Another voice
Recessional
Auberon Waugh
Throughout the Commonwealth Conference in Marlborough House I was attending a slightly humbler Commonwealth gathering of doctors, nurses, patients and ward cleaners a couple of hundred yards away in Westminster Hospital. Perhaps it will be thought whimsical to compare the two, and perhaps I have been unduly influenced by Mr Rees-Mogg's edifying book of Christian apologetics: An Humbler Heaven (Hamish Hamilton 0.50) which I took with me to hospital; but it seemed to me that both gatherings were characterised by the same spontaneous and more or less irrational spirit of goodwill and junketing at the public expense. The big difference, of course, is that whereas Commonwealth conferences come and go, life in the Marie Celeste Ward of Westminster Hospital remains as a permanent memorial to our former dominion over palm and pine.
Most thinking people of my generation have tended to sneer at the Commonwealth as a cheap, face-saving device to extricate ourselves from the responsibilities of Empire while retaining a few of the less meaningful perks; Britain's residual pretensions to leadership of this group could be seen as another irritating noise in the empty political rhetoric of our time; and when it seemed that salvation might yet be found within the harsher disciplines imposed by membership of the EEC, Commonwealth loyalties became a rallying point for all the stupidity and wrongheadedness which lie under the surface of political debate, waiting their moment to acclaim Eldon Griffiths or Young Winston, Peter Shore or Douglas Jay our Man of the Moment.
But nobody pretends the Commonwealth is like that nowadays. We have seen it survive the expulsion of South Africa and Rhodesia, the withdrawal of Pakistan, the new truculence of the Australians and the appalling phenomenon of Pierre Trudeau in Canada; we have sat and watched, making sympathetic noises, while the Ugandan government murdered three hundred thousand or so of its citizens; we even lent a friendly hand to the Nigerian government while it murdered two million or so Ibos in Biafra; we absorbed East Africa's Asians and continue to avert our eyes from whatever may be happening in Zanzibar.
What is left is not the sum of these atrocities but a pleasant, friendly, mildly fatuous thing, rather like a church fête — nobody can reasonably visit the blood of Tyburn and Smithfield martyrs on the lady who serves the teas — in a world which desperately needs such pleasant, friendly, mildly fatuous things.
No doubt it is extravagant to invest the Commonwealth with any of the essential characteristics of a family, unless it is seen as an irascible family of Orthodox Jewish persuasion whose members are forever rending their garments, pouring ash on their heads and declaring each other unborn.
But whether we see the Commonwealth Conference as a sort of biennial barmitzvah, or the sentimental reunion of a few crooked old survivors in the political rat race, or simply as a harmless and inexpensive way of keeping a few world leaders happy and drunk and out of mischief for a few days, the fact remains that it is a friendly occasion. It is also a reminder if not that we are all God's children, at least that most human encounters are friendly ones. Outside the Soviet Union and New York City, human beings do tend to smile at each other when they meet, they do tend to pass the time of day in amiable and vapid conversation. Haggling and conflict take up an extraordinarily small part of normal human intercourse, at any rate in my experience; why on earth should international relations be any different?
The only logical objection to the jamboree must be on doctrinaire opposition to any form of public spending, and it is on this point that I must dwell for a moment, because I think that the Conservatives are going to come badly unstuck if they single out reduced public spending as the main plank of their New Deal. As the free occupant of a L50-a-day National Health Service bed, I am in a better position than most to see that it will cause nothing but misery and despair.
Coventry has just been taken over by the Tories, having been ruled for as long as most people can remember by two Labour Councillors Arthur Waugh, father and son. I do not know whether they are cousins of mine, but have been eager to claim them ever since Councillor Arthur Waugh Senior fainted in horror at the unveiling of Graham Sutherland's tapestry at Coventry Cathedral in 1962. Under their benign rule — Senior is leader of the Labour Party Group, Junior was chairman of the Finance and Recreation Committees — councillors were allowed free sauna-and-massage treatments at the ratepayers' expense, while their wives received weekly deliveries of Corporation flowers in a Corporation van. Councillor Arthur Waugh Senior revealed last week that his wife (Edith, no less) had been receiving the bouquets for fifteen years. 'We regard it as a nice gesture,' he . said.
Not so the new Tory chairman of the Finance Committee, Councillor Trevor Webb. He has not only put a stop to the flowers and the massage, but even ended the f15-a-head free lunches for committee menibers.
Why? Why? Why? Think of all the hideous buildings which the Corporation might have put up if they had not spent the money on these harmless pleasures. Most of us would sooner see our political leaders rewarded in this way, if we thought about it, than by whatever obscure and unattractive pleasure they may find in exercising power for its own sake. It is not for such harmless venality as this that the Labour establishment is now held in almost universal hatred. It is for transforming us from a happy nation to an unhappy one.
A dominant factor in the present mood which seems to have been almost entirely overlooked by the Conservative Party is hatred of the unions. They simply do not seem to have noticed that many working men and women resent being prevented from doing a proper job of work and loathe having to watch others being paid more for doing even less. They resent the whole system of blackmail to which free wage bargaining is now reduced, and regard the union-supported wage policy as a direct attack on themselves. The only programme needed to return the whole country to a happy and unembittered state is one which will smash the power of the unions and remove the punitive element in taxation.
Even if politicians realised how much simple goodwill or friendliness survives la the country, they would probably be unable to exploit it. In a speech to the Royal Soeiety of Medicine last week, Mr Grimond suggested that the only way to change people's attitudes. was to appeal to their better sense. It did not occur to him that people's attitudes are much as they have always been, only the political understanding of those attitudes has changed. Obviously the stupidest members of society will always equate happiness with more money for less work, but I doubt whether many such were to be found in the Royal Society of Medicine. It is an attitude which I shared during a ten-week stint inthe lavatory' cleaning squad at the Guards Depot, Caterham, but outside the small world 01 lavatory cleaners I have only met it in the House of Commons and the left wing of the trade union movement. Perhaps Mr Grimond can explain how it has become the dominant philosophy of British politics. . Anybody who doubts the energy, di!' ciency, beauty, selflessness, compassion, good humour, gentleness and simple sweetness of the human race should spend a weell or so in the surgical ward of a Nationa Health hospital watching the nurses. Fetr.., the alternative view, he should watch wart: cleaners and ancillary workers, already Pal' more than trained nurses and about to go oe strike for more. At present, the country has chosen to be governed by its ward cleaners and ancillary workers, but such people!!! not in the majority. If the Conservatives can't or daren't appeal to our better sense; they should at least take the trouble to finu out where the real resentments lie.
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