Notebook
In a 'century which has already ‘suPP'd full With horrors', there is still possibly one crime which may come to light, of such Fantastic proportions as to nudge even monsters like Hitler and Stalin towards the Shade. As extraordinary events continue to unfold in China, one cannot help wondering Whether sooner or later the process of 'cle-Mao-ification' will lead as far as some Public admission (pace Khrushchev's deStalinisation speech of 1956) of the extent of the massacres which took place in China during the twenty years after the ComMunists seized power. Looking through the Guinness Book of Records recently, I was startled to come across their entry under 'Mass Killings'. In 1969, the Soviet Government alleged, with a certain amount of circumstantial evidence, that some 26,300,000 Chinese had been murdered between 1949 and 1965 alone. Two years later the Taiwan Government claimed that the figure for deaths between 1949 and 1969 was 'at least 39,940,000'. In the same published by the US Senate l rt Judiciary Committee estimated that the figear, a repo tire up to 1971 had been anywhere between 32 million and 62 million. Even if all these tePorts could be said to stem from highly dubious (or at least partisan) sources, it tseems at least possible that Mao and his nenchmen were responsible for killings on a scale beside which Auschwitz and the Gulag Archipelago seem comparatively modest °Perations. Shall we one day see the emergence of a Chinese Solzhenitsyn, capable of fleshing out these unimaginable twilight horrors with some hard evidence? It rn -at be very strange to be a left-wing Politician. The nearer one gets to the millennium, the further and further away does it appear to be. There are always more and more things which need to be abolished (the House x.,o se of Lords), or taken into state own ership (farmland, North Sea oil). Of course, as I argued at length in these columns last summer, the steady drift to the left is much more a psychological phenomenon than anything else. Comrade Benn and his chums are unconsciou i sly caught up n a sly caught up n a Psychological momentum which leads them Constantly to escalate their demands, which In turn have less and less connection with arlY of the real country's problems, or indeed the .. world at all (e.g. the proposal that 'a million new jobs should be created to fight unemployment' why not five million, or even ten, while they are about it?). Has anyone worked out that it might actually cost national. as much as 115,000,000,000 to onalise the 19 million acres of agricultural land? In fact, apart from the exciting idea that our new, unicameral legislature (modelled on Cromwell's `Rump'?) should be able to extend its life indefinitely without any need for nasty, time-consuming elections, the only real surprise of Mr Benn's manifesto proposals is their comparative moderation. After all the huffing and puffing of a year or two ago that the Big Four banks and the construction industry should be taken into public ownership, the suggestions that a 'State Bank' should be set up and only one building firm nationalised (pour decourager les autres?) seem little more than a couple of rather expensive little jokes. Alas, one may take little comfort from this apparent tactical withdrawal. The really alarming question to contemplate is not 'what follies will the next Labour Government be committed to carrying out?', so much as who will be there to restrain them? Three years ago, who could have believed it possible that, by the end of this parliament, Roy Jenkins, Antony Crosland, Brian Walden, David Marquand and John Mackintosh would all be lost to politics? As I recall John Mackintosh himself once remarking, after he had been studying the ideological credentials of prospective Labour candidates, it is not this parliamentary Labour Party we have to worry about it is the one which will be sitting there after the next election, when the left, joined by all those polytechnic lecturers of the 'class of '68', for the first time may be actually in a majority.
Though, as one of the authors, I say it who shouldn't, one of my favourite items in the latest book-selection from Private Eye is a parody of a Man Alive inquiry into the 'great banana skin menace' Mast year over four people incurred serious injuries from slipping up on banana skins. This year the figure could be even higher). The intention of the piece (much as was Auberon Waugh's in his recent prediction of the great outcry that would surely greet the 'childeating ferret' shock horror) was to burlesque our modern mania for identifying absurd 'problems', working up hysterical concern, and demanding 'legislation', 'government action', 'much more money must be spent on research' and the like. But on Monday morning the latest instance of this fast-growing branch of national pathology had even me rubbing my eyes in disbelief. A solemn discussion was taking place on Radio 4 about the appalling scandal of Britain's 'agoraphobia sufferers'. Mr Grenville Janner MP solemnly suggested that the government should introduce a special 'mobility allowance', to allow agoraphobes to get out into the community to live 'happy, useful lives'. He also inevitably said that we had almost no 'information' on this problem 'much more money must be spent on research'. And then what should turn up on Man Alive on Tuesday night? An inquiry into 'the problem of agoraphobia'.
Talking of absurd 'problems', there really would be tremendous relief all round if the tiny genius of Ramsbury Manor were at last able to offload Centre Point on to some of the various prospective tenants he has been desperately showing round in recent weeks. Quite apart from the fact that this tatty skyscraper, which I have to pass six or seven times a week, is becoming an increasingly dismal object to look at, the saga of London's most famous (nearly) empty office block has become a thundering bore. The story is by no means a new one in London's history. When, in the 1840s, the most successful developer of his time,Thomas Cubitt, put up the two tallest private buildings London had ever seen, a pair of sevenstorey stucco mansions on Knightsbridge, they remained unlet for so long that wags of the time nicknamed them 'Malta and Gibraltar because they will never be taken' (one was eventually let to Hudson the railway king, who promptly went bankrupt, and had to sell it to the French for their Embassy). Earlier still, in the 1760s, the Adam brothers bought up seven acres of slums around Durham House in the Strand to build their new Adelphi Terrace. It cost so much to erect that no one could afford to take the apartments, and the Adams were threatened with bankruptcy. Eventually, having more friends in the House of Commons than Mr Hyams, they were bailed out by the ingenious device of an Act being passed, setting up a national lottery the prizes of which were lodgings in the Adelphi. I have often thought that by far the most entertaining solution to the problem of Centre Point would simply be to offer it as first prize in a raffle.
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