AND ANOTHER THING
Why Britannia is waiting to be ravished by a man on horseback
PAUL JOHNSON
Britain is a country ripe for political ravishment. It is a place where disgust for the entire political establishment is now so fierce and profound that any man (or woman) with a voice loud enough, and ideas clear enough, and will to power strong enough, can have Britannia for the asking. She is in the mood to cast off her elderly, impotent, Lib-Lab-Con spouse and go off whoring with a Berlusconi or a Jimmy Goldsmith. She wants an unconsti- tutional affair with someone politically Spicy.
Who can blame the old girl? Over Europe, all three political parties have con- trived to get her into a federalist quagmire where she can't touch bottom, and the humiliations are endless. I've often thought that the decisive British revolt against Brus- sels will be detonated by something quite simple, which will be universally seen as an insult to the British psyche. It could come, for instance, over the French plan to make London's double-decker buses, which they have long envied, illegal on grounds of 'safety'. That has been put on the Brussels back-burner for the moment, but now the French and the Belgians and Dutch have thought of a new idea: banning steam- trains.
We invented the steam-train and have always had a peculiar affection for it. We are the only country in Europe where steam services have been preserved or rein- troduced on a substantial scale. As I write this, I hear the thin, mournful wail of the West Somerset Light Railway warning hik- ers to get off its line as it snakes its way from Minehead across the delectable Vale of Taunton. That melancholy whistle is one of the great sounds of history and it makes all one's senses tingle to hear it again. The envious French want to silence it: their excuse is that steam locomotion involves 'unacceptable risk to human life'. Well: our light railway has been running many years now without the tiniest accident, let alone a fatality. On the other hand, I have a grue- some memory of seeing the results of a typ- ical multi-vehicle pile-up on the autoroute du Sud, with mangled corpses and scream- ing wounded littering the verges, hysterical pompiers playing their hoses on the fires, and the gendarmerie shrugging cynical shoulders. What can you expect, Monsieur, When motorists lunch well in five-star restaurants and then drive at 150 kilome- tres an hour? The Continental record for road deaths continues to soar and Brussels is subsidising new, faster roads as quickly as it can grab the ecus from the taxpayers' pockets. So maybe its war on steam will finally goad the British into throwing off their political masters. On the other hand, it could be the relat- ed matter of taxation. I have been looking into my own accounts and am appalled by the amount of money I will pay in income tax. You may say, all that proves is you earn a lot, so what have you got to grumble about? But I do grumble. I am not a capi- talist, just a freelance writer only as good as his last article, with no more security than my own skill and energy. I would not mind if more of my hard-earned money went on useful things like aircraft carriers, to keep our many enemies at bay and maintain order in an increasingly lawless world. But in fact we are progressively disarming our- selves. Defence spending is one of the few items which has actually fallen in the last three years and will fall still further in the present one, taking the famous Rosyth naval base with it. As a historian I know that every single time in our past we have tried to save money on our defences, a heavy price has eventually been paid in fear, blood and sorrow.
Meanwhile, under the so-called Conser- vative Government, welfare spending roars away without the smallest check. Having passed the £70 billion mark, it jumped to £88.5 billion this year (four times the defence budget) and will be £94 billion in 1995. And it is not just the high-earners who have reason to grumble — all taxpay- ers are being rooked. Britain has become a paradise both for our domestic sturdy beg- gars and for a legion of grasping foreigners from all over Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. This month the courts finally convicted some members of a Nige- rian gang of professional welfare crooks who were stealing over £1 million a month in fake benefits. West Africans are notori- 'I hate the way they dress you with their eyes.' ous for operating such rackets here and we can be sure that for every one detected a dozen more filch freely. It is the same with individuals. At one end of the scale, an 18- year-old Lebanese gambler, who describes himself as a 'political refugee', lives in May- fair at the taxpayers' expense and, having dropped out of a computer course, spends his benefits racing. He has a string of con- victions and says, 'The English are very generous. I like it here.' At the other end of the scale another Middle Easterner who likes it here is an Iraqi wide-boy called Hashim, who has already got £4 million in legal aid and is shortly to get a great deal more. He has seven flats and houses in var- ious parts of the world.
Our home-grown parasites have never had it so good. Girls get themselves impregnated to avoid work and to obtain free council houses costing each average taxpaper £1.50 each working day or £7.50 a week — that is the price we now pay to sub- sidise fornication and bastardy, not to speak of lesbianism. There are about 1.5 minion of these 'families' and the cost of supporting them has jumped from £3.8 bil- lion in 1988 to £8 billion last year. I live in a part of the world where law-abiding, tax- paying locals are genuinely terrified of invasion by New Age drug-addicts and other ruffians travelling in huge convoys. The social security bureaucrats set up spe- cial hand-out stations to keep these forays well-financed. The Government's feeble attempt to provide the police with more powers to curb such waves of terror was recently sabotaged by the House of Lords, another nest of 1,500 unelected parasites who cost the taxpayer £36 million a year. Their Lordships' reasoning was: 'If they go for the New Age travellers, how long will our hand-outs be safe, haw haw?'
I know decent, ordinary people who can- not bear to read the morning paper for fear of getting into an unChristian rage at the rackets daily revealed. No use appealing to our plump, beer-swilling Chancellor. He is the last man to curb the profligacy, being strongly committed to the Continental-style bureaucratic liberalism which makes it steadily more easy for the unscrupulous to plunder the honest. On the contrary: it was Clarke who imposed the biggest peace-time tax increases in our history. So how much longer, 0 Lord, will the people suffer it? And when is the saviour on horseback going to appear?
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