ANOTHER VOICE
Why Whitley Bay doesn't matter
AUBERON WAUGH
With very few exceptions — most of them would appear to be people taken prisoner at the surrender of Singapore who worked on the Siam railway — those who served in the last war seem pleased to have done so and have happy memories of the shared privations and dangers. My purpose in pointing this out is not, of course, to urge another major war. Not even the dramatic fall in candidates for ordination which always seems to accompany an extended period of peace would quite justify such an extreme measure. The joys of excitement and camaraderie are all very well, but they must be measured against other more easily accessible pleasures. My point is to draw attention to the great moan of self-pity and complaint which goes up from press, television, parliament and ev- ery pressure group in the country whenev- er a sparrow falls to the ground.
With the huge improvement in com- munications, it is inevitable that we should be bombarded by bad news as well as good news. By definition news represents some development of an existing state, or altera- tion of it, the breaking of some ordered pattern. In 99 cases out of 100, a death will be more newsworthy than a birth. By the same token, starvation in Armenia or even in Chad will be more newsworthy than an exceptionally good meal eaten in the Cas- tle Hotel, Taunton. Most news is bad news, and the more news is collected and disseminated, the more bad news we are going to have to learn to cope with.
Sadly, our capacity to cope does not seem to have grown in proportion to the growth in news. It is not the Dunkirk spirit which is lacking so much as any ability to put information in perspective. Thus the news that a young man has taken a shotgun to his neighbours in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear, killing one and injuring 13 others, can be the object of no more than idle curiosity outside the neighbourhood con- cerned. Locally, of course, it is of intense interest and might even eventually be a matter of local pride. The village and small towns of England are full of monuments to such events, few of which will have made the national news at the time. For those who actually witnessed the event, it will be the modern equivalent of a St Crispin's day — something to tell their children and granchildren. Once the initial shock and dismay have receded, it will be an enviable experience to have lived through. Those who lay abed that Sunday morning in Whitley Bay shall think themselves accurs'd they were not there and hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks that saw the pigtailed man in black in Whitley Bay.
Above all, it will have been a once-in-a- lifetime experience. For those who merely read about it in the newspapers, however, or see the aftermath on television, it is nothing of the sort. It, or something very like it, is almost a daily experience. Today it may be a gunman in Tyne and Wear, tomorrow it will be a school bus in Glamor- gan which drives over a cliff, the day after some more football hooligans in the north of England. On days when nothing much seems to happen in the British Isles, we have to make do with devastating floods in Bangladesh which drown 250,000 people. The effect is the same. We click our tongues in unison, decide we might contri- bute to a disaster fund, and then turn to the sports pages, or Nigel Dempster.
There is nothing unhealthy in the idea that people should be encouraged, by vivid reporting. to participate — vicariously — in these melancholy events. Where it all goes wrong is when the genuine partici- pants — chiefly the Government and its agents — forget that they are dealing with a two-day wonder and suppose they can use each and every transient drama as an occasion for decisive government action, spending more public money and propos- ing further oppressive laws and controls.
Enough has already been written about the behaviour of various Liverpool spokes- men in demanding that the Queen attend a memorial service to honour the Hillsbor- ough dead. Few have queried the useful- ness, or suggested that any absurdity re- sides in the idea of Lord Justice Taylor's Commission of Inquiry into the tragedy. The body of the Whitley Bay gunman's victim was not cold before police spokes- men were demanding further government measures to add to the hysterical, oppres- sive and ineffective restrictions imposed by Mr Hurd after the Hungerford massacre.
As I never tire of pointing out, about 660,000 people die in Britain every year some 14,000 of them as the result of accidents. The number of deaths through criminal violence is minuscule, although to read the newspapers you might suppose that it was one of the commonest forms of death in the British Isles. We cannot blame politicians for trying to jump on newspaper sensations as an opportunity to strike attitudes and exert power because they are mad. In any case, their madness is subject to democratic controls. What is terrifying is the way policemen, immigration officers and other functionaries now reckon to play the same game.
No doubt there is a calculation in every police demand for greater and more oppressive powers. By demanding further restrictions on the ownership of shotguns. they reckon to annoy three million legal licence-holders while reassuring the rest. By demanding unfettered discretion to stop and harass motorists they reckon to annoy the ten million-odd motorists who drink and drive while reassuring the eight- een million-odd motorists who don't. What they do not understand, which Ken Living- stone understood so well in his days at the GLC, is how soon a number of aggrieved minorities adds up to an aggrieved major- ity.
If I were a policeman. I should look long and hard at last week's London School of Economics election of an honorary presi- dent of the students' union. The man elected was Winston Silcott, the black activist serving a life sentence for the murder of PC Keith Blakelock in the 1985 Broadwater Farm riots. We can huff and we can puff and say how disgraceful it is, but two thirds of those who originally bothered to vote voted for the murderer. If I were a policeman, as I say, I would take the message to heart, get on with my coppering and resolve to keep my mouth shut on the issues of the day.
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