Another voice
The shadow of Glenys
Auberon Waugh
Awhole new generation of Socialist activists is currently working up from the grass roots through local councils and into Parliament determined not to repeat the errors of the 1964 and 1974 governments,' wrote Ken Livingstone this weekend. His words appeared in the Mail on Sunday, whose leader writer chose to ridicule Ken's claim that Labour lost the last two elections because it was not left- wing enough: It simply passes all comprehension [?belief] that there was a sizeable group of people, enough to turn an election, who [?which] when faced with the Labour Party manifesto were [?was] so disgusted with its moderation that they [?itl decided not to vote Labour.
I do not suppose Ken would put it quite like that. He would say that Worzel Gum- midge's version of socialism — not to mention Mr Callaghan's somewhat con- fused appeal to the nation in 1979— failed to inspire the new Britons in the way his own version of it seems to have inspired Londoners. One could argue that local government is something different, most particularly because only a minority of voters pays rates. Few object to seeing other people's money thrown around — subsidising London Transport or putting up huge buildings devoted to lesbian activi- ties — so long as they do not have to pay themselves. National government is quite another matter.
It was Mr Callaghan who first made the painful discovery, which he announced to the Labour Party conference at Scarbor- ough in 1967, that taxation to pay for further social spending must inevitably fall on the incomes of 'our own people' — the working class. There is no painless way of raising money or of printing it. An honest socialist programme is unlikely to appeal to any but a small minority, because what it is effectively saying to the rest is that if they hand over their money to the State, it will know best how the money should be spent.
But of course there is no shortage of people with ingenious ideas about how public money should be spent, and Ken is quite right when he warns us about a whole new generation of Dave Sparts currently working up from the grass roots, inspired by a single-minded determination to wreak havoc on the economy. They are plainly wrong if they suppose that their program- me for the 'reconstruction' of Britain would be popular, if it were understood.
But they are probably right if they imagine that it can be presented in such vague terms that nobody will understand the implications. In Ken Livingstone's screed, apart from the vague promise to recon- struct Britain, there was only one specific proposal:
The next Labour government will need to take power to direct investment into rebuild- ing our economy with specific emphasis on the information and telecommunications sec- tor. It is this sector more than any other that Britain will have to rely on when the oil runs out.
Now what on earth can have got into our Ken to make him suppose that our future lies in telephones and information storage systems which can somehow replace oil? It is a splendidly loony idea, which, with currency control, appears to represent Chairman Ken's entire programme for the reconstruction of Britain. Yet wherever he goes, he is cheered to the echo.
There is, as he says, a whole new generation of Dave Sparts working its way bp from the grass roots, taking control of large areas of local government, many if not most constituency Labour parties, and now within a whisker of taking control of the Parliamentary Labour Party. I am not in this context talking about the hard left of Militant, Revolutionary Workers' Party and other highly motivated groups, although many of the new generation of Dave Sparts may belong to one or other of them. It goes without saying that most of these people have no understanding or even awareness of classical economics. Their knowledge of politics is limited to a few highly-coloured accounts of the work- ers' struggle. They know nothing whatever about democratic management or consen- sus politics. Where they differ from pre- vious generations of Dave Sparts is that with the general collapse of secondary education after Mrs Shirley Williams, and in their own dream world of a class struggle where all established sources of informa- tion are assumed to be against them, they have no means of discovering how ignorant or asinine their opinions may be. Similarly, they have no means of discovering how 'Prison's not good enough for Scargill, he wants to be crucified.' impracticable and absurd are their pre- scriptions for change, until they have had the opportunity to give them a try and see the havoc they cause. •
Which is why the greatest danger from this new generation of opinionated ignor- amuses does not seem to me to come from the hard Left so much as from the soft Left — the Left of Greenham wimmin and Mrs Glenys Kinnock, rather than the Left of Mr Peter Taafe and Dr Bridget Dugdale. The really hard Left, I feel, has enough impetus for self-destruction — not least in the extraordinary odiousness of its approach to the rest of the world — to be able to look after itself. But this new soft or moronic Left is almost as evident in the Liberal Party as it is with Labour, and as much apparent in the Christian churches as in any political party. And wherever it is, it is working its way up through the grass roots like a barrel of worms.
It is this generation which is the true opposition in Britain and one day, whether we like it or not, it is going to come t° power. Commonsense, whether repre- sented by Mrs Thatcher, or Dr Owen, or Mr Healey, is simply not going to prevail forever. We are living in a fool's paradise if we rejoice when we contemplate the apparently terminal disarray of the Labour Party. This disarray is an exact reflection of what is happening in the intellectual life of the country and sooner or later, by the ineluctable process of representative democracy, it will be reflected in the government of the country. One can put the blame for the phe- nomenon as one chooses — on television, on Mrs Shirley Williams, or on fluoride poisoning. Incidentally, I have discovered that the legal basis for this poisoning Of the water supply resides in an order of Mr Enoch Powell, when Minister of Health. This seems to add another sinister element to the continuing practice — and also, for those who have followed the debate about the differing effects of fluoride poisoning on negroes and Asians, to Enoch's present posture against allowing further Hong Kong Chinese into the country. My own explanation for the abrogation of responsibility by the country's intel- ligentsia in favour of the unintelligent is more complicated, relying upon the debili- tating effects on our national character of the principle noblesse oblige, itself the product of our cruel and beastly system of primogeniture. Be that as it may, the fact remains that the Leader of the Opposition in this country at the present moment is Mrs Glenys Kinnock, not her poor, vasectomised, dish-washing husband. For those of us who value our personal com- forts — the occasional decent meal and -bottle of wine, the freedom to say what we like and to live in our own little world away from the caring community, Mrs GlenYs Kinnock, with everything she stands for, is Public Enemy Number One. Her name is legion and she is hydra-headed, but she is on her way.
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