Another voice
Pour les miserables oisifs
Auberon Waugh
On the same day last week that the newspapers announced everything had changed — Britain was booming; the trade balance was reversed; the stock market had broken all records; the harvest was satisfactory; even the pound had gained a cent or two — the better papers carried a less sensational announcement on an inside page. Mr David Hicks, the eminent interior decorator, hair dresser or whatever had put his pretty house, Britwell Salome near Watlington, on the market. He and his wife, the Lady Pamela — a great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and cousin more times over than I care to count of our beloved Royal Family — have found the cost of running a gentleman's establishment too much, and hope to find an Arab to buy it while they move to a dower house on the property.
There may seem no obvious reason why we should weep for David Hicks. I have never met him, don't want to meet him, and am no admirer of his ties, sheets or other artefacts. He is the son of an Essex stock broker. Even his lady wife — her direct ancester, Godfrey I, 'The Bearded', Duke of Lower Lorraine and Count of Louvain, had a younger brother called Auberon, Bishop of Liege 1122-1128 — fails to excite any great atavistic loyalty, although the family has been naturalised British since 1868 and must now count as being as English as pork pies, or whatever.
The important difference between these two news items is that one describes a genuine event — Hicks is trying to sell his house — the other is essentially a non-event. Britain is not booming. Various bits of paper, representing a stake in outdated, overmanned manufacturing machinery, have been revalued in terms of other bits of paper, representing trust in the British Government. But the government is still untrustworthy, our manufacturing industy is still moribund and uncompetitive. Existing loans make any improvement in the trading balance derisory. And the harvest, in fact, is going to be a rotten one — at any rate in the West Country.
Our problems are grave and intractable, and will remain so no matter how many people push little pieces of paper around.
There is not even the beginning of a solution in sight. Just as it has now become fash ionable to despair of the Labour Party, I despaired long ago of the Conservatives. They show no awareness of the gravity or the intractability of the situation which they will inherit and which, under Mr Heath, they helped to create. They have no adequate plans for coping with it. Mr James Prior is a national disaster and Sir Keith Joseph's ideas would never be applied for more than a couple of months. There is nothing which any elected government can do, even if it had the courage to try, because the trade unions hold all the cards. Even if we indulged in the regrettable public tendency to find scapegoats for the nation's failings and hanged all the politicians, shot all the flying pickets, as I sometimes urge, this would not make us a prosperous or happy country again. Such initiatives must be taken for their own sake or not at all, as their results would almost certainly be disastrous. In any case, I honestly believe that the British people have lost the taste for working well.
So let us examine the plight of the Hickses, instead. They say they are leaving Britwell Salome (a charming house, but not much bigger than my own) because they can no longer afford the cost of upkeep. Now Lady Pamela is not only descended from Godfrey the Bearded, Lambert the Belted, Philip the Magnanimous and William the Wise. She is also the great-granddaughter of Sir Ernest Cassel, a German immigrant banker who, when he died in 1921, left a huge fortune to her mother, the late Countess Mountbatten. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Hickses are rolling in it. And if they can't afford to live in a medium-sized gentleman's residence then the prospect is bleak indeed. As I say, they have buckets of money, but it is all taken away by the Government out of spite. There are thousands and thousands of houses like Britwell Salome standing around in the English countryside, each one unique, but the British people aren't prepared to let anyone live in them except Arabs or other foreigners. And the conclusion which is forced upon one is that the Hickses would find themselves in exactly the same plight if by some miracle the country became prosperous again. It won't, of course, and never can so long as it attacks people like the Hickses — the 'wealth creators', bless them —but that is not my point. The question I ask, finding myself in a similar, if less extreme, predicament, is why on earth I or any other member of the persecuted middle classes should wish to see a return of national prosperity.
Last week, restocking my cellars for the winter, I came to the sad conclusion that I would either have to drink less wine or wine of poorer quality. Soon, even trade unionists and chairmen of nationalised industries, let alone the nation's 'creative' people like hairdressers and interior decorators, will find that Britons have been priced out of the market for good wine. As Baudelaire remarked, 'Le yin est pour le peuple qui travaille et qui merite d'en boire.' But one has to read the rest of that passage to understand Britain's true predicament and glimpse the only possible solution to it. It comes from Les Paradis Artificiels (1851): 'Du Vin et du Haschich', in which he compared the functions of wine and hashish. This is what he wrote: `Le yin rend bon et sociable. Le haschich est isolant. L'un est laborieux, pour ainsi dire, l'autre essentiellement paresseux. A quoi bon, en effet, travailler, labourer, ecrire, fabriquer quoi que ce soit, quand on peut emporter le paradis d'un seul coup? Enfin, le yin est pour le peuple qui travaille et qui merite d'en boire. Le haschich appartient a la classe des joies solitaires; il est fait pour les mis6rables oisifs.'
According to my newspaper, there are 100,000 tons of hashish waiting to be bought at Baalbek, in the Lebanon. If there are 56,100,000 men, women and children in the United Kingdom, this works out at almost exactly four pounds each, or five , ounces a week for three months. I think that • should do the trick.
Among the benign, stultifying effects of hashish it depresses the appetite for food and other forms of self-indulgence, like petrol, sailing dinghies, football hooliganism and political activism. It destroys ambition, avarice and aggression with the will to work, but the will to work, as I say, has already more or less disappeared. If, as I believe, all ,our problems derive from the processes of mass production, it is the only way of curing our troubles at their source without scapegoats, or acrimony, or any awareness of deprivation.
There may be those who object to the spectacle of a nation made foolish and docile, where citizens spend the time staring goofily into each other's eyes. The only conversation would be mild, fatuous exclamations, delivered in a phony American accent: 'Great!'
'No way!' 'Hopefully!' 'Man!'
But I find, with most of my fellowcitizens, that their attempts at more animated conversation are seldom more stimulating than this, and nobody need indulge who doesn't want to do so. The danger of some odious tyranny is reduced, not enhanced, by a permanently intoxicated citizenry, since the essence of authority is that it requires people to jump when it presses a button. But the chief recommendation, to a democrat, must be that it is the only way the elected government can confound the unions or, indeed, influence the future course of events in any significant way — by a simple, two-clause Act of Parliament. The pot culture may not be in any single way preferable to the culture of wine and honest work, but it is still preferable to the labour camp culture and is now the only option available to us.
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