ANOTHER VOICE
Time to ask what is happening to the English
AUBERON WAUGH
Not so much any damp-eyed, unrecipro- cated love for the brutal enslaved Rus- sians, slippery Poles, bouncing Czechs or their viciously cynical and unprincipled leaders. Not even love for this country and its variegated inhabitants. For reasons which I shall list later, it is hard for anyone to speak of love for England nowadays without sounding either a villain or a fool. The love they should try to foster and project is their love for each other.
This may seem a tall order. Few if any of them are particularly lovable. Few have any common purpose beyond keeping Labour out, and grabbing a little slice of the action for themselves. But after the spectacle of Labour scratching their eyes out in Bournemouth; after David Owen's angry denial that he loved David Steel in Torquay (like two public school boys caught in the shrubbery behind the squash courts); and after David Steel's description of his relationship with the Liberal Party in Dundee (Disdain is the wrong word, but perhaps affection is too strong a word') — I feel there is a great, aching gap in British politics which the Tories will neglect at their peril.
Having brooded about the matter on a weekend trip to Normandy, I have come to the conclusion that a large part of the profound disorientation one observes in English political attitudes derives nowa- days from an awareness that our leaders do not love each other. I do not propose to embark on a list of their positive qualities, suggesting that many people — the 79- year-old Somerset novelist Anthony Powell and the late lain Moncreiffe have found Mrs Thatcher physically attrac- tive, or that even Nigel Lawson might look quite handsome in a Turkish sort of way if he could be persuaded to grow a curly moustache. I do not even propose that they should try to like each other. Love, as practised in California and by certain bizarre sects over here, is something quite different. I am suggesting that the Con- servative Party Conference should be turned into an agape or love-feast to set an example by which the country might come to reconcile itself to returning a Conserva- tive government for its third term in a couple of years' time.
It was in Bedford, in July 1957, that Harold Macmillan made his most famous utterance: 'Let's be frank about it. Most of our people have never had it so good. Go round the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms, and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime — nor indeed ever in the history of this country.'
With the exception of three or four inner city areas and perhaps a dozen former industrial areas where the older industries once wheezed and groaned, the same is true nowadays but with gigantic, gilded knobs on. The whole country, with the exception of these areas, is oozing and slurping with money. Even the unem- ployed are probably better off, materially, than most skilled workers in full employ- ment were in 1957. This is a golden age which can last only as long as North Sea oil, and to which we shall all look back for the rest of our lives, just as in my own early childhood nearly everybody looked back to the years of plenty before the war. There have been no cuts in government spending, in fact it has continued to grow at a spectacular rate, from 36 per cent of the national income in 1979, when Mrs That- cher came to power, to 43 per cent now.
Yet when one listens to the moans of politicians and public servants, frustrated in their desire to spend even more of the national income, one would suppose that the country in general, and the poor in particular, were going through a period of suffering such as has not been known in the British Isles since the Irish potato famines.. Needless to say, politicians, public servants and their running dogs in the press and broadcasting, make endless capital out of such areas of deprivation as survive, sug- gesting that even more public money should be pumped around. The amazing thing is that they should have succeeded in convincing so many people who are neither politicians nor public servants (nor the sort of social and emotional cripples who are naturally drawn to vindictive class politics). I always try to see the other person's point of view in conversation, but nowadays I find that about half of England — and often the more educated, apparently in- telligent half — can talk nothing but tosh, with no basis in reality at all.
Returning on the ferry boat from Cher- bourg to Portsmouth on Sunday night and inspecting my fellow passengers, I thought I glimpsed the underlying reasons for this. Ten years ago the passengers on these ferries were gentle, middle-class couples with well-behaved children, all thrilled by the excitement of foreign travel and boast- ing about the cathedrals they had seen, the interesting and unusual things they had eaten and drunk. Words cannot describe the grimness of these new Britons, as they stuffed their horrible faces with sausage and chips and baked beans: the loathsome- ness of their appearance, the hideousness of their voices, the horror of the smells they gave off.
The truth is, I suspect, that intelligent and sensitive England is disgusted by all this affluence. Reasonably enough, it blames the Government, but, in the best traditions of our human race, it must find some other reason for hating Mrs Thatcher than that she has made the lower classes so disgustingly rich. So it seizes on the scapegoat offered by the entire public spending machine, and blames these non- existent government cuts as being in- humane and 'divisive'.
Of course it is an honourable and admir- able thing that women and suchlike folk should concern themselves with the dis- advantaged and deprived in our midst. But they are only a tiny part of the whole, and the resources already devoted to them (however incompetently) are gigantic and out of all proportion. Now it is proposed to turn the whole resources of the state over to them — but only, I suspect, as a means of putting a stop to this filthy affluence.
The Conservatives at Blackpool had better teach us to love each other a little more, and the only way they can start is with themselves.
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