16 APRIL 1977, Page 6

Another voice

Spreading the rot

Auberon Waugh Itiontmaur, Aude, France Escaping for a week from all the horrible things which are happening in Britain to the wild flowers and pastoral smells of the Languedoc countryside, I took with me as my holiday reading Paul Foot's new booklet : Why You Should be a Socialist, published by Socialist Worker at 35p.

In the market town of Castelnaudary, Aude, it is hard to see what all the fuss is about. The farmers are ruder than ever, the shops are bursting with goods, there is a general air of discreet well-being and concordia ordinum, Like most Englishmen of my class, I have long since given up worrying about restaurant bills. They exist on a different and largely theoretical plane, with the National Debt, the oil deficit and the American defence budget. It was only when I found myself paying F4.85 (about 57p)for a packet of firelighters that I began to be visited by feelings of impermanence.

It seems inconceivable that this idyllic corner of southern France will ever succumb to the hellish future of workers' councils and collective nursery facilities which Mr Foot dangles before our eyes. But it seems more than probable that Englishmen will be unable to come and share the idyll much longer if the pound continues to fall against the franc.

We all know why the pound continues to sink, why British goods, in the rare instances when we get round to manufacturing them, are not competitive, why there is no investment etc. I have always maintained that there is nothing wrong with stagnant inflation—and the stagnancy is surely welcome—provided that our main trading partners (and those countries we like to visit on holiday) follow suit. This is what the Italians are doing, in their obliging way, so that the pound is still worth about the same number of lire as it was when I was a youth in Florence twenty years ago. Nobody in their right minds wants to visit Germany or Switzerland, so it is only the French who are badly out of step.

Now, I may not be quite old enough to remember when Big Ben was the size of a pocket watch, but 1 do remember when the pound was worth 14 francs. This was in the summer of 1968 and spring of 1969, as a direct result of the evenements of May 1968. For those who can't remember, that was the glorious spring when the whole of France went on strike after some student riots, toppling de Gaulle and causing enormous excitement to the Footies of this world.

Now the pound trembles around F8.50 before its next descent and one yearns for a little radicalism among French students and factory workers.

Which is where this interesting booklet comes in. Can you have socialism in one country, it asks, and the answer is plainly that you can't. Comparisons between the standards of living in Britain and France are already embarrassing enough, but it is obvious that with a little more application of Foot's three sovereign remedies in Britain—social ownership, equality and workers' democracy—they will be obscene, to use a fashionable term.

If I am right in my analysis, that the reason why Britain is in so much a worse state than other European countries is that Foot-rot has already set in deepe,r there than anywhere, then there is an inescapable conclusion. Of the two possible solutions— to persuade the English to work harder, or the French to work less hard—only one is available. The English industrial working class will never be persuaded to work any harder so long as it has its existing union structure, welfare provision and punitive tax system, and it is beyond the power of the elected government to take any of these things away.

So somehow we have got to spread Footrot among the French. One way would be to tteat Foot as the Germans treated Lenin and send him, like a poisonous bacillus, by sealed hovercraft to Calais. But I am not sure how adept he is in the French language, or how the French would take to this strange, gesticulating figure who feels so indignant about factory workers being timed on the lavatory. In any case he might not want to go. No, apart from encouraging the closest fraternal relations between trade union leaders in Britain and overseas, the way ahead is to circulate Foot's booklet as widely as possible among French students and workers.

Most of the reasons in Why You Should be a Socialist are British ones, but, on a first skim through, there seemed no reason why, they should not apply to other countries, mutatis mutandis. On the second, more careful reading, there would not appeal to be many mutanda. For instance, we learn that in Britain, in the mild winter of 1975-1976, some 100,000 old people died because they could not keep warm enough. Now of course it is a very shocking think that old people should die for this or any other reason, and I am sure it would not happen under socialism but are we to suppose that fewer old people died in France during that extraordinarily mild winter? In Africa I imagine the problem may be different, with an equivalent number of old people dying in summer through the heat and lack of adequate refrigeration, but

Spectator 16 April 1971 Africa is not yet giving cause for anxiety, or at any rate on grounds of excessive zeal among its workers. 'Twelve million really poor people in Britain are growing desperate.' he writes. Surely, the same assertion can be made about any other country ? In the United States, I expect, some fifty million real!), poor people are growing desperate; in Belgium, perhaps, two million, AnywaY, write it down, write it down. The chapter he devotes to complaining about the Beef Mountain would make people indignant in any language, even in the socialist countries where they have practically no beef to beef about owing to their peculiar methods of production. Now we come to a detailed analysis of the British sickness: 'The bare statistics of inequality in our society are almost Incredible,' he writes. Almost? ApparentlY the richest one per cent of our population owns a quarter of all the personal wealth, the richest five per cent own half of it. One has seen variations on these figures frorn time to time, depending for their credibilitY on the definition of personal wealth. 0° they include life insurance, pension schemes, tenants' tenures? Footy's definition iS rather a generous one, including not onlY land, houses, flats and insurance policies but also 'household goods, furniture, ckitrcsh. en n . utensils, fridges, washing machies' a Now an obvious objection to this is that nobody has ever valued all the household goods, furniture and kitchen utensils inf, Britain, so Footy is plainly talking out ° the top of his head, but that is not my Point' The point is that if Britons can be Pei. suaded to believe that the top five per cent own half the kitchen utensils, then there no earthly reason why the French shoulo not believe it also. Footy claims things getting worse. In Scotland the bottom per cent owns only 5 per cent of the wealth, whereas in 1959 it owned 15 per cat Oddly enough, I believe exactly the same

figures apply in Brittany. h at

My purpose here is not to argue •Footy's plans for a workers' democracY at a pipe dream, that material equality cacin never be maintained, let alone imPc'se without orgies of coercion, repression an; mass terror. Still less do I wish to visit thes._ horrors on the French. My only purpose 'sr to point out that we have lost the battle fo people's minds—or what they laughingiYi call their minds—in Britain; technological capitalism no longer works there, and can.f be made to work ; and our only prospect future holidays in France depends on Pe' suading the French not to let it work h

either. ere'

If the British Council, many of mill°5! delicate, highly sensitive employees at distinctly left-wing, can be persuaded_ Yto°0 distribute millions of copies of WhY . „ Should be a Socialist to the workers of tn,; world it may not be too late. My dear 'Nu, is working on a French translation as write.