Another voice
Damned lies
Auberon Waugh
United Nations Human Rights Day was marked in Moscow by a press con- ference at which Mr Vitaly Ruben, chair- man of one of the two Soviet parliaments, denounced Dr Andrei Sakharov, the disgraced Soviet Academician, as a lunatic. Sakharov had written an article in an American magazine called Foreign Affairs calling for an American nuclear strike against Russia: 'Only someone who is nuts could suggest such a thing,' said Ruben, tapping his head significantly.
Dr Sakharov may be as nutty as a fruit- cake for all I know, but he never called for a nuclear strike against Russia. His article merely urged that the United States should strive to maintain nuclear parity with the Soviet Union as a way of avoiding catastrophe. Mr Ruben's lie about what Dr Sakharov wrote is, of course, typical of the lies which every Communist Party func- tionary tells every day in order to bolster the grotesquely incompetent and oppressive system which keeps him in power. But Mr Ruben is at least fairly safe in misrepresen- ting what Dr Sakharov wrote because nobody except Party apparatchiks has been allowed to read the original.
1 experienced some of the frustration which Dr Sakharov must feel when I saw the general reaction to my tentative and chatty piece entitled 'Thoughts on the Ukraine' of two weeks ago. The two letters which were printed in the Spectalor ap- parently from readers were,the lip of an iceberg, but since they were the ones which surfaced, perhaps I may examine them.
I do not propose to rehearse the arguments by which I suggested that while the United States and Argentina continued to feed the Soviet Union they were in fact feeding the arms race, with all its attendant risks. I was not advancing Ukrainian na- tionalism as a romantic cause for which we might be prepared to die, taking Ms, Nina Tuckman of London NI9 and Mr Alasdair C. Rankin, of Glasgow, with us. It was simply a fact of life. The parallel with Mr Andropov trying to starve America and detach half the States of the Union simply does not apply: nobody has suggested try- mg to starve the Soviet Union, or detaching its constituent parts — merely ceasing to feed the wretched area and thus keeping it together. Obviously Soviet rhetoric will blame the West for any internal problems from crop failure to succession, but I repeat that there is no reason in logic or normal human psychology why, faced with a tight situation at home, the ruling classes of the Soviet Union should resort to nuclear suicide. Traditionally, Russia's rulers have chosen either to murder their own people or attempt foreign adventures, never both simultaneously.
But the panic which greeted my sugges- tion that the disintegration of the Soviet bloc is not only inevitable but also to be welcomed as the only possible way ahead must be seen, I am afraid, as typical of what passes for wisdom in Britain. We are so ter- rified of any change that we cannot see the very real danger — partly because it is argued by unilateralists to support their even grosser errors — that the present arms race may be leading inexorably to disaster. The most useful thing to do now is not to study the tensions and seeds of self- destruction within the Soviet Union, but to study ourselves.
This is not difficult. Every year the Government Statistical Service produces an invaluable book called Social Trends (HMSO, £19.95) which enumerates everything which is happening in the coun- try, at any rate so far as it can be perceived by the Government Statistical Service. It does not attempt to make any assessment of such things as we may observe for ourselves as the most significant social changes of our time — the acceptance of union-inspired terrorism in industry, the growth of the committed Left in almost exact proportion to its rejection by the electorate, the new puritan ascendancy in Whitehall, especially the DHSS, Home Office and Department of Transport, the great advances of semi- literacy and Orwellian half-think public life. But at last it gives us pointers to all these things, as in figures for the increased readership of the Sunday Tunes, higher rates of suicide, and vast increase in the numbers of police officers.
But the most important underlying trends seldom attract much attention, because we are already painfully aware of them. We are an aging, slightly shrinking population (when net immigration is taken into ac- count), whose men die comparatively young. Our reduction to absurdity, on cur- tent trends, would appear to be that of a nation of old women, living alone, consum- ing more and more alcohol, buying ever fewer books and newspapers but listening to the wireless most of the time. Many of these old ladies will be divorced as well as widowed and will have been born out of wedlock. They will not smoke, and they will prefer margarine to butter. If they suffer from VD, it will be the non-specific variety rather than syphilis of gonorrhoea, or possibly herpes. Of course there are some cheerful aspects of the contemporary scene, too. Consumer expenditure in real terms has risen inex- orably over the years, giving rise to more and more complaints about domestic noise. Domestic smells and litter are not evaluated. But fertility continues to nose- dive, even among the blacks. The most cheerful statistic I spotted in all 208 pages of this most excellent publication concerned alcohol consumption among old age pen- sioners living in two-person households. They drink nearly twice as much alcohol each as pensioners living in one-person households.
It is at this point — somewhere along the line — that one begins to ask oneself how on earth the Government Statistical Service knows all these extraordinary facts. For in- stance, we are told that 'in 1982, the pro- portion of women aged between 16 and 34 at the time of marriage in 1979-1981 who had cohabited with their husband before marriage was 21 per cent where the mar- riage was the first for both partners and 67 per cent where one or both partners had been married before. These proportions are much higher than the corresponding pro- portion for women whose current or most recent marriage took place in the period 1970 to 1974: 8 and 46 per cent respec- tively.'
Now how on earth did the Government Statistical Service acquire that fascinating piece of information? How on earth did it find out how many domestic pets I keep I am not even sure myself — or how often I listen to the wireless? Is my residence among the two million judged defective, and how dare they make such a judgment without consulting me?
The answers to most of these questions are tucked away in an Appendix of a previous volume. Unknown to most of us, the Government conducts a General Hous- ing Survey from time to time. Since 1979, this has included a Family Information Sec- tion which included questions on current and pre-marital cohabitation. But the sam- ple, we learn, involved only a few more than 3000 women or one seventieth of one per cent of women over 16. Even supposing they can find 3000 women to tell the truth their sex lives, the sample is statistically worthless.
Yet even as I write, this totally bogus in- formation is being fed into ten thousand computers, extrapolated, redigested and pilgerised, to be the basis of every market and government decision, every searing newspaper article (old age pensioners in Newcastle are tottering down to the Tyne with pathetic bundles of fur in their arms) condemning the government for its callousness — every ministerial speech praising the government's achievements. The important dimension lacking from George Orwell's vision of a Big Brother government knowing and cont rolling everything is that Big Brother is almost cer- tain to get it all wrong.
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