ANOTHER VOICE
A revulsion that is irreversible and terminal
AUBERON WAUGH
No figures are supplied by the Home Office for the number of minor injuries suffered in road accidents involving police cars, but some idea of the scale of devasta- tion caused can be gleaned from comparing figures for those killed or seriously wound- ed with the number of accidents reported. In the Metropolitan Police district alone, where only 69 people were described as being seriously injured, a total of 5,667 police accidents were recorded, nearly 110 a week. It makes one wonder what exactly consitutes a serious injury. For instance, we were told that two women who were knocked down by a police car answering an emergency call in Sittingbourne, Kent, last week will not feature in the statistics for serious injury, although one was knocked unconscious, as well as receiving cuts and bruises, and the other was taken to hospital for treatment. Presumably the five 'inno- cent' (i.e. uninvolved) motorists who were killed in accidents involving police cars in the same week will feature, eventually, in the Home Office statistics.
But unless they are very strict indeed in their judgment of what constitutes a `se- rious' injury, I confess I am surprised that the figures are so low. I do not produce this thought in any tiresome anti-police spirit, even if I suspect that in the vast majority of cases when one is terrified out of one's skin by a police car answering an emergency call, it is going to the assistance of a fellow policeman rather than a member of the public. Perhaps the sirens (or klaxons, or whatever they are called) are louder than they used to be, but I find it is rare, in London, to spend 20 minutes without hearing the noise of a police car as it demands priority over other traffic in response to some real or imagined emergency. I would judge that police, combined with the other emergency ser- vices, provide a significant hazard of life in London — certainly as significant as the risk of being mugged.
Quite apart from the danger involved and I suppose people could argue that it is right we should be prepared to jump for our lives at any moment if it enables someone else to receive emergency assist- ance a few minutes earlier — these blaring juggernauts act as a constant, ostentatious reminder of government activity. Perhaps Londoners like to be reminded in this way. Brian Walden has argued, convincingly enough, that the British, for all their warm response to the rhetoric of individualism, are in fact a nation of collectivists.
The British people like authority. We are a society streaked by authoritarianism, not because Mrs Thatcher ordained it. . . but because most of us prefer it that way. We believe in stopping other people from doing things, though we disagree about what it is they ought to be stopped from doing. . . . The only freedom that interests us is our own.
If he is right, and I must confess that my own observation tends to confirm his find- ings, the question still arises whether these noisy demonstrations of state power and government authority reassure people that their interests are being looked after, or annoy them because other people's in- terests are being looked after at the ex- pense of their own. I know what my own reactions are, and it seems safe to assume that even if not everybody shares them, there is a division of opinion on the matter. Some people thrill to the noise of police, ambulance and fire engine klaxons, others don't.
There is nothing very odd about that. I merely observe that those who belong to my camp, and resent these noisy reminders of government activity, are the same as might be expected to respond most warmly to the Thatcherite rhetoric of independ- ence, individualism and rejection of the nanny state.
Again, there is nothing very odd about that. Contradictions between the indi- vidualistic, free-market stance and tradi- tional Conservative appeals to authority, patriotism, law and order are two a penny, and have often been remarked on. The electoral calculation has always been that the two opposed camps — the 'individual- ists' who are trying to make money, and the 'conservatives' who already have it will make common cause at the end of the day. My argument for suggesting that the accumulated resentment against Mrs Thatcher has now assumed an irreversible and terminal character is based upon another of Walden's theories, enunciated for the first time last week: that electoral choice, like public disaffection with the Government, is as often as not based on the most paltry of reasons.
It is all horribly unjust, of course. Thatcher has done wonders for Britain. We forget what things were like before she arrived. Hospitals were just as bad, if not worse. Menacing thugs from the trade union movement who roamed the land are now out of sight, having been smashed into the ground. Income tax went up to 83 per cent (98 per cent for savings income). Now we are all swimming in money and the good things of life, and so secure in our enjoyments that we have to invent rubbish about holes in the ozone layer and tropical rain forests in order to stimulate our anxieties. Mrs Thatcher cannot possibly be blamed for holes in the ozone layer, and it was foolish of her to try and take the blame. She cannot reasonably be blamed for tropical rain forests, disgusting and dangerous as they undoubtedly are, or for listeria in French cheese, salmonella in eggs, for rail or plane crashes, however keen she may be to attract blame for all these things.
But she can and must take the blame (or credit) for these noisy police cars, fire engines and ambulances and for all the other manifestations of a truculent and officious state presence in our lives: cus- toms officers who deliberately search a whole jumbo-load of passengers and find nothing; police officers who are even now agitating for 'unfettered discretion' to stop cars and humiliate, possibly ruin motorists who have had as little as two glasses of wine; a Health Education Council which spends millions and millions of taxpayers' money to propagate deliberate untruths about the risks involved in passive smok- ing. She must take the blame (or credit) for these things because, by her own contri- vance, she is the Government. Either we see the Government as a friend and ally, supporting us in need and confounding our enemies, whether domestic or foreign, or we see it as hostile and threatening. She has contrived simultaneously to assure those who would naturally seek to suckle at the state breast that she has no more milk in her than a male tiger, and to set natural conservatives against the Government. It is just a question of how long it takes the Conservative Party to realise she has be- come a liability.
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