Political commentary

Major public issues

Colin Welch

'you can tell how socialist a country is by the number of things it forbids.' 'Some sense in that,' affirmed one of the retired majors with whom, as Mr Hattersley has revealed, I forgather in the quest for political wisdom. 'Did you think of it yourself?'

`No, it is a remark made by "a Yugoslav spy" to Mr Gerald Kaufman. He quotes it in his own contribution to Renewal (Penguin, £2.50), an invaluable symposium written by members of the shadow cabinet, which purports to describe "Labour's Bri- tain in the 1980s".'

`Rum company he keeps,' said a major, `and rum thing for him to repeat, come to think of it. Lets the cat out of the bag.'

`Not in his view. Wait — I have the book here. Let me quote. There are some socialists, he concedes, "whose dream society is one replete with boards, officials and edicts, together with offences created to discipline those who decline to comply with the edicts promulgated by the officials employed by the boards." He is not, he declares, "one of those people".'

`If he's a socialist, dammit, whatever other sort of person could he be? Silly to be a socialist and not like boards and so on. Like being a vegetable at Simpson's.'

'He is a socialist, he says, because he believes freedom is the objective to which all others must be subordinate.'

`Freedom, eh? A likely tale. What's he mean by freedom?'

`Here, major, we're on tricky ground. "The power of the community" is in his view to be used "not to restrict freedom but to enhance it". Nor is that power, inciden- tally, to be curbed or reduced, as a real con- cern for freedom might require. On the contrary, "its exercise should be extended to as many free citizens (sic) as possible". Power should be returned by parliament to the town halls, which must then "open their doors to local citizens. Democracy does not flourish in filing cabinets ... (or) by codification in bye-laws... It must flourish openly and expand (my italics) to fulfil the needs of the community."'

'Sounds like an absolute dog's breakfast to me. Every Tom, Dick and Harry poking his nose into the files and every seditious busybody and crackpot bursting into the town hall to bellyache for new daft ways of wasting money and b ing us all about. And the whole thing expanding too, like a Bombay riot. Makes your hair stand on end.'

`Certainly Mr Kaufman seems blind to the possibility that local tyrannies can be just as oppressive, unjust and spendthrift as central ones. True, he gives us all the right to participate, to be consulted, to be asked continuously what "we" want, to initiate as well as react, to become ourselves "ex- perienced trouble-makers".'

`Participate, God help us!' cried the ma- jor. 'Don't you know what sort of bar- rackroom lawyers would do all the par- ticipating and initiating and troublemaking and get consulted and asked not what we want but what they want? And how on earth could we stop 'em except by turning up to every damfool meeting and spending half our lives in the bloody town hall their idea of fun, perhaps, but not mine?'

The majors were in low spirits. The steady sliding sheet of rain on the windows of the club-house reduced the comforting suburban Tory golf course, forsythias, bud- ding trees and flowering cherries, daffodils, red tiles and half-timbering to a shifting in- hospitable blur, like a Jackson Pollock in the making.

`No wonder we all dance a bit on the op- tics,' sighed the major. 'What's yours same again? Now, think of something to cheer us up. Sing us a song.'

`Perhaps Denis Healey's final sentence in the symposium is rather funny: "I believe that only a socialist government in Britain can offer the leadership which the world re- quires."' 'Damn silly, I agree — soda? — but we've heard that stuff before.'

`Not perhaps from a man who isn't leader of a party which probably wouldn't follow him even if he were, and who in his own essay distances himself conspicuously from half the idiocies to which that party is committed — out of Europe, for instance, and unilateral disarmament. It's difficult to lead the world if you can't even decide which way to go yourself.'

`Something like chickens leading a tank charge. Well, chin chin. What's that other book you've got with you? Looks jollier.'

`And so it is, to be sure. Edward Pearce's The Senate of Lilliput (Faber and Faber,

'I love killing foxes.'

£3.95), a sardonic guide to MPs.'

"'The book no MP will dare to read", eh?'

`Oh, that's only what the cover says. Most MPs — not all — will read and thoroughly enjoy it.'

`Doesn't he put the boot properly into the socialist groin then?'

`My hat, yes, when he pleases, but not ex- clusively. The boot goes in not in- discriminately but non-ideologically, into the groin of MPs who Pearce dislikes rather than of those he disagrees with. David Steel appears as "a hard-faced little idealist", St- John Stevas — a "trainee gentleman" who has stopped being funny without becoming serious —' `Ho, ho, palpably ho.'

Peter Walker, with his "cor- respondence course accent", marcelled hair and affected hauteur, swinging slowly on "a gibbet of his own devising", Julian Crit- chley "atrocious ... a petulant expression on a sea of jowl ... burning with animus" for those who pass him over —' 'I say, a bit stiff that, eh?'

`David Mellor "as agreeable as a mouthful of Brylcreem", Sir George Young "his manner busy, his nose pointed, his spectacles rimless, his total effect awful", Michael Mates an "overbearing and unpleasant ex-Dragoon —'

'Never liked Dragoons myself — a stuffy lot. Lots of boots so far, but not a socialist groin.'

`True, but Pearce makes well a point which often baffles people outside Parlia- ment — that "ideological positions are useless as a guide to a politician's standing with his opponents. In principle Mr Biffen is Atrocity John... Yet hardish men from the Labour camp like Mr Eric Heffer col- lapse into shameless good humour when he is around. By contrast Michael Heseltine, . heavily into compassion .. , is regarded by the Labour opposition as a cold-eyed authoritarian with all the human qualities of reinforced concrete."' `Yes, but this rooster Pearce actually calls the Labour front bench "broadly • • a bunch of likeable, capable, moderate men". He must be a bit mad — the Deolali tap, you know.' 'I'd prefer to call him not only hilariously funny but, broadly and with lapses, fair, gFouondn -yt eti no ope without rniewucickainngd pilluminating; denigrating what is decided there and hoW Funny too not only about the way Mrs, look, talk, walk and behave but also about parliament what they think, feel and seek, for selves °I others, not only about mannerisms but about about character. Thumbnail sketches, caricatures if you please, but, e, Daumier's, they cut deep. I really enjoY this book. So will you.'

`I'll certainly give it a shufti'.

`Now, to return to Renewals. I — tod- `Sorry, old boy, but I simply must dle. Tiffin calls, the lady wife, you 101° 'See you next week.'

'Well ...'