Another voice
Inglorious summer
Auberon Waugh
There can be no doubt the great wet establishment in Britain has decided there is nothing to be gained, and much might be lost, by prosecuting the organis- ers of criminal violence and intimidation on the picket line. Since it has few obvious outlets apart from the correspondence columns of the Times — I am not talking about the parti pris attitudes to be found in the Guardian, Mirror or radical fringe and since one cannot really attack indi- vidual letter-writers to the Times without seeming to take a sledgehammer to a nut, I must try to reconstruct for mysef the steps bY which all these faceless people have come to the conclusion that the continuing Conspiracy to intimidate and terrorise must remain undeterred and unpunished. Nobody, I imagine — or at any rate, nobody within the great wet establishment — would attempt to justify the use of violence and terror to prevent strike- breakers reporting for work. I have heard People who should know better — even Lord Longford, as I remember — justify IRA tactics on the basis of their being acts O f war against a foreign occupier whose Presence in Ireland must be seen as a continuing act of aggression. But not even Mr Scargill has yet claimed that his de- fiance of the law amounts to an act of rebellion or civil war. If it did, of course, there would be no more pussyfooting 4,.round with riot shields and policemen 'Inking arms to play push-me-pull-you. A serious threat to the integrity of the nation would not involve baton charges and plas- tic bullets so much as bayonet charges and Machine guns. No doubt Mr Scargill is just arsing aTmind, like everyone else these days. It is stdliPlY a question of how far he is allowed al go. But in judging how far he has uy gone, one must bear in mind that lus reply to charges of having conspired to ac of violence and terror is not so much to the conspiracy or to justify the nolence, as to deny the violence. The only violence, he claims, is by the police. Quite rhossibly it is the police who throw bricks s rke'ligb the windows of miners' homes, tha°°rage and overturn their cars. That is the son of thing which just might be within b in e competence of a court to decide. But it , surely significant that nobody has tried to lustify the violence. There has, however, _irri general agreement that it should be 4 owed to continue. I wonder why. be first argument produced against the c"_4e of the criminal law on strikers who _unlink criminal acts is that it would create ta!2tartyrs; the second that it would increase 1....eleeling of injustice among strikers, who would see any identification of culprits as victimisation. It would inflame feelings and make a settlement less likely, it would prejudice relations with the trade union movement generally, and might. lead to a general strike, revolution and then . . . oh my God! Mr Mark Bonham Carter would be left with the radical alternative of eating tulip or daffodil bulbs from his garden in Victoria Road.
Against this, the argument runs that the general effect of the criminal law is not only to punish criminals but also to prevent normally law-abiding citizens from com- mitting crimes. Once intimidation was stopped by the arrest and imprisonment of those responsible for organising and per- petrating it, the strike would peter out, with many thousands of miners returning to work. Finally, it is argued that to allow flagrantly criminal acts like these to go unpunished, spreading terror among large sections of the community, is such an abdication of government responsibility as calls into question any citizen's obligations to the government: in other words, it would be time the military took over and allowed Mr Bonham Carter to retire to the country and grow cabbages. This last hor- ror scenario applies whether prosecution would have the effect of shortening the strike or whether, as the wets claim, it
• would harden and prolong it.
A further argument against prosecuting 'Gosh that's longer than the coal strike.' holds that since it can take anything be- tween 12 and 18 months for a serious criminal charge to come to court, the deterrent effect would be lost and later sentences would seem to be empty acts of vindictiveness or spite. The same is true, of course, of any criminal prosecution nowa- days. We must accept that nothing in the world is more important than that our beloved legal profession should continue to enjoy its huge fees, idle rituals and restric- tive practices undisturbed. That is what is meant by the rule of law, the only guaran- tee any of us have against anarchy, in- timidation and violence.
Another objection is that under the laws of contempt, which are peculiar to this country, nobody would be allowed to discuss the case until after it had been tried, and if one took one's lead from recent maverick rulings, nobody would be allowed to discuss even the nature of the offence until then. This would obviously reduce the deterrent effect. A final objec- tion is that our present Attorney-General, Sir Michael Havers, would almost certainly make a cock-up of the prosecution, and the culprits would go scot-free. But that might be no very bad thing, since one does not really want to see these horrible people deprived of their beer and chip butties; merely to see them scared into behaving like ordinary human beings, or whatever is the Yorkshire equivalent.
In any case, I remain unconvinced by any argument for allowing the organisers and perpetrators of this terrorism to go unpunished, and suspect that the real reason behind these arguments is funk. Rich, progressive, responsible people in the great wet consensus are quite simply scared of the lower classes. I do not expect them — or indeed many others — to share my own E. S. Bapty-style yearnings to go out and bash a Yorkshire miner, jumping on his face and drowning his horrible Yorkshire noises with my own inhuman growls. But I should have thought that the average rabbit could see the behaviour of these miners as self-evidently loathsome and intolerable, to be resisted at any price.
But the chief lesson is surely how thor- oughly the commanding heights of the English establishment have been yorkshir- ised. Practically nobody raises a voice to say that these hooligan louts should be punished; instead, the yorkshirised Sunday Times interests itself in finding out about Mark Thatcher's private bank account by dishonest means, and rows of J. B. Priest- ley figures on the Press Council agree that it was quite right to do so. Our famous Yorkshire-style cricket team is resounding- ly humiliated by Asian midgets at Lords.
It is time to de-yorkshirise this poor country of ours, and it must start with the appalling miners from South Yorkshire and Derbyshire. Our whole penal system needs to be reviewed for this task. Why is prison the only punishment allowed? Why should they not be immersed in indelible blue dye and made to eat cabbage stalks?
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