Diary
When the miners first started to picket coal-importing Wivenhoe port, near- by students at Essex University were thril- led and honoured to offer them hospitality in their halls of residence. The student view then was that the miners deserved support because they were brave and admirable defenders of decent values, fighting against reactionary, coarse- grained, brutal Thatcherism. Returning last weekend to my cottage there, after a few weeks' absence, I find that closer acquaintance with miners in the flesh has, as should have been expected, somewhat modified this rosy view of proletarian virtue. The first sign of the cultural gap came when the miners gave offence by wolf whistling some of the girl students, thereby outraging the feminists. Worse was to follow when they demonstrated racialism by referring to black students as, yes, nig-nogs. But even these crimes against student proprieties might have been over- looked had not an incident occurred in- volving feminism and racialism at the same time: namely when a group of black women students, who complained about being kept awake all night by miners singing lewd songs, were told by their miner guests to go and f— themselves. So fewer university windows now boast pla- cards pledging support for the miners, and there is even a piece of graffiti saying 'Dig a deep hole: bury a miner', which I take to be about as literate and well-argued an expression of disapproval as most socio- logical students educated at Wivenhoe University can be expected to make. One such, incidentally, was prepared to be more explicitly damning, as a result of sharing a carriage with miners on the train from Wivenhoe to Clacton. Apparently after a very polite elderly black inspector had twice asked for their tickets, which they did not have, they chased him down the train, booting him up the backside. Idealistic young middle class men like Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Macmillan were rendered highly sympathetic to the plight of the working class through learning for the first time what their life was like in connection with the General Strike, Jarrow march etc. Thus was born the guilt-ridden, socially aware generation of post-war politicians. It seems to me that the effect on today's idealistic middle-class young of learning about the miners at first hand is more likely to produce a whole generation of politicians who are even more anti- working class than Auberon Waugh.
While on the subject of miners, is it not worth noting that so far there has not been a single round-robin from progressive intellectuals with a view to issuing one of those joint epistles to the Times condemn-
ing the hateful violence and intimidation? When I complained about this last week to Arnold Wesker, whom I had run into at a City luncheon of all places, he had the good grace to regret this omission and to undertake to put it right. He thought part of the problem was that on the Left there was a tendency, to see the Coal Board closures, causing unemployment, as also an act of violence. But pressed by me on this point, Wesker swiftly and honourably admitted its absurdity and irrelevance. Nevertheless, ten days later, there has still been no public remonstrance from Arnold Wesker and his friends. What worse acts of Brownshirt brutality must Mr Scargill's bully boys do before these people, usually so quick on the draw, decide to condemn them? If some large corporation were using gross physical violence to intimidate workers on this scale, not on one occasion but consistently over 23 weeks, I like to think that even the most ideologically obtuse and right-wing intellectual Alfred Sherman, for example — would eventually have been shamed into publicly condemning such practices. Or is my confidence just another example of the wishful thinking of a Tory romantic?
It is really very surprising that public persons still persist in basing their reac- tions to events on what they see on the telly. David Steel, for example, after seeing the TV shots of the Noraid clash in Belfast, issued an instant statement de- scribing it as a 'police riot'. Yet as every- one knows, TV reporting has to be selec- tive in the extreme, much more so even than print reporting. More often than not, eye witnesses of an event will tell one that what was shown on the telly bore almost no relation at all to the real thing. Neverthe- less, long after people have given up saying that so and so must be true because they have read it in the newspapers, they still say such and such must be true — miners' violence, for example (mea culpa) — be- cause they have seen it on the telly. Under certain very precise circumstances the camera can be relied upon to establish the truth eventually, as it has, for example, in the Zola Budd affair. But even here, first impressions were wholly misleading. Perhaps the Noraid clash was a police riot. But for a politician to base such a conclu- sion on telly shots is scarcely more scien- tific, or responsible, than to suppose — as superstitious rulers of old used to do that something must have happened be- cause they dreamt it.
When I am alone of an evening I almost always prefer to switch on the radio rather than TV, since the sound programmes are usually incomparably bet- ter than those on the box, and members of my family tell me that they do the same when they are alone. But when in a family group it is always the television set which we sit around, and never the radio. Why is this? The answer, I think, is that TV is more suitable for communal entertain- ment, precisely because it makes so few demands, leaving one with plenty of atten- tion to give to the querulous grandchild or talkative aunt. If the programmes required greater concentration, one would resent the distractions which inevitably attend the family circle. The less demanding the programme, therefore, the more outgoing and gregarious everyone is, making for a better time for all concerned. Listening to a really good concert on Radio 3, say, has exactly the opposite effect, since everyone withdraws into their separate shells, be- hind tightly shut eyes. So perhaps there is more to be said for the low quality of television than meets the eye, so to speak. At least it makes for togetherness. Truth to tell, most people are much less glued to the box than is assumed; rather less so than they used to be in the steam radio Reithian age when I remember, as a child, not daring to cough for fear of breaking the grown-ups' concentration as they listened to the oh so solemn nine o'clock news on the Home Service.
This has been a marvellous summer m East Anglia, with just the right com- bination of sun and rain, and the country- side is one great cloth of gold stretching as far as the eye can see. Driving through it the other evening, I was rejoicing to myself at the bumper harvest that lay ahead, until the distressing thought occurred to Me that all this agricultural wealth simply meant bigger grain mountains for the EEC and higher taxes for you and me. From the farmers' point of view a good harvest is just as much a joyous event as it always has been throughout human history. But for the rest of us traditionally thankful people, for the first time, a hint of anxiety oversha- dows our joy as at the end of a glorious summer we watch them safely gathering in . . . the subsidies.
Peregrine Worsthorne
Previous page
