DIARY
CHARLES MOORE As soon as A. N. Wilson submitted to me his article (`Time to turn to Labour') which we published last week, I knew that the piece would strike a chord. There is a period in each Parliament when people get fed up with the Government, and we have now reached that period with this one. The only wonder is that the polls stayed so favourable so long (the longest since polls began). People get particularly, virulently fed up with Mrs Thatcher's governments because they have such strong feelings about her. She provokes unreason, both of adulation and of hatred. Actually, Mr Wilson's piece was the more powerful for not going on about the Prime Minister's character, and I could tell that it was powerful by the way that it annoyed me so much. It scored palpable hits and yet, I think, was wrong in its underlying argu- ment.
he illusion has been', A. N. Wilson writes, 'that it is possible, or desirable, to dismantle the semi-socialist state set up by Attlee's administration. . . .' This is true to the extent that everyone sane believes in some sort of mixed economy. But it is misleading. French dressing is a mixture of oil and vinegar. I suppose that if it were three parts vinegar to one part oil it would still be French dressing, but it would also be utterly disgusting. The proportions of the mixture are all-important. And what Mr Wilson does not acknowledge is that it was the collapse of just those public services which he values which brought down the Labour government in 1979 and has, I believe, excluded any party domin- ated by the trade union movement from power for ever. The public/private mixture did not work. Britain seemed ungovern- able. Mr Heath asked the country who it thought governed in February 1974 and the country said it wasn't sure. The trade union leaders said that they could discipline their members in return for running the govern- ment, and they showed that they could not. Failure to govern produced paralysis of everything else. Why should people deliver public services if they could get more money by refusing to deliver them? There is much talk of greed today, but at least today's greed, however unattractive, is satisfied by getting more for doing more. In the 1970s, we were ruled by the collec- tive greed of the public service unions, and their greed was only satisfied if they could get more for doing less.
In short, much of the 'semi-socialist state' did need to be dismantled. And the last three governments have been brave and resourceful, if not always adroit, in doing this. Everyone knew, for example, (everyone except the hard Left and the union barons) that nationalised industries were badly run. But it took this Govern- ment to do anything about it. Now you can hardly find anyone who will defend old- style nationalisation. Everyone knew that trade union immunities crippled industry and gave unrepresentative power to mili- tants. I got my first job in Fleet Street just after Mrs Thatcher came into office but before trade union reform had begun. I had to creep in by the back door because I was not a member of the NUJ. The Daily Telegraph, for which I worked, was losing money. The print unions did whatever they wanted, frequently stopping the paper, always filling it with misprints, and trying more and more to censor what appeared in it. Sogat, I think it was, controlled the office staff, messengers etc. If you wanted, say, a new chair in your office, you had to ask. It would not come. You had to ask again. Still it would not come. It might never come at all, but woe betide you if you went along the corridor to the cup- board where spare chairs were kept and took one yourself. Then everyone downed tools (not that they had ever upped them in the first place), and a long, agonisingly boring industrial dispute began. Almost everyone knew that all this was wrong, but no one imagined that anything could be done about it. Yet within a few years the union leaders were broken. There are now practically no disputes. Papers make pro- fits, they are better printed and some of their titles are new. Mrs Thatcher was midwife at the birth of the Independent.
'I used to be a Goth... now I'm just a vandal.' A. N. Wilson writes that 'we need to return to the simple idea that public services require public spending and it is the responsibility of governments to admi- nister this spending.' But only if, surely, we have previously returned to the even sim- pler idea that public money all comes from the public and that its spending by others must therefore be justified. A service should not be provided by public money if it can be provided as well, or better, by private. It turns out, for example, that long-distance buses can run without any public subsidy at all and charge the custom- er less for a better service. Contrary to deep-seated belief, the Government clear- ly does not want to get rid of the National Health Service. But keeping it does not mean that it is right never to alter its workings and simply to put more and more money into it. Trying to work out how to run things better, trying to estimate the real cost of things, is not mean-spirited. Government is a trust and the care with which government spends money is perhaps the best index of how it fulfils that trust. Somewhere after 1945 that simple idea came clos.e to being forgotten by the Tory and Labour parties alike. Thank goodness it was remembered just in time.
Iadmit, however, to sharing some of A. N. Wilson's atavistic dislike of this Government's behaviour. .I felt physically sick when I saw a picture of Lord Young in a Mercury telephone box: I cannot wholly admire a woman who gave a job, however minor, to Mr Jeffrey Archer. I agree that this Government does not understand why universities matter. There are too many economists, sophists and calculators around, and not enough proper Tories. But when looking at government, one should try and keep atavism in check. On the day we published Mr Wilson's article, I went to see Single Spies by Alan Bennett at the Queen's Theatre. These are two plays, one about Burgess, the other about Blunt. In a programme note, Mr Bennett writes that ' . . . an ironic attitude towards one's country and a scepticism about one's herit- age is a part of that heritage'. Mr Bennett is right. I value such irony, and I suspect that Mrs Thatcher has no time for it at all. Blunt and Burgess and Philby came from the witty, ironic world of Cambridge which I know and like and which is much more fun, I bet, than Alderman Roberts's par- lour. But the fact remains that these men were so snobbish and vain that they could see nothing straight. They were very deca- dent, and so was Britain. It is emblematic that Blunt was unmasked by Mrs Thatcher in the first months of her administration. She is not decadent, and nor, any longer, is Britain.
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