Another voice
Our Moroccan future
Auberon Waugh
Casablanca My search for the clinic or nursing home where Jan Morris had her famous operation has come to nothing. Nobody knows where it is, although they seem well used to the spectacle of Englishmen with this sort of problem. Many helpful suggestions are forthcoming, but never an address. My own interest, I aver, is simply that of a literary pilgrim. My colleague's sacrifice implores the passing tribute of a sigh, a wreath, a quiet moment of reflection. Her writing may have gone from strength to strength, as I believe, since the operation, but I have decided that I lack the necessary dedication to my craft to try the same remedy. Nor, as I pointed out to her in a long letter some time ago, could I face the boredome of women's after-dinner conversation, or the indignity of coloured toenails, or the crudity of the women's movement. But! can't help seeing Casablanca as some sort of literary beacon. Doesn't Mr Kingsley Amis sometimes feel it beckoning, even the great Anthony Burgess? The age of Oh! Calcutta! has surely passed, and it can't be long now before we see Oh! Casablanca! in neon lights over the Duchess Theatre, offering a new and even more intriguing sort of strip show.
After these initial reflections, one tends to see the whole of Morocco as a Signpost for Britain in the Eighties. Of course, the parallel can never be exact, since Morocco has a firmly established national religion to comfort and sustain its people in their adversities. On top of this, the population is extraordinarily young — not so young as in Thailand, where the average age is fifteen, but with over half the population under twenty it is grotesquely different from our own.
On the other hand, the Moroccan young — Arab and Berber alike — do not show many of the characteristics normally associated with youth; they are not thrusting, or dynamic or politically active, and take to unemployment like the proverbial ducks to water. But they appear to have alert, inquiring minds and are probably more to be compared with our beloved old age pensioners than with our own listless, incurious young people, stupefied by the variety of sweets and reading matter on offer: Beano, Dandy, The Sun, Topper, Whizzer and Chips etc. etc. Moroccan youths have no such embarrassment of choice. But illiteracy among the fifteen to nineteen-yearolds in Morocco is 75 per cent, and in this matter they are still a long way ahead of us.
The growth of illiteracy in Britain, especially among teachers, is a separate study, and this is not the moment to speculate on the tender, Somerville-educated conscience of Mrs Shirley Williams as she presides over the final stages of what was once one of the world's better education systems. Let it suffice that education has always been something at which the middle classes have excelled, so that in the new, stupid, uniondominated society of the future, education must be reduced to a minimum. Such weighty affairs of state are not for the likes of us, but reading the Observer's eulogy of the revolting Larry Lamb, editor of The Sun, last week, I was amazed that nobody — not even Mr Murdoch— has yet taken up my suggestion which, I feel sure, contains the only long-term hope for the newspaper industry. This is for a new national comic to challenge Beano as the main reading matter of the up-and-coming generation. Beano is still read by the university elites, but there are whole groups of school-leavers, students in technical colleges and teacher training establishments who fail to identify with its old-fashioned attitudes, ancrneed something more down-to-earth.
One reason for this may be the prudishness of D. C. Thomson, the publishers. A down-market Beano for the new generation of non-elitist, comprehensively-educated adults would eschew all advice on how to clean their teeth and wash behind the ears. Instead it would have brightly coloured 'adult' comic strips specialising in lavatory jokes and mild forms of sexual innuendo. Its naked ladies would be fat, middle-aged and copiously endowed with pubic hair. Other photographs would show small, furry animals. Occasionally, the two might be photographed together, but the main message would be carried by cartoons and comic strips pointing out, through jokes about false teeth and going to the lavatory, what an essentially humorous, easy-going race the English are.
The formula can't fail, and if it is tied to some simple daily competition with large cash prizes so that every copy sold acts as a lottery ticket, it would cater for every identifiable English taste. The element of topicality would be supplied by a daily interview and photograph of yesterday's winner, and a page would be devoted to readers' com plaints about their various illnesses. It is with such bright ideas as this that we should face the future instead of brooding glumly over Larry Lamb's horrible face as he boasts of the phenomenal success of The Sun.
But as with Morocco, all the brighter, keener people have left. In Morocco there are now only 1,500 doctors to cater for a population of fifteen million, and this is plainly the way we are heading in England. Those who remain in Morocco are perversely content to sit by a small pile of quartz or fossils on some unfrequented tract in the ante-Sahara on the off-chance that a tourist will pass by to barter for his findings. After we in Britain have sold all our Warwick vases and Canalettos we can start trying to interest the German tourists in our lace doyleys and Edwardian chamber pots. We are for the most part too old totry any of the other tricks that the Arab boys get up to. Even in Morocco, it is not possible to find anyone to clean the lavatories on camp-sites or clear litter from the beaches. Unemployment Even in Morocco, it is not possible to find anyone to clean the lavatories on camp-sites or clear litter from the beaches. Unemployment is impossible to estimate in a country where two thirds of the population are peasants, and the ten per cent in industry produce half the gross national product. The Arab attitude to work would appear to be much the same as the English — five are usually required to do the work of one — but without the element of moral righteousness ,which makes the English feel it is humiliating and wrong for them to work, something which only their supine good nature allows them to contemplate, occasionally, as a treat for their employers.
Instead, the Arabs seems surprisingly happy to beg. This is something the English will never do, of course. `Ah doon't give money to , beggars,' one of our group explained, as if he were enunciating an unalterable moral principle. The English are used to demanding their baksheesh as of right. I wonder how they will fare when, after the collapse of education and the national health, our beautiful system of unemployment benefit, supplementary grants and allowances begins to totter. Wandering around the villages of southern Morocco, where small children of five always seem to be carrying a baby on their backs, its eyes covered with flies, where village idiots howl and gibber at the gates and obviously mad dogs rush around biting everyone in sight, and seeing it all in this rather strange light as a vision of Britain's future, I found myself asking rather an awkward question: just how conservative is one, or are we, or ought we to be?
Britain resoundingly rejected the Heath/ walker vision of a conservative future — of a high wage economy, high productivity, fat men in their fibre-glass ocean cruisers, thin men competing manfully in the sheets — and we all breathed a sigh of relief at the time. It is perhaps merciful that the alternative, more austere vision of a conservative future —massive unemployment, collapse of public services, poverty, illiteracy and slow decay-should be ushered in as a product of Mr Callaghan's political know-how, Mr Benn's progressive idealism and Mr Moss Evans's noble stupidity. I am not sure that I regard our Moroccan future with quite the right degree of dismay or consternation, but I am very glad it is the Labour socialist and proletarian leadership which is giving us the chance to try it out. Mrs Thatcher should stay out of sight for a little longer yet. Morocco is not too bad once you can get used to the dirt.
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