The Tokyo G8 summit and unemployment - 9 July 1993

I suppose every nation has its own peculiar language that translates professional scientific terms into something the layman can understand, I'm thinking of the sort of language necessary for a doctor to use with a patient, for the weather bureau to advise a man who's not sure whether he should leave home with or without an umbrella.

I like the memory, part of the memory of being afflicted in France with a tummy ache in the long ago when that particular condition was called by British and American doctors "spastic colon". The phrase has vanished completely, it's not irritable bowel or if you want to be pompous and meaningless, irritable bowel syndrome, but I'm glad the French still call it today what they alarmingly called it years and years ago … "what's the matter with me doctor?" "Monsieur, fermentation bilial"– a case of bilial fermentation. Wow.

As for the the weathermen it might surprise some people to hear that the official language of the American meteorological bulletins is usually plainer than the British, shall we say less emotional; though because it embraces the width of a continent, it can have a sort of simple poetic grandeur … A high pressure system is moving in from the Pacific and will pass over the intermountain empire, across the Great Plains and bring sunny dry weather to the middle west and within 24 hours to the north-eastern seaboard. That's really simple, unemotional. But what I called the grandeur of it comes from the names given long ago to the different regions, the intermountain empire, the Great Plains. Most of the time when you look up the likely weather in your neck of the woods you get something quite bland.

Last week for instance, whereas the London weather office said, "hot and sunny again tomorrow, high 75 Fahrenheit", the New York Times said, "tomorrow fair, seasonably cool, high 82", but came the week ushered in by the picnics and the fireworks, the illegal fireworks of 4 July and the weather bureau deserted its usual cold blood and turned positively hysterical. Here this Thursday sizzling summer heat will continue Friday into the weekend over the entire eastern half of the nation that's from Northern Maine about 1700 miles down to the tip of Florida, "high tomorrow 104". It is necessary to point out especially to people who saw on the telly, the thermometer standing in the sun at Wimbledon, that New York City's 104 is the shade temperature, if you can discover any shade.

The sun temperature in Central Park was 135, not nice, drenching or rather clogged high humidity, a blanket of smog. The mayor through radio and television issuing advisories, advisory bulletins if you must, about staying indoors in air conditioned indoors as much as possible, walking slowly at all times, taking lots of water provided you also took a brake at regular intervals, salt pills or made a point of dousing your food with more salt than usual. I don't remember when that happened before in the north.

So for a ghastly run of getting on for a week or so now New York, Washington, Boston and yes way inland up in my daughter's mountain valley in Vermont, everybody has been inhabiting an inferno. Well, I imagine there are people shocked that I can talk at once about personal discomfort and the weather while Bill Clinton and John Major and the perpetual Mitterrand were performing mighty deeds, or were they in distant Tokyo, but let me remind you especially if you're listening now in reasonable comfort that whereas an earthquake in China is dreadful news, a toothache is an emergency. A man trapped in a coal mine doesn't give a damn about Germany's immigration problems or the import duty on Japanese computers. And one of our news magazines had a cover story this week, practically the whole magazine was about the subject, why free trade is good for you? A weary friend looked at it, "some other time", he said, whether the amazing agreement of the assembled ministers to eliminate tariffs on everything from as one despatch put it from beer to bulldozers, from pharmaceuticals to furniture whether that will hold through the next round of Uruguay talks is what we have to wait for.

It strikes me that the best thing that might come out of Tokyo is not the substance of the final communique or whatever is tentatively agreed on there, but something that was announced hailed and then forgotten, namely President Clinton's initiative in calling for another early summit to pool the knowledge and the ideas of the Western leaders on the great aching problem that throughout this century has never gone away, unemployment. It would be a great thing to discover a method of achieving across the industrial democracies a manageable low level of unemployment, it was one of the stated aims at the beginning of the Tokyo meeting and of course it's been one of the un-stated aims a consummation devoutly yearned for at every political party conference, every economic get together since the disastrous London economic conference of was it not January 1934.

Maybe we ought to lock up the rhetoric for a minute and look at one or two fundamentals. Now nobody who has ever been in power in any democratic country has ever believed in spite of the standard rhetoric of election campaigns that unemployment can ever be totally cured. When I was very young the slogan of the Labour Party was "full employment with peace". Of course, why not, it doesn't take many years of living in a democracy to know that that aim is a shot at Utopia, it has never happened and it's never going to happen.

I keep qualifying the sort of society we live in by saying democratic society because the rather frightening fact is that in a tyranny you can have full employment in peacetime especially if the tyrant is working up to a big war. Nobody who lived in Germany just before Hitler – and I had that dubious privilege – can ever forget the main thing that brought him to power and kept him there, and it's something rarely mentioned by my contemporaries all of whom of whatever political party was stout libertarians who believe that if there was one thing in life worth dying for, it was personal political freedom.

So what was the thing about Hitler, they either didn't mention or never thought about. He did produce full employment, it sounds awfully vague and technical when you put it that way. I'd rather say he took a society as good and bad as various as any other society, he took up people who were dropping in the gutter faint from despair and hunger, many more millions that we had with no job in sight and in a year or two there was hardly a German male/female, young middle-aged who wasn't at work. I dare to add that only a man or woman who has no employment for sometime can ever know the boundless gratitude you feel to the person who offers you the next job.

A whole nation was pulled up out of the pit and set on its feet in the daylight able to earn food and shelter and some little time to sit and bounce a baby, lounge under a tree, read a book, hit a ball. The one man who could do this for a whole nation was a saviour and millions of decent despairing people could forgive him a great deal, as I discovered with some of my old German friends. Later, when the war was over, they would quietly turn their faces to the wall whenever the embarrassing topic came up, the one about six million Jews being roasted like pigs on a spit.

If you, you sensible decent democrat, with a small 'd' that is, believe you do know how to cure unemployment, let me suggest you read four authors one book of each of them. John Maynard Keynes, Michael Oakeshott, Milton Friedman, John Kenneth Galbraith – each of them in his day would politely grant the distinction of the other three and then privately confide in, of course politer language, that two of them were nuts, so let's hear it for Bill Clinton and his hopes for an employment summit.

And this time, let's hear it also for Chief Oren Lyons of the Onondaga tribe. Never heard of him? You must, he should be given at once the Presidential Medal of Freedom or honour or frankness or something. Why? Well let's put it this way, have you ever heard of any American who has protested being taken under the wing of liberal left by way of having his physical or ethnic name changed in the interests, of course, of compassion?

Once the poor were always with us. Today, the most advanced liberals responding to codes of usage actually proclaimed by some universities and colleges now see no poor, there are only the economically disadvantaged. I'm waiting to hear some honest man get up and say, "you're wrong, I'm poor". Have you heard at all of a disabled man objecting to being called physically challenged, nor have I. Has the Reverend Jessie Jackson lately called a black person a black, not on your life. Even the New York Times has caved into the clumsy and separatist lingo African American.

Well Oren Lyons is a man of other metal, he is the Chief of the ancient Onondaga tribe of Indians, mark Indians in upstate New York and this spring, he was chosen to be the speaker at the graduation exercises of Syracuse University. The news release proudly announced the first Native American to deliver the commencement address at Syracuse. The Chief called him up, "Change it," he said and taking the words out of my wife's angry mouth he explained, "anyone born on this continent is a Native American, change the announcement," he commanded, to read the first American Indian to deliver the commencement address. All hail Chief Lyons.

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