Another voice

The orthodox reflex

Auberon Waugh

Fleeing from the election last Sun- day I took refuge in the Sunday Times schools essay competition. The newspaper had offered £4,000 in prizes, and received

more than 15,000 entries from young writers.

My purpose in drawing attention to it is not primarily to complain about the stan- dard of the winning entry, from ,Miss Suzanna Chambers, aged 10. Miss Chambers wrote about 'A Woman's Place'. In discussing whether or not mothers should stay at home, she decided that they should do so when the fathers were employed, thereby providing comfort for their children and making jobs available to People who might need them more. It was not a startlingly original argument and missed out any consideration of the mother's reasons for wishing to work — in- cluding perhaps escape from the company of her priggish, put-you-to-rights children — but it was written with spontaneity and feeling.

Primary school entrants were the best, and Miss Chambers was judged the best of these. Although, as I say, her essay was not bad, it seems safe to deduce from the fact that it was judged best of 15,000 entries that

the genekral standard must have been pretty abysmal.

But that is not my point. What emerges from the report of the judges — they in- cluded John Carey, Merton Professor of English at Oxford, and Claire Tomalin, the newspaper's literary editor — is that they were not struck so much by the illiteracy of the competitors or even by the banality of their ideas as by their unanimity. The most popular subject chosen was the Bomb, followed by Unemployment, followed by a letter to Mrs Thatcher, although many combined all three by writing to Mrs Thatcher about unemploy- ment and the Bomb. These are obviously the sort of subjects they are taught to worry about, rather than the Function of the Ar- tist in Society, Freedom versus Social Equality or Have Animals got Immortal Souls. The more's the pity. But among those who wrote about the Bomb, 90 per- cent were unilateralists; most, we are told, `scolded Mrs Thatcher for wasting money on arms which could be spent for the relief of poverty'. In fact, there was widespread and deep opposition to Mrs Thatcher among the young, So there we have the new orthodoxy, revealed in the judges' report under its puzzling headline: 'Buck up mums, says Suzanna'. A second report was appended by Claire Tomalin which amplified the point: 'It is very hard to tell with the youngest entrants to our competition whether they are writing out of their own heads or giving us what teacher, mother or television has fed into them. Hundreds of the submissions were neat, careful — and standardised as soap: blood sports are wrong; robots and space travel are on the way; Mrs Thatcher lacks appeal; the Bomb threatens trees and animals.'

We all know that the unfortunate children have had this rubbish pushed at them by ghastly young women in trousers from their earliest years. It is depressing to learn that they are actually taking it and ac- cepting it — even worse, pushing it out again as their own thought. From the eminence of the Spectator we may sneer at this frightful generation of social workers, plasticine experts and Blue Peter playmates, but some of them have now grown old enough to emerge as the nation's head- masters and headmistresses. In a year or two, they will be its Mrs Thatchers. They are poised to take over the country, even though I hope and believe that the results of this week's election will show they have not taken it over yet.

Their closest political expression is to be found in the Liberal Social Democrat Alliance, although so long as Mr Jenkins re- mains I cannot see the Alliance adjusting to their unilateralism or to their passion for pet animals and trees. But then, at the mo- ment of writing, it seems more likely than not that Mr Jenkins is going to lose his seat at Glasgow Hillhead to Labour. The extent to which this rot has already set into the Alliance may be judged by Professor Carey's excellent analysis of the three party manifestos which is to be found in the same issue.

Mourning the death of political language he reports that, 'linguistically, the Alliance

manifesto is the most woebegone'. He does

not stress the point, although it is implicit in everything he writes, that sloppiness of

language is usually the product of mental

dishonesty or of mental emptiness. Here are some of his examples: The Alliance will carry out 'an extensive decentralisation of power from the centre'; it has 'faced the question of pay and prices head on'; it will provide an incomes strategy that will stick'; its industrial

democracy will be 'but- tressed by action on two fronts'.

Professor Carey confines himself to sug- gesting that the whole point of a buttress is that it does not move,

whereas 'action' im- plies movement; that strategies do not stick; that the positions of 'facing' and 'head-on' are irreconcilable, etc. He' does not argue from this, as I would, that the Alliance does not honestly believe it is going to decen- tralise from any centre; it has not faced pay and prices with anything except pious ver- biage; its incomes strategy has already been tried and shown not to stick, and its in- dustrial democracy will not be buttressed by anything because it consists of hot air.

But this rubbish, as I say, is the current orthodoxy. What a pity Professor Carey did not apply the same linguistic standards to the Sunday Times's main leader in the same issue, 'A Tory victory, yes: a landslide no': `Our criterion of judgment — as a newspaper which has no fixed affiliation to any party — has been this: how closely does each party programme accord with our own publicly stated views on the major items of foreign and domestic policy?'

If that is their criterion of judgment, what is their criterion of spinach? What are unfixed affiliations? Needless to say, the manifesto which comes closest to their own 'beliefs' is that of the Alliance, with its `moderate and sensible attitudes'. But, realistically, we must hope the Tories will win: 'This does not mean that we will desist from criticising their policies in the future, as we have in the past.'

When did they desist? Let us follow the Sunday Times's reasoning. The Labour programme, we learn, has its good points, including its economic policy which 'em- bracing the idea of government, employees and unions sitting down together round a table, paints a more attractive picture than the present congealed situation . .

Policies, it would appear, can simultaneously embrace and paint a pic- ture, while congealed situations can only paint a picture.

'The voter is thus forced, as his pencil hovers over the ballot paper on Thursday, to make up his mind according to the Con- servative record after four years of office, and guesses as to what they might do when returned.'

Parse 'guesses'. How can four years of office do anything when returned? How can they be returned? All this miserable waffle points to the conclusion, apparently, that `there should be no Tory landslide, which could unleash the forces of illiberalism lying not far beneath the surface of modern Conservatism'.

At this level of literacy, I simply cannot be bothered to point out that a Tory land- slide will almost certainly have the opposite effect, unleashing the wets and sending many of them (including Mr Heath, I dare say, if Mr Jenkins loses Hillhead) into the Alliance camp. But this statement of the orthodox reflex seems not to have been influenced by human thought at any stage, even in committee. One of the more salutary results of a huge Tory landslide, I should hope, would be some adjustment to prevalent ideas of the intellectual consen- sus.