Another voice
A year for yobelling
Auberon Waugh
Poor old Britain. Hic. Used to be such a great little country for people like us. How the film of the Coronation brought it all back. All those blackamoors and Australians trying to March in step. Really quite makes you want to blub, or punch somebody or, you know, have another drink.
Actually, I was too young to take much part in the Coronation. I spent the day in Weston-super-Mare on a day's outing from school with a boy called Green-Armitage. All the restaurants were closed, but we found a sandwich bar open on the front. We didn't see any blackamoors or Australians in Westonsuper-Mare, and the most evocative part of the film was the dreadful hairstyle worn by the Queen and her ladiesin-waiting, or whatever the women were called who traipsed along behind her. Whatever may be the experience of other people, it seems to me that things have been getting better and better ever since 1952, and 'the only true significance of the event was to demonstrate how things are shortly going to get much worse.
It took Philip Howard of The Times to inform us that the word jubilee is not derived in the first instance from the low or church latin verb jubilare, 'to rejoice', but from the Hebrew word yobel which means a ram. In fact, I had already made this discovery, trying to find some reason for the extraordinary pronunciation of jubilee used by the Queen, Angela Rippon and others, when they stressed the last syllable making it rhyme with 'tree', instead of giving it the force of the final 'e' in 'Psyche' as the Oxford English Dictionary suggests. Does the Queen ask for a cup of coffeee? Does she, in her private moments, suck or chew toffeees? The effect was to ensure that her Jubileee was celebrated as a festival of ignorance, illiteracy and proletarian triumphalism, which is perhaps what the organisers had in mind. One can see that the Queen has to suffer this sort of humiliation, but Angela Rippon and the BBC might have put up more of a fight.
From meaning a ram, yobel came to mean a ram's horn used as a trumpet. One marvels at the ingenuity of the tribes of Israel in the early, pastoral days, allowing their musical abilities to find expression so soon. From this habit of yobelling came the jubilee, an event celebrated in Jewish history every fiftieth year, when people would blow trumpets and the fields would be left untilled for a whole year.
Other strange things happened in Jubilee Year all land and most houses which had been sold in the past halfcentury would suddenly revert to their original owners but I do not think we need worry about them.
It is also a fact, of course, that inflation is running three times faster than it ran at the height of the last war, the economy is falling to pieces and something or other extremely unpleasant I wish Peter Jay were still here to tell me what is going to happen fairly soon. But I do not think one should meditate on the unpleasant consequences of yobelling in Jubilee Year. Let us first look at the more agreeable aspects of our predicament which I attribute in all its ramifiCations to the single fact that Britain is now ruled by its working class to a greater extent than any other developed nation in the world, including Russia and the socialist countries.
Last month, the Daily Mail showed photographs of eighteen people who had left Britain for tax reasons. It estimated that these people and others like them were costing the country £1000 million a year. This may seem a large amount, but if it is shared out among the 55 million who remain it costs us only £18 or so each, and, as I studied the pictures, I honestly felt that their absence was cheap at the price: Mick Jagger, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, David Bowie, Charlotte Rampling, Len Deighton, Joe Bugner
Then there is the cheerful prospect of all the government and commercial expenditure which must be reduced or abandoned: the hideous council houses which will never be built, the schools, hospitals, by-passes, factories, office blocks, hover-trains, public lavatories on Exmoor, the juggernaut lorries which will never run, Concorde aeroplanes which will never fly, civil servants who will never be recruited.
It is only when one tries to extend the list that one begins to have doubts. A future of empty roads is a beautiful thought not a car to be seen between Taunton and Plymouth but what about my dear wife's little runabout Renault, what about my own glittering limousine, with its automatic gears, three rows of seats and wireless which works? How can any of us be sure of profiting from this development? Does the working class really know what it is doing?
Traditionally the best way to find out what the working class is thinking is to ask one's taxi-driver, but I can never understand what they say. But if one dares to probe the collective mind of our rulers and extract some sort of proletarian view of the economy, I think it will go like this: inflation is no longer caused by higher wages but by Arabs and the Common Market, so it is only fair that there should be higher wages and pensions in order to 'combat it; things may be difficult for a time but fortunately our oil bonanza is just round the corner, after which it will not be necessary for any of us to work again. On the other hand, the Government should occupy itself seriously in creating more jobs.
I think the fair-minded observer must now accept that there is oil in the North Sea, reluctant as one was to believe it at first. As Mr Rees Mogg might point out about the existence of God, it is no disproof of the existence of North Sea Oil to show that if it hadn't existed our politicians would have had to invent it. It was the blow-out which finally convinced me. But I think that the fair-minded observer must also decide that the discovery of oil in the North Sea was the greatest disaster which could possibly have befallen our chances of economic recovery at the present time.
There can be no question of further investment in the British econothy while its workers unilaterally decide their own working conditions. Recently we saw ICI announce its plans to build a £250 million plant in Wilhelmshaven, West Germany, to process chemicals arising out of North Sea oil, and so long as the British unions remain as strong as they are, this js bound to be the pattern of the future. Significantly, the only important area of the economy which is still ununionised Is North Sea oil, and I think those of us with our country's best interests at heart should support the unions in their efforts to make this operation as inefficient and uneconomic as everything else. But on the assumption that no miracle will save us a sudden drying-up Of the North Sea oil wells, or a dramatic reduc: tion in the OPEC oil price which woul° have the same effect we must just sit, and wait for the worst to happen' imagineit will manifest itself at first in ant ever-growing list of shortages. Providenr_ musicians should start practising wit° rams' horns in time for the Golden Jubilee in twenty-five years' time.
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