The Revolt of the Chicken Farmer
Ideas matter. And because ideas matter, so too does the story of an Old Etonian Christian Scientist, former RAF fighter pilot, chicken farmer and unsuccessful turtle rancher called Antony Fisher. In the high years of socialism and planning, from 1945 onwards, Fisher stood out as an utterly self-certain individualist and anti-socialist. ‘Communism is the poison offered to the people; socialism is the cup in which it is given; and the welfare state is the tempting label on the bottle,’ he liked to say. In the Britain of the forties and fifties these views made him an eccentric. Once this country had been the world centre for liberal economics, famous for its people’s distrust of big government – a land without identity cards or intrusive central government. Now even its Liberal Party was a keen supporter of the post-war consensus (the party, after all, of Beveridge and Keynes). There were some standing out against it. Not many, but some. Their unlikely spiritual teacher was Friedrich von Hayek, an exiled Viennese economist, who came from the very heart of cosmopolitan intellectualism where socialism, communism, Freudianism and fascism contended. A cousin of the daunting philosopher Wittgenstein, he would help reconvert the British to their old doctrines of economic liberalism.
Hayek had arrived in London to teach economics in 1931 and developed a close rapport with another economist Lionel Robbins, the son of a London market gardener who had been taken up by that creator of the Welfare State, William Beveridge. Hayek and Robbins formed a crucial partnership at the London School of Economics, a subversive friendship which would help, eventually, to change the intellectual climate of Britain. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, was one of the most influential books of the age, a full-throated attack on socialism which was received with contempt by many but admired – with reservations – by both George Orwell and Keynes himself. But a book is not a movement. Liberal economists did begin to meet regularly in Switzerland from 1947 but for Britain the key moment came with the arrival on the scene of Fisher, now an almost entirely forgotten man. He had been traumatized by watching the death of his brother during the Battle of Britain and rebuilt his life as a Sussex farmer. A staunch individualist, he had been entranced by Hayek’s book and managed to meet his hero after the war. Hayek told Fisher not to try to become a politician but instead to try to win the battle of ideas by forming some kind of institute or organization to fight the rotting influence of the State. It was a message Fisher never forgot. Luckily for him, the State stepped in to help him spread it. In 1952 his herd of cattle contracted foot and mouth disease and had to be destroyed. Fisher used his compensation money to visit the United States.
There he not only picked up the latest free-market thinking but visited a huge experimental ‘broiler chicken’ farm at Cornell University, where 15,000 birds were being raised under one roof. This, thought Fisher, was exactly what the meat-starved British needed. It was illegal to import the chunky American poultry central to the new factory farming, so the (anti-regulations) Fisher was reduced to covering two dozen fertilized White Rock eggs with silver foil and bringing them through in his hand luggage as ‘Easter Eggs’. Back in Sussex he built sheds with gas heating systems and an overhead rail system to bring in food. Soon twenty-four chickens became 2,400 and then 24,000. Within a few years, his family were raising 1.25 million birds, Buxted Chickens had been formed, and Fisher was a very rich man, the most successful poultry farmer in Europe. Across Britain, affordable roast chicken became a staple of the Sunday lunch table, thanks to Fisher. And with the money they made him, he was able to fund the Institute for Economic Affairs, undoubtedly the most influential think tank in modern British history. Set up by Fisher and the eccentric ex-paratrooper and Liberal, Oliver Smedley, the IEA was intended to combat the socialist influence of the Fabians. Soon they would be joined by others, Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon. Hayek would be proved right. It was the seeding of ideas that mattered most, not conventional political careers.
The IEA first touched British politics during the winter of 1957-8 when inflation was rising above 4 per cent and wage settlements were in double figures. Like so many political crises of the time this one occurred in deepest private. The question was whether government spending should be cut back as part of a wider drive to curb the amount of money in the economy. Banks were also to be instructed to cut back credit. Macmillan was far more worried about confrontation and unemployment than he was about rising prices. His Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, disagreed. He was insistent that savings had to be made to squeeze inflation and save the pound. His enemies thought Macmillan an unprincipled coward. He was certainly driven by a ruthless enthusiasm for staying in office. But there was another side to the Prime Minister. Brought up in the intellectual shadow of Keynes, he thought that seriously painful cuts were perhaps not necessary and that the economy was already slowing. Though Macmillan was inclined to dither, haggle and to split the difference, this was a shrewd call. And around him he had many spending ministers, looking after the armed forces, the hospitals and welfare, who were bitterly against cutting back. He feared some of them might resign.
On the other side of the argument, as it turned out, were the real resigners, Thorneycroft and his two junior Treasury ministers – the wealthy, sarcastic, ruthlessly logical and nearly blind Nigel Birch, and Enoch Powell. Their insistence that it was vital to control the money supply was not just a technical position, but was intertwined with a personal suspicion of corporatism and the big state that was close to the more intellectual economic case now being pushed by the newly formed IEA. Lionel Robbins had been advising the three ministers, despite much sucking of teeth by more consensus-minded officials, and Fisher’s men would come to see Thorneycroft and his fellow rebels at Macmillan’s Treasury as heroes. They provided the intellectual ammunition and connected through Powell to younger Tories, and gained them as converts. Powell had already been introduced to Hayek’s thinking. In the months before the three Treasury ministers resigned, they had been dropping in on one another for a rolling conversation which showed they had all concluded the same thing – that government spending was too high and had to be severely reined back. Against the instincts of their own officials as well as their colleagues, they put together a planned series of cuts, including a 50 per cent increase in the cost of school meals, freezes on pay rises and the removal of family allowances for the second child. It would have hit five million families, including millions of the very middle-class mothers whose support the Tories most needed.
It was a deliberately tough and provocative package, and battle was duly joined in the cabinet. If there was ever a moment before the great political smash-ups of the seventies when ministers could have gripped the issue of inflation and asserted themselves against the consensus of Whitehall and the unions, this was it. Day after day, the arguments raged back and forward. Compromises were offered, partially accepted, and then rejected again. Tempers grew shorter. The Treasury team trooped in and out of Number Ten. A special cabinet was held on Friday, then again on the Sunday. But Thorneycroft, despite being accused of ‘Hitler tactics’ by irate colleagues, would not budge. Macmillan, anxious to get away for a tour of the Commonwealth, would not concede the cuts. All three ministers then resigned. Thorneycroft would later become chairman of the Tories under Margaret Thatcher. Birch would struggle with his growing blindness and never return. Powell’s stormy career had many more crises in it yet. In apparently throw-away but actually carefully considered words, Macmillan dismissed the whole matter as ‘a little local difficulty’, appointed a new team, and swanned off abroad exactly on schedule. It seemed stylish, insouciant, masterly. From it, immediately, nothing flowed. Some cuts were made by the new Chancellor. The economy was in fact turning down, which suggests Thorneycroft’s medicine would have been grim indeed.
Yet this was a turning point – away from the ideas of free marketeers and towards the last phase of the planning economy which would end in disaster. That, in turn, would eventually produce Thatcherism, the IEA’s final triumph and the time when Antony Fisher’s eggs came home to roost. Before that could happen, another pre-election boom was engineered in 1959 and a new idea for improving British economic performance began to take hold, the central plan used by the French. By 1961 there was a ‘pay pause’ to try to hold down inflation, and then the establishment of a grand chat-in, the National Economic Development Council, or Neddy, which brought industrialists, civil servants and trade unionists around a table to discuss how to produce more. Reggie Maudling virtually ordered the carmakers to build new factories in Scotland, Merseyside and Wales in order to combat rising unemployment. The following year saw a 4 per cent growth target. The run-up to the 1964 election under a new Prime Minister featured a giveaway budget by Maudling, by now Chancellor, which would later be blamed by Labour for leaving an atrocious economic crisis. Almost all the weapons used by Labour to try and plan their way out of economic decline, from pay and incomes targets to national plans and regional directives, were already in place under Macmillan and his successor Alec Douglas-Home. All would fail. Antony Fisher knew why.