SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
J. W. M. THOMPSON
Mr Crosland introduced a new and civilised note into the Stansted affair as soon as he arrived at the Board of Trade last year, and the terms of the new inquiry into London's third airport fully maintain his record. It looks, indeed, like a model of the kind of thorough, independent, public investigation which ought to become standard in these major planning decisions which can so calamitously affect so many people. There ought to be no need for the years of anxious agitation which the people threatened by the Stansted proposal had to engage in before they could get the original bureaucratic decision thrown out, and the affair remains a scandalous example of what Whitehall can and will do if unchecked. Lord Carrington said that but for the House of Lords the original iniquitous plan would cer- tainly have gone through by now. This is only a half-truth : but for the determination of the grass-roots protesters, the Lords would most probably never have got up the head of steam which they ultimately achieved.
Mr Crosland said, incidentally, that the in- quiry might take up to two years. Assuming the present Government runs its course (ad- mittedly a large assumption) the final crunch in this business is likely to be not far removed from the next general election. What is the betting, in such circumstances, that the recom- mendation (and it will be only a recommenda- tion) would then be delicately left in abeyance until after polling day? A new government would feel much happier about thrusting this great unwanted development upon some luckless part of the country than one about to take its life in its hands before the elec- torate.
Offside
It is singularly unlucky for the Committee on Football, which reported this week, that the Chancellor decided to increase the tax on foot- ball pools in this year's budget. This means that one of the committee's most constructive proposals, the setting-up of a Football Levy Board on the model of the Racing Levy Board presided over by Lord Wigg, seems unlikely to make much progress in the near future, since its basis was to be a I per cent levy on the gross proceeds of all pools, and this will probably be thought rather stiff immediately after a tax increase. This impost would have raised about a million pounds annually, and the committee's idea was that it should be devoted largely to amateur football. At the moment, it is explained, amateur football is starved of money and facilities (far more so than rugby football).
That some of the blame for this lies with the present governors of football was illus- trated, by coincidence, in the disclosure the other day that the Football Association had incredibly allowed £250,000 (part of the profits of the World Cup) to pass to the Inland Revenue because of the administrative diffi- culties involved in sharing it out among amateur clubs. But after reading this report one is left with no doubt that football is in need of a good deal of administrative re- organisation, even though the game is finan- cially in a far happier condition than it was four or five years ago. I also note one statistic pleasing to those who think of football as an overwhelmingly spectator sport: in any week nearly a million people are playing football, which is very nearly as many as are to be found watching it.
Eureka
The reception which scientific reviewers have given to James D. Watson's book The Double Helix has taken us back to the Two Cultures with a bump. These experts seem to have been struck all of a heap by the publication by a scientist of an account of a major scientific discovery which acknowledges that scientific workers are in fact human beings, liable to tantrums, ambition, arrogance and other familiar frailties. Admittedly such a book is unusual coming from a Nobel prizewinner, but the scientists who suppose that such a narra- tive will be a blinding revelation to the rest of us betray a curious unawareness of how we habitually visualise their tribe. The picture of 'cold-blooded eggheads in white coats' is not at all common among laymen, in my experi- ence; it is much more recognisable as part of the dream image of themselves encountered among scientists. The rest of us have always assumed that they could be driven to extremes of excitement and even instability by the con- templation of such matters as the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid; and there is a vast corpus of popular literature to support our view. Every schoolboy learns the story of Archimedes leaping from his bath to run naked through the streets in an ecstasy of discovery, and learns from it a view of scientists as men of rare volatility. Hollywood, too, has fostered this view over a long sequence of laboratory melodramas. The truth is that the un- emotional-egghead notion misses the whole point of laymen's anxieties about scientists. What worries us is the knowledge that though they are no more superhuman than the rest of us, they act as if (in Dr Leach's phrase) they had already become like gods.
Outrage
The student-power lads have kept oddly quiet about a television programme which I saw the other evening. The whole thing was an un- mistakable affront to forward-looking student opinion. Two teams of undergraduates were lined up and subjected to peremptory exami- nation: there was no consultation with the students over the form or content of the ques- tions, no attempt to set the programme in the context of a critical evaluation of society, nothing worth calling a dialogue at all, really. Furthermore, rigid standards of right and wrong were imposed by the presiding authority, and those penalised had no opportunity to dispute his rulings. It was even openly asserted that the team which had answered fewest questions had 'lost,' a concept notoriously alien to modern ideas of social justice. And—crowning iniquity —this inquisition was presented as a quiz entertainment to please the outmoded and irre- levant bourgeoisie! I'm sorry, Bamber Gas- coigne, but your true role as an agent of the counter-revolution cannot be concealed much longer: University Challenge may have been all very well in the old pre-protest days, but if you don't update it pretty soon you will find yourself in trouble.
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