Notebook
Two of my colleagues disappeared after Christmas for skiing holidays with their families. How they could afford it I do not know, for the Daily Mail reported on Wednesday that 'a holiday in the top hotels in Switzerland would cost a family of five UP to £6,000 for the Christmas and New Year period.' There are, nevertheless, more Britons in the ski resorts this winter than ever before, and the amount spent on holidays this year is generally expected to be a record. This proves, if proof is needed,
that there is still a great deal of money about the place, despite unemployment, the recession and so on. As people often seem to judge governments by the quality of their own lives, this is possibly quite good news for Mrs Thatcher. There may be a lot of unemployed, but nearly 90 per cent of the Population is still in work and enjoying, on the whole, rather a high standard of living. Although inflation continues, many of the luxuries they crave have actually fallen, in Price. It would be going too far to say that they have never had it so good, but they are not having it at all badly. And they have many millions more votes than the unemployed.
No holiday, however, can compare with one currently being enjoyed by ten Swedish drug addicts. I have begun to ac- quire a certain immunity to horror stories from Scandinavia, but this is an extraor- dinary one. The drug addicts, of both sexes, are teenagers in the care of Sweden's social services department. Recently a Danish Charity called (for reasons I cannot ex- Plain) the Small Schools Association open- ed a branch in Sweden. It wanted to help teenagers with drug problems, so it offered to finance an expedition in a sailing boat to the West Indies. The adventure, it was thought, would not only cut these young people off from supplies of drugs, but it would teach them initiative and self- reliance. So last November the boat set off horn a small port on the west coast of Sweden, the teenagers accompanied by a group of teachers and social workers. They were half way across the Kattegat when Mutiny broke out, and a woman teacher was thrown overboard. Luckily she was rescued, but the crew put in at the port of klirtshals in Northern Denmark where the children, it seems, managed to acquire new supplies of drugs. The Danes, however, for- bade the voyage to continue, on the grounds that the crew was incompetent and that the boat was unlikely ever to reach the nest Indies. New plans had to be made, so he Party acquired Inter-rail passes and set off to roam about Europe on trains. There were various rows between the teenagers
and their mentors about how the available money should be spent — whether on food or drink — but they ended up in Austria at a skiing resort. There another mutiny broke out, and the children, using their rail passes, went home for Christmas. This, however, was not the end of the story. After Christmas they were taken to Moroc- co, where Inter-rail passes are also valid. At last, in the land of hashiSh, they may have found contentment — at the Swedish tax- payer's expense.
^t he newly nominated Labour candidate I for the Glasgow 1-1illhead constituency will have to develop some new line of attack if he is to defeat Mr Roy Jenkins. All that Mr David Wiseman, a Bennitc, has manag- ed to say so far is that 'it is shameful of peo- ple to use this campaign to advance per- sonal ambitions', which is rather like saying it is shameful for people to enter politics. (The same sort of thing could be said of Sir Horace Cutler, the Conservative leader on the Greater London Council. if he wants to humiliate Ken Livingstone, he must try to speak English and avoid statements like: `If Mr Livingstone thinks we are going to pull his hot chestnuts out of the fire so that he can get off the griddle, he has another think coming.') But returning to Glasgow, the Government now faces the decision about when the by-election should be held. Con- ventional political wisdom is that it should be held as soon as possible, in the hope that the challenger will not have time to organise and make his mark. But in present cir- cumstances, one wonders if it might not be wise to wait. Excitement over the Social Democrats is probably at its peak, and a quick election could bring Mr Jenkins vic- tory. But given time, the Glaswegians might grow weary of his alien presence, his very un-Scottish coosonants, and his incom- parable complacency.
T was a lunch before Christmas at
I the Social Democratic headquarters in London, attended by leading lights in the British entertainment industry. The guests included Harvey Goldsmith, the pop con- cert promoter, Alan McKeowan, the tele- vision wheeler-dealer, Michael White, the theatrical impresario, and David Putnam, the film producer (Chariots of Fire and Midnight Express). The aim of the luncheon was to discuss how the industry could be tapped for political funds. The model for this sort of thing is the United States, where large sums of money are raised for political parties from pop concerts and other types of popular spectacle. But, so Mr Putnam tells me, the idea is quite new in England. As a charter member of the SDP, he hopes that someone like Elton John, another SDP supporter, might give a concert in aid of the party and that film and theatre premieres could be similarly exploited. The SDP is becoming increasingly 'showbiz' and American in its outlook. It is all a far cry from traditional methods of fund-raising by the established political parties, which tend to look no further than lunches for bankers and businessmen. And when it comes to getting support from popular entertainers, both the Conservatives and the Socialists are decidedly 'square', with the Tories rely- ing on people like Arthur Askey and Ken Dodd, and Labour, for example, on Step- toe and Son.
Iam quite pleased to see the back of Joseph Pearce, the editor of the National Front's youth newspaper Bulldog, who was put away for six months this week for at- tempting to stir up racial hatred. He is ob- viously a horrible person. But a feeling of dreadful poignancy overcame me when I read one paragraph in the Daily Mail's report of the trial: 'His blind girl-friend, 31-year-old Veronica Stark, called out "Sieg Heil" and wept as he was led away'. Eleven years older than Pearce, and above all blind, Miss Stark still manages to be a fanatical Nazi and racist. If there were any advantage whatsoever in being blind, it would surely be that one would hope to ac- quire a certain detachment which might lead in due course to inner serenity. Indeed, most blind people I have met seem to possess this quality. But Miss Stark, although she is presumably incapable of distinguishing white from black, continues to harbour feelings of loathing towards other racial groups and is not serene at all. It must be terrible for her.
You will notice how studiously I have avoided any mention of the weather, or 'white hell', as it is now called. I can think of nothing new to say about it, except to point out that when the sun is shining, the snow makes London look remarkably pret- ty. Thousands have been deprived of this spectacle, however, because Mr Ray Buckton has called his train drivers out on strike rather than let them work variable shifts, as British Rail demands. He is one of those people who seem to enjoy being hated, whether by his fellow trade unionists, British Rail, the Government or the public. Such men are very difficult to deal with. If only he had chosen to remain in his original profession, that of being a groundsman in the park of a Yorkshire country house!
Alexander Chancellor
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