Benn and Caliban's mirror
Christopher Booker
Among all the hundreds of thousands of words spilled out last week in the aftermath of the massive vote by British Leyland workers in favour of Sir Michael Edwardes's plan for the company's future, one comment stood out with such devastating clarity that it is worth a paragraph or two of meditation. The comment was broadcast by LBC, just after 7 p.m. on the day the results of the ballot giving a vote of 87 per cent to 12 per cent in favour of the Edwardes plan were announced. The speaker was a Leyland union official called (if I caught his name correctly) Mr Todd Sullivan. And what Mr Sullivan said was this: 'You must remember that more than a third of the Workforce did not find the company's proposals acceptable. That's a considerable majority'.
. Anyone who has lived for any length of time with someone suffering from a severe state of mental disorder will know that one of the worst things about it is the terrible strain that comes from having to listen, day after day, to remarks which, though completely mad, have some kind of dreadful, twisted inner logic. Each time the unhappy victim speaks, one makes an effort to follow what he is saying and the strain comes from trying to hold in one's mind two views of the World so conflicting that it is eventually hard not to feel that one is going mad oneself.
Such a position is it that we are getting into with the unions and the Labour left at the present time. What Mr Sullivan was unconsciously trying to do in the remark quoted above, of course, was. to re-interpret into a form he could find acceptable the, to him, utterly unpalatable fact that 87 per cent of the Leyland workers Who voted had supported the management's plan — whereas the shop stewards of the company had voted 99-1 against the Plan. The way he did it was this. Firstly, he tried to take into account all the Workers who had not bothered to vote at all. By including all of them in the `no Camp, he could say that 30 per cent bad found the proposals unacceptable. Then, On the basis that 30 per cent is near enough a third, he decided that, give or take a few percentage points, 'less than a third' was much the same as 'more than a third'. Finally, no doubt by a purely onWitting slip of the tongue, he chose to describe a considerable minority as a considerable majority', It might serve. as tin admirable definition of the Benn view of democracy, But in purely psychological terms, what Mr Sullivan was doing was simply, by three different acts of sleight of mind, to turn an unacceptable reality into an acceptable fantasy — and this, of course, is a process any psychiatrist has to cope with in his patients every day of his working life.
In recent weeks I have regularly been arguing in these columns that it is no longer possible to consider, or to try to understand, the plight of the unions and the Labour left in this country except in terms of the language and concepts of morbid psychology. What I would like to examine this week is one particular aspect of that characteristic of mental illness which leads the victim wholly to re-orient the world round his own subjective viewpoint. Although he continues to use language which has objective definition and meaning in the outside world, he uses it, Humpty Dumpty-like, purely to embody his own solipsistic fantasies.
One of the most obvious examples of these symptoms, in the case of the unions and the Left, is the way they react to anyone who dares to oppose their collective ego-demands. I have already discussed the way any 'industrial action' these days is always 'forced' on the union by the management. All irrationality, inflexibility and wickedness are projected onto these unspeakable 'others' who are wholly responsible for bringing about such a dreadfully regettable situation as a strike. And of course the chief way in which anyone (such as a spoiled child or a psychopath) who projects his own shadow like this interprets criticism (as we saw in that striking example of the condition, our last prime minister but one) is by taking refuge in paranoia. Since I myself am wholly blameless, the unconscious argument runs, any opposition to my desires must come from some unfair, irrational and malevolent conspiracy against me. And one of most familiar manifestations of this among the unions and on the left is their attitude to the 'media'.
Last weekend, Mr Tony Benn, it was reported, indulged himself in no less than three separate speeches attacking the media. He accused the media of 'conditioning and brainwashing the people in order to get them to accept policies that are not in their interests'. He singled out the BBC as 'an instrument' being used `to bulldoze labour into accepting the requirements of capital'. And at something called the annual conference of the Labour Co-Ordinating Committee (another example of the looking-glass world, where a mere 'committee' holds an 'annual conference), Mr .Benn claimed that the main objective of the media was `to obscure, confuse and divide by distorting what is happening'.
Of course this paranoia of the Left at the way its activities are reported has been familiar for a long time. But it was last January that it began to turn into a morbid condition. And in fact all that the press and television were doing at that time was to hold up a fairly accurate mirror to what was actually. happening (nothing could have been more pitiful than the TUC's attempt in its report, A Cause For Concern, to substantiate the charge that the media had been wilfully distorting what was happening). When gravediggers, water workers, hospital porters and millions of others were going on strike, the media merely reported two undeniable facts: firstly, that vast numbers of the general public were greatly suffering as a result; and secondly that a .number of union officials were making quite unprecedently reckless statements, such as the celebrated comment of Mr Bill Dunn of COHSE, spokesman for the striking ambulance workers, that 'if it means lives lost, that is how it must be. .. we are fed up of being Cinderellas, this time we are going to the ball'.
Now, the reason why remarks like this come across in human terms as singularly unpleasant has nothing to do with party political bias, or the whim of mysterious newspaper proprietors and TV moguls. Behaviour of this heartless, egocentric and anti-social kind is seen as •distasteful for reasons which are permanently engraved in the human psyche — the same reasons which make us instantly recognise someone who comes onto a stage and talks in this manner as the villain of a play. The reason why Mr Benn and the' infantilist Left so dislike the media is simply that the media, by and large, hold up a glass in which they see themselves as others see them. And of course the one thing which no spoiled child or psychopath can do is face up to the objective reality of his behaviour — which is why the Left's only instinct, Calibanlike, is to lash out in blind rage and try to break the mirror — or at least to have it melted down into a kind of funfair distorting mirror which will show them not as the Ugly Sisters they are, but only as the beautiful, admirable Cinderella.
When Mr Benn expresses his desire that the media should reflect more 'variety, access and democracy, he means of course nothing of the kind. He merely means a press and television which would show Mr Berm himself as a saintly figure, whose only concern is to do good for the people. It is the kind of wish which many have expressed for themselves before in our century; and for some, like Stalin or Castro or Hitler, their infantile longings have actually come true. But the fact that such wish-NIfilments come true does not, alas, guarantee a happy ending to the fairy tale. Changing the image does, not change human nature. And simply dressing up the Ugly Sisters as Cinderella, or Caliban as Prospero, does not mean that the audience will be taken in: it will privately continue to recognise the stage villain beneath the make-up, even though the theatre itself be taken into public ownership, and the audience be forced to give a standing ovation every time Caliban comes onto the stage.
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