Another voice

Shirley's achievement

Auberon Waugh

Many middle-aged men nowadays must dream of revenging themselves on the young. It is not just that the young are so ignorant and rude. Their worst crime is to be so conceited. For two decades it has been fashionable to talk about the generation gap as if it sprang from some failure on their part. Weighed down by bourgeois and materialistic considerations, if not by sim- ple snobbery, the middle-aged were unable to make the great imaginative leap necessary to communicate with the young.

Young people were by definition idealistic, uninterested in materialistic things, untouched by colour or clan pre- judice. Their attitude to sex was healthy and natural, uncoloured by hypocrisy or religious guilt. They were interested in employment which gave them an oppor- tunity to help other people — the old, or kiddies, or deprived folk generally — but they were definitely not interested in joining the wage-slave rat race, buying themselves a semi or equipping it with labour-saving devices. Wages were less important than fulfilment. If they drank at all, it was only in moderation. They preferred the subtler, more peaceful satisfaction of cannabis. Young people ruled the earth, and anybody over thirty must cringe before them.

As for the kids, they were if anything even better. They were never happier than when redecorating the home of some senior citizen, voluntarily, in their spare time. Of course they were too intelligent to be im- pressed by older people and, being natural- ly classless, they were sometimes slightly impatient of snobbery when they met it. But, by and large, kids were wonderful.

Then Shirley Williams arrived on the scene — or, to be more exact, the first Harold Wilson government arrived, with a huge apparatus of educational theory which had largely been thought up by Anthony Crosland. The primary purpose of state education was no longer to inculcate the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic in those whose natures made them unreceptive to anything more advanc- ed. Still less was it to introduce a finer taste of the discipline necessary for any sort of social existence. The purpose of education was not even to prepare children for a classless society where nobody could look down their noses at anybody else — it was to create such a society. At whatever cost to the conventional values of education, the joys of engineering came first. Every valley must be exalted at whatever cost to the hills and mountains.

When Mrs Shirley Williams arrived at the Department of Education and Science it was already perfectly plain that the great Comprehensive experiment had been a disaster. Like socialism, it simply did not work. Huge schools, with little or no super- vision of the teachers, let alone the pupils, were open invitations to truancy and violence. In the four years since the Labour government was defeated there has been plenty of time to take stock of the havoc which was wrought on an entire generation by this silly woman's opinions. For at least seven years I have been pointing out that a substantial proportion of young Britons I would put it at about a third overall, perhaps a quarter in the south and a half in the north — are completely unemployable. They not only lack the discipline necessary to acquire the most rudimentary skills, they also lack the necessary will to please. They are a lost generation, without even the resources to amuse themselves.

My own observations, which must coin- cide with the experience of anyone prepared to take a look around, have generally been treated as a quirky, slightly perverse obses- sion of my own. Kids were still the kindly, idealistic people of Blue Peter and similar propaganda films. Now at last the truth is beginning to emerge, that the hopeless generation of louts and bores which Mrs Williams has produced is not only com- pletely useless to anyone else but also harm- ful to itself and deeply unhappy.

A brilliant series which ran all last week in the Daily Mirror was called 'Bloody kidsl who do they think they are?' Put together by Keith Waterhouse, it echoes every sane person's awareness of what has happened and is continuing to happen to a substantial minority of Britain's youth. It is also, I fancy, to be read as a cry of pain from someone who is certainly the best and possibly the wisest commentator in the business. If the rest of my piece is taken up, for the most part, with quotations from his work, I hope he will interpret it as an act of homage rather than as one of simple plagiarism. I cannot, alas, reproduce the horrifying photographs which accompanied the text.

This is Heather Smith, 17, unemployed, of Gateshead, Tyne and Wear: 'I like being a skin because I like fighting . . . Sometimes they come looking for us, sometimes we go looking for them. We always beat them. There are about fifty of us in the SHAM (Skinheads Are Magic) Army and no one can beat us . . . I drink snakebites (lager and cider). They make me drunk quicker. I like getting drunk . . . I never had a job . . . I was supposed to go for an interview last year but didn't turn up: It doesn't worry me.'

Stacey Ottwell, 15, a schoolgirl of Derby, is more moderate in her approach to violence: 'Pointless violence, no. In a good cause, yes — like a demo for more jobs.'

No doubt Stacey is teacher's pet. Nigel Connelly, 19, unemployed, of Newcastle may have been less pliable: 'It's just another game, isn't it? You can't let anyone push you around now, can you? . . . I've started fights a canny few times when I'm drunk . . . Mostly I have been provoked, but a couple of times it has been completely unprovoked. It doesn't give me a cons- cience. I'll do it again, probably.'

Most of them drink — 'I usually get into fights when I'm pissed up' (David Webster, 17, skinhead, Plymouth) — but there is a certain debate between drinkers and those who get their satisfaction elsewhere.

Darren Kemp, 16, Woolwich: 'I get £32.32 a week and spend £10 of it on drink. Cider — I just like it. Beer makes me sick. Got the money, can't spend it on much else.' Andy Butlin, 18, unemployed, Glasgow: 'I spend £16 a week on glue, it's £3 for a pint and I buy a pint and a half every other day. I sniff every day . . I'm in the house all day — my dad drinks and he just annoys me.' On sex, there was a healthy difference of opinion between members of the idealistic generation. Thus Ray Hillyard, an unemployed punk of Plymouth, says : 'Load of crap — not interested.' Wayne Munden, 17, also unemployed, of Worcester, says: 1 wouldn't get married. Girls are there to be used when you want them.'

Danny Newbury, 18, a fruitpacker of Bolney, Sussex, is more idealistic: 'I believe in sex. I was just over 14 when I started. You learn about it in school and that in- fluences you a lot. They show you all these

books and pictures and you think try that. But I prefer spending my time on my bike.'

Chivalry survives among the men — 'I've a lot of respect for them, especially if they don't drop their knickers for two or three weeks' (Jeff Strange, 19, unemployed, Bed- was, South Wales). Paul Higgs, 19, unemployed, of Mid-Glamorgan, carries his chivalry to extremes: 'I've never had sex with a girl friend, it would be too embar- rassing like just to ask her.' Above all, there is the perennial problem that teenagers are misunderstood. Thus Fiona Peace, 19, unemployed, of Leeds: 'Teenagers are misunderstood. Many peo- ple think we are all dreadfully promiscuous. I'm not easy to sleep with . . . I keep a list of boys I have slept with. I don't star-rate them — I don't think that's fair. My list has the boy's name, then how many times we have done it — not the exact number, but whether it was once or twice, numerous times or infinite.'

Perhaps the real difference is that we listen to their callow and idiotic opinions• That, too, I feel can probably be blamed on Shirley.