn't attend the first meeting Mr Churchill had quickly summoned of the men who'd just emerged from the shadows to become daylight Cabinet ministers.

Churchill was not, it's no news, a long-suffering man. His brief Cabinet meeting was distracted by knockings and bangings and the shufflings of delivery men. And when it was over, his private secretary said, "Everything went all right, sir?".

"All right?" he growled, "Between Clem's feet and Tony's knees, the whole parliamentary system is in a state of abeyance".

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