Notebook
Like government departments, local authorities are a byword for wastefulness and extravagance. Some are worse than Others, of course. I am not, thank heaven, a ratepayer in the London borough of Camden, or might well be demented by how. As a seat of bureaucratic folly, Camden is surely unsurpassed, and not Only in terms of public expenditure. The couns decision to offer official employment to immigrants, even when they are less qualified, in preference to British-born subjects cannot be called anything but an outrageous incitement to racial discord and social disharmony. In application, it would amount to the gravest discrimination against members of the native community. If this measure is' actually introduced, to the unfair advantage of newcomers to these shores and the corresponding detriment of more qualified persons of British birth, I hope that someone (no, not someone, but an r'nly of local residents) will institute proceedings against the council under the Race Relations Act. As Mr Callaghan was saying last Saturday: 'This country Will not be worth living in unless there is true racial equality for everyone'. An unexceptionable text — but ,its import seems to have escaped the zealots, both elected and appointed, who now comprise What is perhaps the most reckless local authority in the United Kingdom.
friend of mine, Mr David Bassett, who 1,:s no doubt familiar to some of you as a "roadeaster, spent eleven years in Canada, where he had an account with the Bank of Montreal. On returning to England, he elected to remain with the tame bank, for reasons of sentiment, and "Is account was transfered to its London °Mee. He has now been told, in effect, that the custom of private individuals is n.0 longer of interest to the Bank and Invited to take his business elsewhere, namely to Lloyds Bank. Mr Bassett is understandably indignant, not to say affronted. Although the Bank of Montreal is not a British but a Cornluonwealth institution, it is nevertheless oPerating within the English banking system and (one might have hoped) conv..eutions. Its behaviour is a poor advertisement for free enterprise in banking, Which the British banks are very properly defending in the face of Labour's threat of nationalisation. They have formed a committee for the purpose, under Lord Armstrong, chairman of the Midland Bank. Perhaps he should have a word with his Canadian counterpart — the tarter the better.
The death of Edward Sutro, celebrated — indeed champion — first-nighter and, with his wife Joan, a host of Edwardian expansiveness at their house in Belgravia, will be widely mourned, and not only in the theatrical world to which he was so devoted. Several writers have mentioned his white Rolls-Royce, a truly noble car in which to take passage with him, and especially resplendent when the hood was down on a summer's day. What they have not mentioned was his skill as a motor mechanic. He so loved his car that he took a training course with Rolls-Royce in order to be able to maintain it himself. I have never seen a private garage so well-equipped with the tools of the motor engineer. He knew the ins and outs, the secrets, subtleties and refinements of the Rolls-Royce mechanism as intimately as he knew the theatre.
Mr Heath's future remains a familiar, if subsidiary, subject of conversation, not always fanciful. I have just heard yet another suggestion, propounded over lunch in one of the citadels of the Conservative Party. The thought is that Mr Heath could be usefully employed as our Ambassador to China, on the grounds that he is uncommonly well-loved in the
People's Republic and would moreover act as if he were a sort of envoy of the European Community, to which both are so attached. Peking is five thousand miles from London.
The Equal Opportunities Commission was established on 29 December 1975 under the Sex Discrimination Act. Its function may be concisely defined as promoting equality of opportunity between men and women and keeping under review the workings of the Sex Discrimination Act and the Equal Pay Act. I now put forward a proposal to each of the ruling parties: the Commission should be wound up — dissolved — on 29 December 1980, that is to say five years after its inception. This ought surely to become the rule for many if not most official bodies charged with limited purposes under new legislation (or indeed at ministerial whim). If they cannot achieve their objectives in the course of five years, they are unlikely to achieve them at all. Successive governments are much given to setting up commissions and the like, of a more or less permanent and expensive nature. There is no good reason why they should be perpetuated for ever and ever. They should be disbanded after a period — and five years is not an inconsiderable length of time.
I am not to be numbered among the strongest devotees of television, and until
recent months had seldom thought of it
as an enticing prelude to Sunday lunch. But Mr Brian Walden and his Weekend World programme have captured me where others failed. I find him a most engaging broadcaster, acute but never strident or overbearing, with a quite outstanding power of lucid exposition, as he demonstrated again last Sunday in his examination of the Leyland shambles (what a rebuke to Lord Ryder) and subsequent interrogation of Mr Enoch Powell. His predecessor, now Ambassador in Washington, was never particularly illuminating in speech or print. Stay away, Peter Jay.
Just as hospitals have guilds of voluntary workers (for example the Friends of St Mary's), so might other institutions. I am thinking now of the Victoria and Albert Museum, troubled and disrupted by the consequences of the appalling inflation, doors closed every Friday, at least one department seriously impaired. Why not a voluntary corps of Friends of the V & A, to act as custodians or attendants when the regular staff cannot (or will not) be present? Its members would have to be well selected, of course — but there are plenty of candidates around, many of them rather knowledgeable.
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