Another voice

Towards an ideal state

Auberon Waugh

(In a wine tour of northern Italy last IV week I was delighted to come across a group of Merseysiders spending their dole money and slaking their well-earned thirst on the sour young red wine of the Veneto. 1 hoped they would extend their cultural Grand Tour further south to include Naples, where the local government had run out of money to pay its employees, with the result that seven weeks' worth of gar- bage lay stinking in the streets while the mayor squabbled with the local military commander about an allocation of petrol to allow volunteers to clear it.

Venice itself had a bit of a pong, I thought, for the time of year. One was well advised to walk around clutching a rose. No doubt it was caused by these invading hordes of Merseysiders, as I heard no sug- gestion that the sewage had broken down. Venice's problem is that under the rating system imposed by its socialist mayor about a third of all rentable accommoda- tion in the centre of the city is now empty. As anybody with several houses knows, unoccupied property tends to deteriorate with amazing speed. I should judge that this touch of socialism presents a more im- mediate threat to the structure of the old buildings than occasional flooding, which most of them are built to survive.

This tendency to elect socialists into local government, while quite properly keeping them wrapped in wool where central government is concerned, is particularly ag- gravated where so few people pay local tax- es. I was irritated to learn, on returning from abroad, that my wife, accosted by some youth in a London street on behalf of the £20 million Save-Ken-Livingstone Cam- paign, had agreed to sign his petition. She said she knew nothing about the matter, it seemed rude to refuse, she approved of Liv- ingstone's attempts to reduce Tube fares and was mildly amused by his efforts to support the cause of sexual perversion.

All of which reflected my own attitude until the beginning of last year when I became a London ratepayer again. Of course wives, like children and other dependents, do not pay rates. It is all very well to be amused by documents like the GLC's Agenda Paper No. 2 of 12 April, 1984: 'The Council's Policy in Relation to Gay Men and Lesbians', now being con- sidered by the Arts and Recreation, Ethnic Minorities, Finance and General Purposes, Housing, Industry and Employment, Police and Women's Committees; but just how much is one prepared to pay for being amused in this way? In the financial year 1982-83 Ken Livingstone spent only £2,250 on his Gay London Police Monitoring Group (GALOP), which seems reasonable enough, but by the financial year 1983-84 this had gone up to £14,773, with no ob- vious increase in its joke-value.

The sum of £700,000 for a Lesbian and Gay Community Centre seems altogether more serious. Why cannot these people be left to find their own clubs and pubs like everyone else? The answer is that Ken fears they may be exploited, but I simply do not see why homosexualists should be more prone to being overcharged for drinks in their own clubs than anyone else.

I do not think that anyone who has read John Carvel's Citizen Ken (Chatto, £2.95) can reasonably decide that Livingstone is engaged in a cynical exercise to buy the homosexual vote. Look what hap- pened to Peter Tatchell in Bermondsey, Nor do I honestly suppose he was trying to buy the Irish vote by his flirtation with Gerry Adams, of Sinn Fein. Very few Lon- don Irish have much time for the IRA. He just happens to believe that homosexualists should be provided with feather beds for their activities and that Dublin should be allowed to take over the Six Counties, just as any bore one meets in the street may tell one he believes that everyone should be guaranteed a job and paid the same wage for it, or that married couples should be re- quired to past tests in parenthood before being allowed to have children.

In his own way, Livingstone is an honest man. But that must not be allowed to obscure the fact that what brought him and his merry cohort of Marxists to power is a profoundly defective system of govern- ment, in that it gives a huge majority of non-taxpayers the right to vote themselves whatever benefits they choose. The system reduces to absurdity in places like Liverpool where local politicians, having milked the ratepayer dry and closed down most of commerce and industry by exorbitant rate demands, finally have to present a 'bank- ruptcy budget', promising the same lavish increases in expenditure as formerly but without any money in the bank to pay for them. I sincerely hope the Government does nothing about Liverpool Corporation beyond refusing to guarantee any loans it may raise. Perhaps, when the wages of local government employees dried up, schools and hospitals closed down, garbage piled up in the streets and sewage started returning through their bath plug-holes, the people of Liverpool would come to their senses.

But of course they will do no such thing. Their wails and moans would rise to heaven; the bleats of Bishop Sheppard would be amplified through the absurd roof of Archbishop Worlo k' travesty of a

government by limiting the suffrage In of anything in this world that at the end 04 of Liverpool will once again be saved froth Catholic cathedral; and everybody would blame Mrs Thatcher. Nor is there the slightest possibility that the Government would allow events to take their course in that way, any more than there is any chance that the Government will do anything 0, mend the serious flaw in our system of loco ratepayers. One can be as certain as one is the day Liverpool Corporation will find itself bailed out by central government, on- ly the ratepayers will suffer, and the peoale facing the consequences of their actions- that abolition of the metropolitan count"' councils is a good thing. Never mind that It will save only £20 million a year, accordil to the most hopeful estimate commissioned from Messrs Price, Waterhouse. It is a

Nothing must deflect us from the fact ' move in the right direction.

fq rMhr se rT fhaaiticuhree r thoasc obneveinn cheeatvhiely pcurbitiiicciseocif e this. It is true that the Conservativ Government's handling of its own Pub,tYci has always been open to criticism. fear- the worst when Mrs Thatcher appointed alYr old friend Mr Anthony Shrimsley as her Press Officer in Downing Street. TonY (°s 'Toady' as he is affectionately known) ,h,an many qualities,- as he demonstrated vinly editor of Sir James Goldsmith's brilliajlth'e successful weekly magazine Now! But i`„tn. Conservative PR effort has a single ny tifiable fault it is in the tendency to toa inwards (on itself and towards Mrs 1.1!5; cher) rather than outwards (towards Pr`o and public). I was not sure that dear 00 Tony really had the natural equipment inclination to reverse this trend. tiec- But one may doubt, in the abject thee- is tual state of the nation, whether therefor really much of a PR case to be Put 00. abolishing the metropolitan countY ;47000 cils. Where you and I think of cutting a wasteful and redundant civil servants as first step towards dismantling the hage„„,,,,.. paratus of the State, our abject fen', a citizens will think of 3,500 jobs lost a' ld be time when they sincerely believe it shoo_,,s. Mrs Personally, purpose to 'create' dabble in tseelleiiPs tb.,:ec et hto yideIalaisniticnoptollnititiccsh, e espousal of political idealism as a lices"e the every fanatical excess. But I suPPrices of morons in our universities and Placesme higher education might be tempted hY;the

vision of an ideal Tory society, It

awvara

State has eventually withered

iiddiycllic master-see in shape,e w_e"ath p y r of rweol aut lido nbseh p society

traditional British posture of some Philosopher King — perhaps th

and good Sir Peregrine Worsthorne Elie on th- in down from its peak. It would resi,re to de feretc,; the one's betters, being held together.. Its love born of reciprocal utiht.1i'er members would be bound still further free the mutual respect of free citizens In by country and, only in the very last res 0' the knout. Any takers?