Another voice

Thank God for the unions

Auberon Waugh

Is it very wicked to rejoice in our country's present discomfiture? Even the most fanatical Tories or free marketeers can generally show a few crocodile tears to accompany the sincere indignation they feel at being excluded from influence and attention. The whole language of politics is geared to treating anything as good which is conducive to general prosperity, anything as bad which is detrimental to it. One often finds whole passages of political rhetoric— from both sides of the political fence, and from journalists as well as politicians— which assume that this pursuit of prosperity is the only and supreme Good. Preservation of the countryside, protection of old buildings, survival of the arts, defence of freedom? Prosperity must come first, enshrined in the Tabernacle of Average British Living Standards.

Am I alone in rejoicing every time Mr Healey's fat face appears on the television to tell us we must all reduce our living standards still further? My reason for this perverse emotion, why I cheer when the newscaster mournfully announces that inflation is getting worse and groan when he brightly claims that oil in the Forties Field is more copious than formerly imagined, is not simple puritanism. It may come, in part, from malicious glee at the discomfiture of politicians, but far more it comes from a profound disillusionment with what is nowadays meant by prosperity. They do not mean, these politicians, that hard-working middle-class parents like myself will once again be able to send our children to public school, drink good burgundy at luncheon and even employ a butler to pour it out for us. They mean that the working classes will have more of everything they like: fish fingers, over-cooked meat, transistor wirelesses to take out of doors with them, caravans and motor cruisers to fasten behind their cars and choke up the Somerset lanes in summer. Television advertisement for all these disgusting things will be longer and more lavish, television companies and newspapers will compete with each other in attracting the affluent proletarian market. Feeling stronger and more self-confident, the political wing of the Labour movement will renew its vindictive campaign against any remaining outpost of middle-class values with the certainty of success wherever battle is joined.

There are two components in any conviction that further enrichment of the uneducated working class and impoverishment of the educated middle class will bring about the end of civilisation, or at any rate of anything we recognise as civilisation. The first, obviously enough, is sorrow at the passing

of a culture with which, by birth, upbringing and conscious choice, we identify ourselves. The second is revulsion from the proletarian culture which threatens to replace it.

Cynics will fall upon the first component as the explanation for everything. We are resentful at the attrition of privilege, they will say, and react in petulant spite with these impotent, ivory-tower political attitudes. As I say, this is only part of the truth. In fact I have observed very little attrition in whatever privilege may ever have attached itself to my person, just as I have observed very little decline in my own standards of living. Occasionally, it is true, my wife will announce some lunatic decision of the sort that we can no longer afford Marmite, but I generally manage to talk her out of it. No, I am honestly convinced that of the two components I have listed, it is revulsion from the noise, smells and spiritual devastation of the proletarian culture which is the stronger motive force.

Which makes it rather poignant, somehow, that the only bulwark we have in this country against the rising tide of world prosperity should be our wonderful British trade unions. Responsible commentators often judge it imprudent nowadays to place the blame for our economic plight where it obviously belongs, on the intransigence of the unions, but the surliest unionist can scarcely complain if I give unions the credit for their splendid work in maintaining our traditional decencies.

There can be no serious doubt, although it is fashionable to talk about the incompetence of management, that overmanning and other restrictive practices among the workforce are mainly responsible for the fact that there is no investment in British industry. There can be no serious doubt that this drying-up of investment explains why British industry has lost its competitive edge, and why there can be no increase in real wages, outside a handful of fringe racketeers like hospital laboratory technicians and television crews. There can be no doubt whatever that these overmanning agreements and other restrictive practices are imposed by the unions with all the enormous power put at their disposal by obliging governments and with all the obstinacy which comes naturally to people of limited intelligence who find themselves engaged in argument. Thank God, we must all say, for the trade unions.

Of course, there are ways in which this splendidly entrenched and immovable attitude of the unions may be thought irresponsible, even anti-social. It is all very well for dilettantecommentators in ivory towers like the Spectator to strike such attitudes, but

great princes like Jack Jones should perhaps give more thought to the damage caused by inevitable cuts in such areas as education and health, as the Government finds it increasingly hard to confiscate wealth that has not been created and therefore does not exist.

Perhaps they have decided that education is now a lost cause. It may or may not be true that many of the 20,000 teachers born to be unemployed are more or less illiterate and unable to do the simplest sums in arithmetic —I have my doubts about the real extent of the problem—but these unemployed teachers illustrate the way that any sort of higher education has become something of a handicap. In the days when a man's chance of advancement in the world depended largely on his education, the Labour move ment was prepared to go along with the idea, however reluctantly. Now with the arrival of the £5,000-a-year miner, the

£120-a-week long-distance lorry driver, the £160-a-week docker, with laboratory tech

nicians earning far more than senior physicians or surgeons, the only surviving purpose of government education is to hobble children of the middle class, which should be done quite cheaply.

Health is another matter, of course, since even the lowliest citizens in the land set great store by the medical attention they receive.

Perhaps the union leaders have realised that the free health service has now reached its own point of absurdity, and in the agonising choice between losing a good health service and having to work for it have chosen the former.

During the recent, highly enjoyable, few weeks I spent in hospital, I never stopped marvelling at the stupendous cost to the taxpayer of my sojourn. Shortly before I went

into hospital myself, a French boy staying id the house had the misfortune to develoP typhoid fever and was removed to an iso lation hospital. Everybody who had been in contact with him, including myself, had to supply the County Health Authority with faecal specimens in glass jars for three daYs running to prove they were uncontaminated.

It was a most disagreeable and undignified business, made only slightly more endurable by the knowledge that these tests would cost £60 each to carry out. But it remained a tortuous way of making our small contri bution to national insolvency when compared with the magnificent simplicity of the unions' approach.

Ah well. I have decided to invest the extremely generous sickness benefit which I received in Japanese growth stock. It will be the first stock or share I have ever owned

partly from reluctance to trust my savings to Brit ish workers or governments, partly froni a genuine feeling that it might be immoral to exploit British workers when they obviouslY dislike working so much. The Japanese, bY

contrast, actually seem to enjoy it, and I feel Japan is far enough away for me to escabe any distasteful consequences of the prosperity I may unwittingly have helped to create over there.