Another voice
Lessons of Jamaica
Auberon Waugh
efore leaving for an important fact- .1.1 finding mission to Jamaica on 27 February — it really is a most agreeable time to be there — I read a letter in the Daily Telegraph which seemed to contain all human wisdom, at any rate on the subject of unemployment. It came from P. J. Deary, Director of the Careers and Appointments Service in the University of Liverpool, and explained with the aid of tables and other useful props how the problem of unemployment would very nearly be solved if people of both sexes were encouraged to retire at the age of 58.
The traditional objection to earlier re- tirement is expense, but P. J. Deary points out that it is considerably cheaper to keep elderly people without dependants in re- tirement than it is to keep younger people, many of whom have dependants, in unem- ployment. At first glance, his argument seems unassailable, and compares very favourably indeed with solutions put for- ward by what might be called the brain- softened mainstream of English life: letter- writers to the Times and Church of Eng- land prelates (I ignore similar pleadings from the Labour movement and from Tory wets as being too obviously prompted by political self-interest to merit serious con- sideration). These 'solutions' come under two headings: that the government should print vast sums of money for bad invest- ment in non-jobs; and that the People should agree to share jobs, forgo overtime in a great unselfish movement designed to scatter jobs like lollipops through a smiling land. As one who very nearly passed his PPE Prelims at Oxford a quarter of a century ago, I find it hard to decide which of these two proposed solutions is the more fatuous in its conception, the more dis- astrous in its likely consequences. But P. J. Deary seemed to have a point, especially when he urged that many 58-year-olds would very much like to retire, many school and university-leavers would gen- uinely like to be given jobs.
It was only when I was in Jamaica, studying the effects of ganja on the local population, that I began to see a flaw in his argument. It assumes that everybody is equally employable. This is far from being the case. Those who are still working on their 58th birthday have at very least proved that they are employable — they may be contributing their most useful work. The new generation of school and university leavers, after so many years of the Shirley Williams' treatment — not to mention the delights of Liverpool Uni- versity — have in many cases yet to show that they have either the inclination or the aptitude for steady employment.
It boils down to whether employment is seen as a lollipop to which all citizens of a welfare state have some sort of right, or whether it is seen as something which might conceivably be advantageous to the employer as well as to the employed. Perhaps I am being unnecessarily gloomy, but I felt sure there would be a snag somewhere.
My study of the effects of ganja — the powerful local marijuana — on Jamaica's population convinced me of another error in my own previous assumptions. The writings of Richard West and others should have prepared me for the discovery that a significant proportion of the Jamaican population is more or less permanently stoned, but I confess that it came as something of a shock to me when my first taxi-driver in Kingston — Jamaica's dilapi- dated and violence-ridden capital — took both his hands off the wheel and started jigging to the offensively loud reggae blar- ing from his radio. In some ways he was a perfect taxi-driver — courteous, cheerful and reasonably cheap — but he understood nothing I said to him and nothing he said made any sense.
Wherever I went (except, perhaps, in the luxurious British-run enclaves of Round Hill and Tryall, around Montego Bay) the pattern repeated itself. Con- tinuous ingestion of the drug would appear to make people happy and amiable, at any rate in public, but terrifyingly stupid, forgetful, inefficient and more or less unemployable by western standards. I do not know whether the recently announced closure of Alcoa's huge bauxite plant, with dire consequences for the Jamaican eco- nomy, had anything to do with shortcom- ings in the labour force, but it is an observable phenomenon throughout most of the Jamaican scene that three people must be employed to perform the simplest job for one person. In my own extremely pleasant cottage in Round Hill, it took three women from six o'clock in the morning to scramble two eggs by a quarter past nine. I do not suppose for a moment that any of these women had ever so much as experimented with ganja, which is illegal in the country and also forbidden in Round Hill, but it seems to me that the ganja- smokers set the pace throughout Jamaican society. It was also noticeable that if ever one asked for an egg poached, it arrived scrambled, if ever one asked for it scram- bled it arrived boiled and so on, to make life a constant succession of delightful surprises.
The difference between being unem- ployed in Jamaica and being unemployed in Britain is that if one is unemployed in
Jamaica one is quite likely to starve. In many ways, a system where three people are required to do one person's job might seem to approximate to the modern Church of England's idea of heaven, the solution to all our problems. But Shirley Williams' victims already suffer from an entirely different set of disqualifications from most forms of employment; it is not so much that they are more ignorant, or ill- iterate, or even undisciplined than previous generations as that they have never been confronted with any particularly good reason for wishing to work. They are spoiled and lazy to the point of resenting any call upon their attention, let alone the manifold inconveniences of regular em- ployment. In the past, I have urged that the unemployed — and, for that matter, the whole population — should be allowed free access to such a comparatively harm- less euphoriant as cannabis as the best means of keeping everybody happy and preventing them from creating that social or proletarian wealth which disfigures the landscape and spreads a cancer of uncouth noises, sights and smells all over the country. Having examined the Jamaican model, I must now conclude that I was wrong: if one added the ganja-inspired qualities of stupidity, forgetfulness and inefficiency to all the other factors which make such a large proportion of Young Britain unemployable, the final result would be a general squalor such as would make even the South Bank theatre and entertainment complex seem acceptable. So I end up with no solution to the unemployment problem and a firm convic- tion that the general sale of cannabis should continue to be forbidden. But the fact remains that it is an extraordinarily pleasant substance, if taken infrequently and in moderation, at times when it is unlikely to interfere with one's work or one's prospects of employment; so I have one constructive suggestion to make. When I referred to the brain-softened mainstream of English thought as exempli- fied by the Church of England I was not, of course, suggesting that the Archbishop of Canterbury was actually stoned when he told the Queen: 'We do not have to look as far as Ethiopia to find the darkness of disease, death and disaster. . . it is here in our inner cities' — only that he might as well have been. Once again Jamaica shows the way, where ganja-smoking is an established ele- ment in Rastafarian worship. If cannabis were forbidden under the severest penal- ties throughout the week, and
permitted
only on Sundays inside Christian churches, when supervised by a Christian minister of religion, every objection to its use would be overcome and many benefits accrue. Nobody would be irritated by the fatuous or ignorant opinions expressed from the pulpit, everything would be accepted in a spirit of amazed, finger-clicking benignitY; the Church would have found a role.
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