Another voice
Back to two nations
Auberon Waugh
While not pretending to match Peter Jay's magnificent self-sacrifice in taking a fifty per cent cut in income to be ambassador in Washington, I must confess to a warm glow of self-righteousness last week when I cancelled a $3,000 commission for an article from an American magazine. Of course, the figure is peanuts from anybody's point of view but my own; nevertheless it was the largest sum I had ever been offered for a single article, and certainly the largest I had ever turned down.
The immediate reason for this action, if I am honest, was a certain lethargy which happened to be visiting me at the time. The article would have involved five days' work. When I revealed at the beginning of this year that I now pay eighty per cent tax on the 'top slice' of my earnings (that is, all earnings in addition to my regular grind) I thought I might have been joking, or striking attitudes, when I said I had lost all earthly ambition. Now I find that I wasn't. Of the $3,000 (£1,754) which Esquire, in its generosity, was offering for the article, I would have received only $540 (£316) after deduction of ten per cent agent's commission and eighty per cent income tax. Even £316 would not be a bad fee by English , standards — rather more than the Sunday Times 'Colour magazine pays in tow for an article of equivalent length. But I didn't particularily need the money, suspected that the tax people would find some way of grabbing it and was suffering, as I say, from a certain lethargy.
None of which explains that warm, priggish glow of achievement with which I put down the telephone. It was true that I had denied myself £316, but I had also saved myself some work. Equally I had denied Mr Healey a little foreign exchange he had done nothing to deserve. Far better than this, I had denied Mr Callaghan, Mr Scanlon and Mr Moss Evans the sum of £1,263 which they had been planning to redistribute among their blubbering, shitfaced supporters in places like Grimsby and Newcastle as soon as they could get their greasy fingers on it. And this, I must confess, was the true reason for my joy.
Oh dear. Conservatives have traditionally felt bound to hide their distatste at the spectacle of those less fortunate or less successful than themselves. Partly, this was the product of good manners — simply not wishing to hurt their feelings — partly selfinterest, since historically these people could be quite useful if treated nicely. It was also an essential part of the 'organised hypocrisy' of Conservative government (as Disraeli put it) that the privileges of one part of the nation could best be maintained in a spirit of genuine concern for the misfortunes of the other.
To argue (as I intend) that Disraeli is out of date and that the pursuit of the 'One Nation' ideal is now a recipe for certain defeat, is to spit in the face of all Conservative philosophy, whatever passes for Conservative morality and all Conservative experience, even down to recent times. It is one of the paradoxes of history that Mr Heath —a 'One Nation' man to the depths of his second-rate being — should now be used as Exhibit A in any argument about the errors of confrontation or divisiveness. Yet I am convinced that the only way artead for the Conservatives is to regard the nation as an egg, cut it along its socio-economic middle, announce the top half as its own constituency, the bottom half as Labour's and thereafter press the interests of its own half at the expense of the other, battling with Labour for the small middle zone represented by those earning precisely the national wage.
The top half of the egg, I should point out, would include nearly all the members of Clive Jenkins's ASTMS, all the 34,209 members of Mr J. Lyons's Electrical Power Engineers Association, possibly a half or a third of the AEU membership, few, if any, members of TGWU, most, if not all, members of the locomotive engineers and mineworkers' unions (train drivers and coalminers). There are those who maintain that ancient working-class loyalties, racial tradition etc would prevent such people ever voting Conservative, but the Conservatives have never given them a chance with all their soothing, meaningless rhetoric about One Nation. The issues concern wage differentials and tax penalties on higher earnings; now that the national average is so extraordinarily high, I would not be in the least surprised to learn that those on and around the average have the impression that their pips are being made to squeak.
The logical error in supposing that a 'One Nation' party can ever prevail against a class-based party — in any except a • temporary, electoral sense — could be illustrated diagrammatically if I possessed Mr Ferdinand Mount's genius. Let us accept that the two are going to alternate in office as the electorate discovers with fresh amazement the cowardice, dishonesty, and incompetence of each. When party 'A' is in power (the Conservatives) they are going to try and benefit the whole nation equally. When party 'B' (Labour) is in power, they are going to benefit only the bottom half at the expense of the top half. Repeat the process on and off for thirty years and what do you find? That the bottom half is in a, position to wipe the floor with the top half, which is precisely where we are now.
Disraeli's most fundamental error is the assumption that 'increased means and increased leisure are the two civilisers of man'. Of course, it was inconceivable to anyone in the nineteenth century that the educated classes would lose control of this prosperous leisured proletariat; we would have them singing madrigals and performing Comus to each other in their leisure hours, building delightful workmen's terraces in the Doric order, going for nature rambles into , the countryside. Nobody could have guessed how the new proletarian culture would bring hideousness and desolation to every corner of the land; how the working class would be in a position to turn its back on education — even order an end to it — and concentrate on the satisfaction of its own brutal appetites in a setting of total banalitY — ugly, noise, disagreeable sights, revolting smells; how Bruce Forsyth and Hughic Green would be born to take the place of Sir Henry Irving and Charles Keen.
I mention this aspect because it seems to me that the Conservative Party does need an idealism, a sense of its own moral superiority, and that by abandoning the Disraelian ethos of 'One Nation' it might be in danger of becoming a party of toughies and cynics. Such a moral dimension might, perhaps, be provided by an awareness of the ecological, aesthetic, cultural, philosophical, gastronomic etc, disaster represented by that proletarian take-over.
How is it to be done? The process has gone so far now that it can only be repressed by a direct mandate given to a general election manifesto, but Mrs Thatcher and her advisers are so terrified of not being elected, that they will do nothing. Far better be elected and do nothing than not be elected, they feel. What they should do is write into the Manifesto an undertaking that if talks with the unions over a new industrial charter fail to reach agreement, the unions will be suspended for a period of three Years (their assets frozen, telephones disconnected) after which time a new industrial charter would be put to a plebiscite. All of which, to conventional political wisdom, will seem a recipe for electoral defeat or civil war. But it is conventional political wisdom which has brought us to our present position. On the analogy of the February 1974 election one nanst remember that Heath only just lost, that he had picked a fight on the worst possible ground, that things have got worse and that now the Tories are in opposition nobodY pays much attention to manifestoes anYway. Nor do I think it flippant to mention the very real feelings of terror and distrust inspired in the electorate by the sound of lvir Heath's voice and the sight of his face. Cul the second point, I can only give it as rrlY opinion that there are not more than a few thousand people in the country wh°s.,e, enthusiasm for an alternative society wl" survive the first whiff of CS gas.
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