23 JULY 1977, Page 6

Another voice

Something to celebrate

Auberon Waugh

It couldn't happen here, we are told by a smug Electricity Council. This is because we have nationalised our electricity supply. We now have a national grid protected by a sophisticated system of trip-switches, so that any failure or overloading is automatically compensated. No Act of God can close down the Central Electricity Generating Board, as Consolidated Edison was closed down last week by a bolt of lightning. Like the Titanic, we are unsinkable. God has spoken clearly to the New Yorkers, warning them to be good little boys and nationalise the commanding heights of their economy without delay.

But in fact, of course, London and all other parts of the country can quite easily be plunged into darkness at any moment, if ever we do anything to displease the executive of the Electrical Power Engineers Association. Fortunately, they seem to be quite placid and agreeable folk, these power engineers, but we have no reason to suppose they will remain so. With the example of New York in mind, it is intriguing to speculate on the likely consequences of a prolonged black-out in this country, particularly one which was caused by malice in an atmosphere of hostility rather than by accident or Act of God (from which, as I constantly remark, we are immune on this island).

The only lasting effect of New York's last black-out in 1965, was a dramatic bulge in the birth-rate, comparable to our own Munich bulge of June 1939. It occurred to me at the beginning of this year, when confronted by figures for the terrifying decline in Britain's birth-rate, that it might be a public-spirited thing to provoke these affable power engineers into strike action this winter and so revive our torpid procreative performance. It might also, in a cold spell, revive our anxieties about the welfare of old people, one of the few subjects on which the British appear to have strong moral feelings. Fear and resentment of the unions may be widespread, but they need a sense of moral outrage to give them effect, and I feel this moral dimension might be supplied by news of old people dying in large numbers from the cold. In the absence of newspapers or television, it is wonderful what we can achieve with a few well-placed rumours.

In New York, as I say, the only result of the 1965 black-out, which occurred in November, was to increase the baby supply. Perhaps a greater number of old people died than would normally have died at that time of year but New Yorkers are probably less sensitive about that sort of thing than we are, and can take it more or less in their stride.

But there is no guarantee that British couples would respond in the same way as New Yorkers did twelve years ago, and one must face the risk that a strike provoked in November (I use the word 'provoke' in the sense that all strikes are provoked by management, an axiom of Newspeak English) would result in nothing but red noses and blue fingers all round. With its sensitivity to our feelings about old people, the Association of Electrical Power Engineers (whose members really are some of the most intelligent and agreeable people it is possible to meet, as well as being very nice to look at) would probably only introduce a go-slow in the winter months.

So let us shift the scenario a little and imagine a power strike in the summer, preferably during a heatwave. In New York, we learn that 'within minutes' of the power failure at 9.34 p.m. (when, by my reckoning, it should still have been nearly daylight) the city police force was 'overwhelmed' with reports of arson and looting on the Upper West Side, in Brooklyn and in the Bronx.

An interesting feature of this is that although over 3,000 people were reported as having been arrested for arson and looting, there seem to have been amazingly few cases of rape. Perhaps it was too hot for that sort of thing, or perhaps they just don't bother to report it in New York any more, but I can't help feeling it confirms my theory that normal sexual activity has come to a full stop in that city just as, I suspect, it is fast declining in London. But that is by the way.

The arson and looting in New York would appear to be confined to workingclass areas. In the middle-class areas there was an atmosphere of carnival, not to say Jubilee, with street parties, sing-songs and little groups of public-spirited citizens directing the traffic and urging everyone to keep calm. There was little or no coming and going between the districts, whether of middle-class people going to watch the spectacle of their social inferiors looting and burning each other, or of those less socially advantaged coming to loot and burn the well-to-do. This strikes me as an encouraging phenomenon and one that might well be repeated in similar circumstances in Britain. It is easy to exaggerate the pleasures of intercourse across the social barriers, and at such moments one prefers to be among one's own people.

Looting, although reprehensible, strikes me as a fairly rational response to something like a power failure, but arson is surely quite a different matter. Perhaps this incendiary urge is the down-market equivalent of the carnival spirit which broke out in the middle-class areas. I don't know. In typically American fashion, these arsonists take their pleasures seriously. Having set fire to the building of their choice, they then take up positions to shoot at any fireman who tries to put it out, But the important discovery is surely that there is a substantial number of citizens — in New York at least — who are ready to start setting fire to things at a moment's notice, and are just waiting for the 'off'.

Can we doubt tha t their equivalents are not waiting in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham? Arson is, of course, only one aspect of the carnival urge which Anglo-Saxon societies tend to repress. I often wonder whether the middle class or infantile revolutionary left is not similarly moved by this frustrated carnival urge. There is a sudden and fierce joy to be found among many, if not most, human beings when everything breaks down. It may not last long, this .joy, in the event, but the expectation of it can lead people into silly behaviour, which may not matter much, and the frustration leads to the permanent adoption of silly and dishonest attitudes of mind, which is surely rather • worse.

Perhaps Jubilee Year has catered for this carnival urge to a certain extent. I doubt it, however. Jubilee was too decorous, too well organised. In the part of France where I have my summer abode every village gives itself up to licence and debauchery for two days and nights of the year in honour of its patron saint. In Britain, we have no such escape valve, trip-switch or whatever. The choice before us in simple. Either we must prepare for a massive confrontation with the unions next year, involving a breakdown of services, anarchy, civil war and the deaths of old people; or we must declare a second Jubilee Year (in honour of the Coronation) and try a little harder this time,