Another voice
An historic decision
Auberon Waugh
Friday's vote by 58,000 British Leyland car workers should not be seen as the product of some momentary irritation with its tiny, overpaid chairman, still less as a calculated gamble. Nor, as I sometimes like to pretend on this page, can it be interpreted as anything so dramatic as a sudden act of suicide, in the manner of a dying elephant Which throws itself over a precipice. It makes a pleasing literary conceit to imagine that the British working class, having been bombarded with flattery like some hideous old millionairess for the last 36 years on television and radio, in novels, plays, Poems, films, newspapers and even, as one Shudders to recall, in the private conversation of intelligent, educated men and women, has finally seen the truth glimpsed its reflection, perhaps, in some municipal birdbath — and now wants to do away with itself. Perhaps it was Derek Granger's magnificent production of Brideshead Revisited which did the trick.
The truth, I fear, is more prosaic. The decision to commit suicide may have been helped along by stupidity, ignorance and above all lack of imagination among the workers who voted two-to-one, or possibly threeor even eight-to-one for this course of action. There may even have been funny little old men knocking at their doors in woollen hats, with suitcases full of plastic bags, pieces of string, spare bath plugs and Other useful equipment to help them on their way. But the decision was not a sudden one nor even, I fancy, a conscious one. It was part of a continuing process, confirmation of an historical tendency and a product, more than anything else, of the force of habit. The British working class may not he unanimous on many issues, but it approaches unanimity on at least one point: When asked to decide whether it should have more money or less, all things considered, it can generally be relied upon to Choose the former. Moreover it can usually be relied upon to produce some pretty good reasons for this decision: prices have gone 111); others are getting more; it has been a long time since the last big increase; other People have been made redundant and they, for their part, have not complained. . • It has never been the workers' business to find out where the money is to come from. If Sir Michael Edwardes has not sot enough, he had better go to the social security people and ask for some more. If the Government has not got enough, it had better print some pretty quick. Once the British worker has been asked the question and gives his traditional answer, nothing on God's earth must stand in the way. , Nor, historically, can this policy be said Lo have done British workers much harm so far. If they had been prepared to listen to their employers through the ages saying that times were hard, the money simply was not there, they would still be sleeping on the floor. There is no scientific evidence to prove that British workers are less intelligent than their Japanese equivalents (although I suspect they may be slightly less intelligent) and every reason to believe that they are rather brighter than the average American worker. The reason that prosperity eludes him and the reason that his simple and plainly stated desire for more money is constantly frustrated by inflation, is to be found in the structure of British industry or, more particularly, in the inadequacy and guilt-ridden wetness of the British middle class.
Which is no doubt why British Leyland has imported a South African, and British Steel an American, to sort out their problems. I wish British Rail could find some head-hunter from Borneo to take over from the demented Peter Parker. But it is all too late. These colonials and aborigines should have arrived 25 years ago. The tendency to accept preposterous levels of overmanning has bitten so deep into every aspect of British industry that any rationalisation now would create an unemployment level of something around 40 per cent. An unemployment at that level would create problems which could be solved only by something approaching genocide.
It is all very well to point out that overmanning creates unemployment, but the British working man is not to be troubled by such abstractions. He is too stupid, perhaps, to be troubled by them, although I insist that he is not stupider than his American equivalent, who does not suffer from the same problems. It may be that the stupidity of the British worker is compounded by the intelligent malevolence of his representatives in the trade union movement, of whose active membership a significant proportion is dedicated to destroying the society which nourishes them. But once again it is too late to do anything about it. The left-wing leprosy is so well established now that it could be excised only by something approaching genocide — that is to say by a degree of repression and mass imprisonment which, in the circumstances of a divided nation, would almost certainly be impossible to administer. One can demonstrate until one is blue in the face that Japan, the least Luddite of all industrial nations, has easily the lowest rate of unemployment at two per cent, while Britain, where overmanning and resistance to new technology have become a way of life, has easily the highest rate of unemployment at 10.7 per cent. The workers are too stupid to take such things in, and their representatives in the trade union movement, when not equally stupid, are too much committed to the 'socialist alternative' to see unemployment as anything but an argument in their favour. One can even tell them that industrial wages are Significantly higher in Japan than in Britain, but they will either disbelieve it — anything they learn from 'the media' is the voice of the Victorian housewife telling her servants that liquidity problems preclude that extra fourpence a week — or, if they are politically half-educated, ascribe it to the bourgeoisie's unpatriotic refusal to invest in British industry through class hatred. All the British worker can do is to ask for more money.
Most of us knew perfectly well that large sections of the British working class were virtually unemployable long before the New York Times published its comparison between the performance of a West German and a Merseyside factory using the same equipment to produce the same Ford Escort car. According to Mr Bill Hayden, a vicepresident in Ford's European team, it takes 21 man-hours to make an Escort in West Germany against 40 in Halewood. He attributes the discrepancy to 'mental attitudes'. But it is not just that Merseyside folks don't like making cars — they don't like doing anything. Last summer we read of 200 Liverpool unemployed men and women who were taken on to help out in the hotels and restaurants of Berchtesgaden. Of these, 140 turned up; within two weeks, 70 had been sacked for idleness, filth, drunkenness and general incompetence and most of the rest had left in disgust after fighting a pitched battle with a crowd of Australian tourists.
Of course Merseyside is an extreme example of what is happening in the rest of the country. The British Leyland vote was not a Merseyside phenomenon — its Speke (Liverpool) factory voted against the strike so that its workers, already declared redundant, could collect their redundancy payouts. Our problem is not how to get them working again — that battle has been lost — but how to live with an unemployable and turbulent working class. Can we really be expected to go on paying for them? In such dark moments of the soul it may seem that those of our fellow citizens who are travelling the country with bags full of anthrax-contaminated soil have the right idea. But we must comfort ourselves that the traditional semi-moronic working class of this country is a rapidly shrinking proportion of the population. Most of its members now seem to work for The Times. Many others have walk-on parts in television advertisements. It can't be long before they are rare enough to be handed over to the Arts Council, who will dress them in russet smocks or tunics and set them to various William Morris activities. Meanwhile, it is possible that a few of these poor confused creatures will be persuaded to vote for Mrs Shirley Williams and the Social Democrat Alliance.
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