SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
J. W. M. THOMPSON
Parliament seems at a low ebb these days: it is as well that the latest attempt to have proceedings televised should have sunk in a pool of general apathy. All the same, if parliamentary standards are low they do still exist. They impose upon ministers and MPS certain obligations which may be ignored elsewhere. I thought this well illustrated when Mr Michael Stewart misled the House of Commons the other day over a supposed American 'guarantee' of relief flights to Biafra; at least he had to turn up in the House the next day and, however grudgingly, go through the motions of setting the record straight. When Mr Maurice Foley, his junior minister, made the same misleading state- ment on television no similar pressure re- quired him to return to the screen to make any apology or correction.
As it happened I saw Mr Foley in the Twentyfour Hours programme in which he said his piece about Biafra. He was having a difficult argument with Group-Captain Leonard Cheshire, and he used the American `guarantee' effectively to damn the Biafrans and exonerate the British government. No doubt most of the five or six million people watching accepted his words as the whole truth. Only those who follow the parliament- ary reports would later have seen that Mr Stewart had admitted that no such guarantee existed. Most viewers, I dare say, retained a general impression that the Biafrans had been wholly unreasonable and could con- veniently be blamed for their own distress.
Naturally enough the incident has caused some embarrassment within the BBC. The contrast is all too stark. Mr Stewart misleads the House and has to make amends. Mr Foley misleads the nation through the mac and, it seems, there is nothing whatever to be done about it.
Independent means
It was agreeable to see the National Union of Students coming out strongly against the compilation of nosey-parkerish personal dossiers by the Department of Education. This ingredient in our computerised future will have to be watched unceasingly if the state is not to acquire a dangerous keyhole into every citizen's private affairs, and long before the year 1984 at that. But the students' case would have been stronger if they had not, at the same conference, demanded that the state should not only leave them alone but should also find a lot more money for them in the form of higher grants. I sym- pathise with students who, in a time of sharply rising prices and vociferous demands for higher wages, feel the pinch of poverty; they are actually worse off than they were, and it is hard to stomach that fact when ministers are continually boasting about the country's growing prosperity. But there is a contradiction of a sort in objecting to state interference with one breath and demanding more state money with the next. After all, the students' union, however much it tends to forget the fact, is not a trade union of workers pressing for a share in the profits of industry: students are a privileged minority supported by the workers. Their call for freedom from state interference might well have been accompanied by another call for freedom from dependence on the state. The obvious method is a system whereby students pay a part at least of the cost of their educa- tion, through the provision of loans ins of the present handouts.
Down to earth
An interesting statistic has just eme from the Board of Trade. The numbe passengers carried on domestic air To actually fell by 4 per cent last year. I lik see this as a sign that the old fashioned sense which regards flying as ipso j superior to other transport is at last losin spell. Of all the often forlorn attemp arrest the despoliation of our environm the hint of new life in the railways is po tially one of the most encouraging. They nothing to be said, in the present stat aviation at least, for endlessly increasing number of people moved about a small crowded island by air and endlessly ad to the appalling burden of aircraft noise.
We have learned the hard way that fly like all other technological developments. to be disciplined if we are not to pay insane price for any benefits it brings. is a point which ought to loom large at international conference on aircraft n being held at Montreal this week. It is very well to express rosy hopes of silen
aircraft engines in some remote future. H and now, the best chance of sparing milli
of people the curse of incessant din lies sensible siting of airports and enlighte development of • less obnoxious forms transport.
Uprooted
Watching an old hedge being uprooted farm machinery the other day, I remembe a recent estimate by the Nature Consery that some 7,000 miles of English hedge are at present being destroyed every y. You have only to travel around the coun a little to see the impoverishing effect u the landscape. Some other effects are obvious: wild life suffers to the point extinction, and evidently the poisoning eli of chemical sprays is greatly increased w they are spread wholesale over the new-st prairie farms instead of selectively on tra tional smaller fields. But for me the great loss is still simply visual. The familiar E lish countryside is being bulldozed out existence.
Many of the hedges now disappearing astonishingly ancient. Professor W. Hoskins, the chief historian of the Eng landscape, worked out a rough-and-re rule that for every hundred years of its in an unmanaged condition a hedge-b will have added one more species of sh to its flora. On this reckoning I know some pretty ancient hedges, mostly no do now threatened with destruction. Old hed often coincide with local boundaries, m of which are also under threat from reorg isation schemes; and these boundaries are often of very great antiquity, pOSS even following the limits of some Roma British estate (to quote Hoskins again). 111 is a need for some rapid study of these le records of history before they are obht ated. The English landscape is an aston ingly intricate palimpsest upon which s ceeding ages have written over and o again. The special contribution of our ti is to wipe out the whole story, so at least have a duty to make a note of what we e
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