ANOTHER VOICE
How to support the only worthwhile campaign of our time
AUBERON WAUGH
Now I come to look for the cutting again I find it has softly and silently faded away, otherwise waffled off. I hope this is not a portent. International disaster relief is a thoroughly good cause, even if it may be a trifle unspecific in its immediate appeal, and even if the whole organisation of a modern state makes it geared towards producing huge sums of money and mate- rial assistance in the event of a sudden disaster. Nothing but good could come of contributing towards relief of the earth- quake victims in Soviet Armenia, for in- stance, but I was reluctant to believe, given the vastly centralised resources of the Soviet Union, that it was really necessary. To give money to an unspecified disaster fund might be seen as the reduction of almsgiving to its abstract form, somewhere closer, no doubt, to pure charity. Cows need milking even if the milk is to be thrown into the European Milk Lake: it is unquestionably a useful and meritorious thing to milk them under these circum- tances. And it is always great fun to blow whistles, however old one may be.
The reason I cut out the letter was that it seemed to illustrate the enormous amount of energy and intelligence and the immense power of good available to be tapped for almost any ineffectual cause. Perhaps there is some unwritten law that do-gooders must be ineffectual for fear they encroach on the functions of the state. At best, they operate on the margins of civic utility, offering services which could perfectly well be provided by the state if there was any real demand or need for them. At worst, they merely offer good people a chance to work off their goodness, just as war or football hooliganism gives violent people a chance to work off their aggression. The same sort of feelings arose when I read of the Prince of Wales's scheme to raise 100,000 young volunteers annually to serve the community for three months each. The idea is that they will deliver Meals on Wheels, care for the old and reclaim derelict land, all of which are thoroughly admirable things to do. But I doubt whether it will do anything for the real problems that the Prince wants to address, which concern the minority of young British males who make up the football hooligan and lager lout element.
This is because, when you ask for volun- teers, you are asking for people who are already goody-goodies, or half-way to- being there. It would be foolish to suppose that many of the heroes of Stockholm will be tempted to volunteer. 'Charlie's Angels', as we are invited to call them by the Evening Standard, are to be seen as the direct descendants of the Duke of York's Camps for Working Class Lads which I and my friend Wallace Arnold used to attend before the war. These were nothing to do with the present Duke of York (dread thought!) but the particular concern of the man who later emerged as Good King George. However, they never did the trick. The politicians had to declare a world war to get their working class lads sorted out. If anything really effective was to be achieved by the Prince's scheme, it would have to be compulsory, not volun- tary — whereupon the Prince would not dare propose it and the politicians would not touch it.
Writing in last Friday's Telegraph, Ferdi- nand Mount remarked on the fact that so many of the Prince's anxieties had been enthusiastically adopted by politicians of all parties as soon as they were out of his mouth. This is certainly true of the volun- teer army, and also of the Brazilian rain forests, although both those causes, as I say, belong to the realms of waffling, as opposed to effective do-goodism. But then Mount cited the Prince's concern for the general standards of civic and commercial architecture: As for Prince Charles's legendary attacks on modem architects and the ghastly things they have done to our cities, well, there is not a person in public life who has not loathed those terrible tower blocks since the moment they were built No doubt that is true, but it is not true that politicians have run to support the Prince's campaign against architects. Nicholas Ridley consciously and deliber- ately opposed it, and it is against the whole decomposed free-market philosophy of Downing Street, which has decided that the Prince is not one of us. In fact, the Prince has three solid achievements to his credit, none of which has anything to do with support from politicians. He has kept Ahrends Burton and Koralek out of Tra- falgar Square, he has kept Mies van der Rohe out of Mansion House Square and he has succeeded in removing the threat of Richard Rogers from Paternoster Square. He has also provoked the absurd Maxwell Hutchinson, president of the RIBA, into a polemical defence which, by its odiousness and ineptitude, is bound to make many converts to the campaign even among the superannuated smartiboots element which insists on seeing the issue in terms of progress and reaction.
The reason the Prince of Wales has received no official support in his admir- able campaign for a return to the decencies of harmony and scale in architecture and planning policy is that billions and billions of pounds are involved. The lamentable Canary Wharf development in Docklands is said to be worth £4 billion alone. I shall be returning to the Canary Wharf develop- ment at a later date (in the context of its being posited on the breathlessly optimistic vision of London as the financial capital of the world in the 21st century) when I unveil my major thesis on the relationship be- tween 'real' and 'junk' money. For the moment, I would confine myself to the observation that the Prince of Wales's initiative is the only real (as opposed to junk) campaign of our times. It will not work through bending the ears of industrialists and sympathetic cabinet ministers, but only through a mass middle- class movement. As I never tire of pointing out, the middle classes, united, have never been defeated. The way ahead, as the office party season approaches, is to adopt some variant of the punch-an-architect tactic. This, at its simplest, is that whenev- er one is introduced at a party or business meeting to someone who tells you he is an architect, punch him in the face. Women may throw wine over him, or spit. Weak or elderly people should simply scream. A few honest conscientious architects may suffer but they should be given the badge of three white feathers to announce their support for the Prince of Wales.
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