Notebook
?This column is always on the look-out for 1 cases of persecution or injustice towards young people who, as a group, are universally disliked, even by young people. Over the years, I have drawn attention to various examples of exorbitant fines handed out by self-righteous magistrates for such petty offences as urinating in public or carving one's name on a London Transport bench. Last year I was questioning the decision of the police in Brighton to remove the bootlaces of young people as they arrived in the town by train for the Whitsun Bank Holiday. What right, I wondered, had the police to tamper with people's footwear simply because they didn't like the look of them? The answer given to me then by a Brighton police spokesman was that the sort of boots worn by mods, skinheads, or whatever, could be classified as offensive weapons, which seemed to me a disturbing legal precedent. Might not anything that could be used for kicking — even a bare foot — be similarly classified? In Brighton last weekend a youth was fined £500 for possessing a piece of driftwood — a harsh sentence, but one that may in the circumstances have been justified. But how about this paragraph in The Times's report of the August Bank Holiday disturbances? 'About 300 youths, mostly mods, were rounded up, deprived of their boots and made to spend the night face downwards on a grassy bank behind the beach.' The trouble, so a police spokesman said, had been caused 'by a hardcore of no more than 50 mods and skinheads'. Yet 300 people were made to spend an entire night with their faces buried in grass. This is the sort of punishment inflicted by Germans in war films. Some of the youths were 'barely in their teens', and I expect many of them caught chills. A court chairman told one youth 'you behave like animals, you must expect to be herded like animals'. But who treats animals in such a manner?
The ghastly Notting Hill carnival, the annual festival of London's West Indians, also took place last weekend. Middle class householders in the neighbourhood stayed at home to protect their property, missing their country house weekends, but fortunately very little untoward happened. The carnival is principally ghastly because of the way the police feel obliged to behave, jiggling about stiffly to the music and fraternising ostentatiously with the revellers. These activities are then presented on television as examples of police benevolence and racial harmony, giving what are supposed to be straight news reports all the appearance of propaganda films. In fact, many of the policemen on the spot had seen service at the Brixton riots and must have felt more anxiety than benevolence. Two amiable policemen chatted with our reporter, recalling how at Brixton they had been set upon by upwards of 100 black youths and somehow survived. Afterwards, back at the police station, they had been unable to stop trembling. From time to time, one of these Brixton veterans would pick up a small black child and jig it up and down a bit, often to the evident annoyance and anxiety of its mother. 'They hate us really,' the other policeman said.
I n an article which he wrote for the Spectator two years ago, Albert Speer took a characteristically upper-class view of the nature of his own responsibility for the horrors of Nazi rule. He quoted the Bible: 'Because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth'. 'Because, basically, I let things happen, I have become guilty,' he went on. 'Had I been an engaged, enraptured National Socialist, I might at least be able to say: "I erred, but with all my passion". But non-engagement brings greater guilt. Is it not true that someone who looks on when wrong is being done, becomes as entangled in the events as the active culprit? Does passion not justify many things, and is not this standing aside, this neutrality, the real reproach one should make, both in my own case and in general?' That passage is more than a little creepy. How, when he exploited slave labour on such a colossal scale, can Speer subsequently have convinced himself that he was a mere looker-on? But the passage also suggests that what Speer really admired in Hitler were not the qualities of reason and moderation which he claimed to have been first impressed by, but the quality of passion which he felt himself to lack. It was only by hitching himself to the passion of brutes like Hitler that this cold, over-civilised person could satisfy his own purely egotistical ambition. He then thought that, because he bared his soul to the Nuremberg judges and convinced them of his sincere repentance, he should have been acquitted of his crimes instead of been sent to Spandau. The late Airey Neave, who was present throughout the trial as a British judicial aide, took a different view. Writing in the Spectator two years before Speer's article appeared, he said: 'Why should Albert Speer, the real architect of the slave labour programme, get 20 years imprisonment and his unattractive lieutenant Fritz Sauckel go to the gallows? As Armaments Minister Speer gave orders for foreign labourers to Sauckel who procured them. Why was Sauckel more guilty than Speer? . . . . it certainly seemed at the time that Sauckel belonged to the wrong class.' Airey Neave ended this review of a book on the Nuremberg trials with a plea for Rudolf Hess. 'Anyone who saw and spoke to Hess at that time, as I did, would have been well aware of his mental instability. He played no part in preparing his own defence. He did not go into the witness box, and the prosecution case against him was never strong. How the decision to sentence him to life imprisonment was reached is not clear, but he is still in Spandau prison.' Now that Speer, a guiltier man, is dead, it is worth recalling that he still is. Ureelance singing is, as one might expect, an uncertain way of earning a living. Life is a constant search for choruses to join, and choruses are not in abundant supply. That is principally why the 18 adult choristers at St Paul's Cathedral are so distressed at the dismissal of one third of their number. But there are other reasons for regretting the cut, which takes effect at the beginning of next month. It will mean a reduction in the number of sung services from nine to six a week, meaning that, for the first time in history (apart from the war), there will be no singing in the cathedral on Tuesdays. It will also mean an imbalance between the trebles and the rest, for there will still be 30 little choirboys piping away against inadequate competition from lower down the scale. In consequence, the choir's repertoire will have to be reduced, as several pieces written for the cathedral by nineteenth century English composers like Stamford rely upon a larger compliment of singers. It could be argued that it doesn't matter very much. The choir will remain one of the largest in England (though the cathedral, it should be remembered, is an exceptionally large one in which only a large choir can make itself heard). The cathedral is losing lots of money, and music is the last department to be cut. Nevertheless, this sort of cut is depressing. If London can't even afford to keep a proper choir going in its magnificent cathedral, then what is London coming to? But, of course, London can afford to. Between £15,000 and £16,000 would be needed to keep the choir going for another year. The money could almost certainly be raised by appeal. But if that failed, why could not Mr Ken Livingstone for once try to please his ratepayers by subsidising something sensible. The ridiculous new job offers with which he has been filling the New Stateman's advertising pages — for race relations advisers and the like — will cost many times more than this.
The headmaster of ... Fairfield High School, Widnes, in Cheshire was obviously well-intentioned when he questioned the motives given by two of his former pupils for their suicide. He felt, as practically everybody must have done, that unemployment was an insufficient reason. He also knew the boys rather well. One of them, he said, had a job only a week before he died; the other 'was always a bit of a joker'. 'This could have been a prank that went wrong.' A stupid thing to say, nevertheless. He didn't know why they commit' ted suicide any more than I do, and his comments can hardly have made their families any happier. Nor is there anything he could say which would undo the damage these boys have done. Every teenage suicide from now on will be attributed by someone or other to unemployment, just as deaths from old age during a bad winter are attributed to the weather.
Alexander Chancellor
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