In and out of prison
From Mrs S. Robin Letwin Sir: We should all be grateful to the high-minded Sunday Times for letting Denis Healey bring us such good news this week. He has gone to China and found there a life free of all vexation and replete with all good things: "no unemployment; no price increases for twenty years; no drugs. No betting; no pornography. Health, self-confidence and hard work. Above all, a sense of common purpose and dedication to a common cause . . . a degree of democracy in human relations at least equal to that in Scandinavia But Mr Healey's discovery is even more heartening than he realises. For all these good things are already available in England too, right now, though as yet only to the privileged few. Certainly the inmates of a sound English prison suffer from no danger of unemployment, no price increases, and are kept in good shape. They are at least as equal as the happy Chinese. If the latter are not afflicted, as Mr Healey assures us, by any secrecy about the police, neither are our prisoners. Above all, as any enlightened warden could tell Mr Healey, they have a great sense of a common cause and life, of belonging to a smoothly running system, a clear sense of the shape of their lives. They also occasionally make 'refreshing ' admissions of backwardness and flaunt a regulation or two 'by common consent,' undoubtedly just as happily as Mr Healey found the Chinese doing.
The one small hesitation that Mr Healey expresses can be disposed of. He sees that China reverses "all the values, achievements, and shortcomings" of the West and has not much use for "those individual freedoms which Europe prized so much since the Renaissance and Reformation." But he is too diffident to say that the Chinese way is preferable. He feels obliged to let that question be decided by history, the most prejudiced of judges." Now a prejudiced judge is obviously not a good judge. Anyway there is no need to wait on history which will never decide anything because it only records what men decide and what they do. It is therefore entirely open to Mr Healey, and to -the rest of us, to decide whether we prefer the perilous life outside prison which, alas, most of us in the West must for the moment endure, or the blissful coziness inside to which, with the glorious success of the Chinese before us, we can now reasonably aspire. Once Mr Healey and his friends are back in power then the way will be clear.
Shirley Robin Letwin 3 Kent Terrace, London NW1
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