Another voice
Tarantara
Auberon Waugh
Devon and Cornwall are not, of course, as other parts of the British Isles are. The average age in stretches of the coast, or so I have been told, reaches well into the eighties. Although Jack Jones, on his retirement a few years ago, announced his intention of 'mobilising pensioners' power', to demand higher pensions, free transport, free meals delivered to their homes and free 'home helps' to wait at table, free television, telephone and chiropodists in attendance, an indexed Christmas bonus of £20 and, last but not least, an 'adequate' death grant, I am not sure that he ever got the old dears marching. Even if he did, I feel sure there was no urgent need for the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary to use CS gas or plastic bullets against them. If, in fact, the present Chief Constable, Mr J. C. Alderson, had been agitating in favour of these weapons, rather than against them, we might have looked at him askance.
Mr Alderson, I should explain, is not a native of the west country, but comes from Barnsley, home of Arthur Scargill and the flying pickets which defeated the forces of law and order at the battle of Sattley Coke Depot. He is not to be confused with Mr James Anderton, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, who comes from Wigan, is ten years younger and is unmistakably what you might call one of us. Barnsley has produced a number of celebrities in recent years, as well as the dreaded flying pickets which were last seen battling with police at Grunwick in support of the ineffable Mrs Shirley Williams's efforts to prevent a few terrified Asian ladies from working. There are lessons to be learned in Barnsley which have no relevance whatever to anywhere else in Britain. And this, they are saying in Devon and Cornwall, may be what has happened to Mr Alderson. The local citizenry seem most extraordinarily anxious that their Chief Constable should be prepared to use plastic bullets and CS gas against them should the need arise. Mr Alderson's refusal to countenance the idea has caused terror and confusion, giving rise to nightmares among all the retired majors in those parts that there is collusion between police and the forces of anarchy.
It seems to me that Mr Alderson's response belongs to a much older tradition in the Force, and one with respectable local antecedents. It must, after all, have been the Devon and Somerset Constabulary whom Major-General Stanley called in to do battle with the Pirates of Penzance. Mr Alderson's apparently fatuous suggestions for a 'community police force', with special training in chiropody rather than CS gas, are not only well attuned to the special con ditions applying in Devon and Somerset, where officers are more likely to be called upon to perform an emergency verruca removal than gas a rowdy assembly of 'workers' or blacks; they are also clearly descended from the song of W. S. Gilbert's Sergeant: When the coster's finished jumping on his mother He loves to lie a-basking in the sun.
Ah, take one consideration with another A policeman's lot is not a happy one.
Of course it can be argued that in anywhere outside the blessed counties of Devon and Cornwall Mr Alderson's suggestions for a system of community police committees to appoint officers and supervise their conduct are not so much fatuous as potentially disastrous. At best they could be taken over by the village Shirley Williamses, left-wing activists and boring lunatics who think they know best about everything — with appalling consequences both for the maintenance of law and order and for police morale. At worst they would fall into the hands of criminals and Irishmen, like so many Labour Party constituency associations in the bad old days before they invented the SDP. There are parts of the country where the police already have cordial enough relations with the criminal fraternity without inventing new opportunities for them to get together. But I have no doubt it will all work well enough in Devon and Cornwall, where the Liberal Party is still strong despite its contretemps in North Devon two years ago.
Another objection which has been made is that for all their managing of verrucas in Torquay and Salcombe, Mr Alderson's men are, in fact, part of our national line of defence against the instruments of death and despair in contemporary society. In the past months, they have been called out on riot duties to keep down the blacks in St Paul's, Bristol, and even the restless young people of Toxteth, Liverpool. His answer to that, presumably, would be along the lines that Devon and Cornwall are in Toyland; if other, more turbulent regions call for assistance from the forces of Toyland, that is their affair.
As an argument it has its attractions, and it is certainly in the tradition of Penzance rather than of Barnsley, but I am not sure that the forces of Mr Alderson's Toyland are even up to dealing with the occasional Wicked Witch of the West who might visit his area. Quite apart from the thieves' kitchens of Plymouth and St Austell, there is the recent history of the Norman Scott affair. The first police inquiry, under Devon and Cornwall's Detective Chief Superinten dent Proven Sharpe — since, I believe, retired — not only failed to turn up any significant part of the evidence later produced in the Old Bailey, but was widely regarded by many who followed the case as something of a cover-up. Indeed the prosecutor at Mr Thorpe's trial (now a judge) referred to this suspicion in the course of the proceedings. Nor has any satisfactory explanation been forthcoming about how Newton, the dog-shooter, was able to tell a cock-and-bull story at his trial in Exeter without any apparent efforts by the Devon and Cornwall police to check it out. But I was pleased to be the subject of a high-level police investigation myself, some months after the election, into allegations that I had not sworn my election expenses before a magistrate. One of Mr Alderson's Chief Inspectors motored all the way from Barnstaple to my home on a Sunday to discuss the matter. It was good to think his men were being kept on their toes.
All of which may seem a far cry from the matter of CS gas and plastic bullets. It is not just because I happen to belong to the 'whiff of grapeshot' school in the matter of civil disturbances that I believe Mr Alderson should be asked to resign. My own experience of riot control is limited to a single episode in Nicosia, where I observed that the rioters had no terror of armoured cars, knowing that we would never use machine guns, and laughed when we waved pistols at them, but for some reason ran like hares at the sight of a sten gun. The best weapon against rioters, I am convinced, is the baton charge, but that does not work against a small, highly mobile crowd of missilethrowers. Gas is more or less useless against anybody, but against the sort of rioters we saw in Toxteth and Moss Side I believe that aimed plastic bullets are the best weapon. The fact that in exceptional circumstances they can injure (even kill) sightseers is not an important disadvantage.
The reason Mr Alderson should be asked to resign — at 59 he must be near retirement — is simply to warn the nation's other 42 Chief Constables, as our winter of discontent approaches, that they will be expected to enforce the law. Of course, the Government will do no such thing. Despite her reputation for toughness, Mrs Thatcher's is the wettest government in my lifetime. Has she forgotten how Mr Macmillan — the most left-wing Tory Prime Minister in history — actually put Bertrand Russell in prison when he was nearly 90?
In the absence of any such initiative from the Government, 1 would simply urge Mr Alderson, if he is unwilling to equip his Toyland troops with anti-riot weapons, to give them trumpets. This is not just part of my campaign to teach everyone in Britain a musical instrument. As W. S. Gilbert's Sergeant explained: For when threatened with emeutes And your heart is in your boots There's nothing brings it round Like the trumpet's martial sound Tarantara-ra-ra-ra-ra.
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