THE SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

Another year gone; another Christmas upon us; another holiday time when the Wall between East and West Berlin has remained shut, a thing of ugliness and terror that long since has become part of the furniture of Berlin, and the biggest post-war monu- ment for the proposition that the last war made as many problems as it solved. Other walls induce awe: the mind responds in like fashion to the Great Wall of China and to the surprisingly similar Hadrian's Wall here. But to the Berlin Wall no such response is possible, although its purpose was not dissimilar.

All walls are to stop people from cross- ing over, to assist defence, to keep people in and to keep people out. Almost all walls are built, however, by those who wish to pro- tect themselves and their fellow citizens from attacks and depradations of barbarians beyond; and only prison walls are designed to keep people in.

East Berlin is the only example that occurs to me of a walled city whose walls are prison walls designed to keep its people in, and keep them safe for barbarism. This Christmas, like the last one, and the one before that,-and the one before that again, the Berlin wall, by decision of the people on the other side, the inside of it, remains closed. This is a wall that will never become a pos- session of which the heirs of its makers will be proud. One day, or rather one night, as swiftly and as furtively as it was erected, it will be torn down; unless, like Ozymandias, it finally crumbles, but unlike that wreck, into a cold and man-made desert.

Dependable judges

Judges for the most part are not only con- servative-minded, but naturally incline to the authoritarian, paternalistic, dirigiste and bureaucratic view of how public affairs should be conducted. It is no accident that juries, for example, are more inclined to leniency than are judges in areas where pub- lic opinion finds itself less outraged than have done the law-makers. Judges, too, may he expected to place more reliance upon 'expert' witness, and upon the letter of the law. Exceptional judges have enhanced Com- mon Law and have shown exemplary' zeal in pursuing and expanding what they have understood to be the spirit of that law. But for the most part, no one would dispute the cleverness of any British government which, desiring to have a conclusion reached in which public opinion and common sense would lose out to the bureaucratic view that the officials and experts know best, set up a Commission dependably headed by a judge.

The ludicrous conclusion of the Roskill Commission that a third airport should be built at Cublington is very much a case in point. The Commission was set up after public opposition to the earlier choice of Stansted; and, presumably because Stansted had been successfully resisted, the Commis- sion rejected it for serious consideration. Having done that, it has, however, come up with a proposal which has all the failings of Stansted and more beside. Cublington is an even worse idea than Stansted. as anyone looking at a map could see—is, indeed, only marginally better than Heathrow itself.

It is said that the airlines and the airports authority wanted Cublington, or somewhere similar, if they could not have Stansted: and I dare say that they did and do. But airlines and airport authorities are obviously far better judges of their own interests than they are of the public interest, which, indeed, is usually diametrically opposed to their own.

The Roskill decision is disgraceful and only to be expected. Here you had a situation where the local authorities, the great pre- ponderance of the public, and ordinary com- mon or garden sense were agreed that a Foulness-Maplin sands scheme was obviously the answer—if, that is, a third London air- . port was in fact proved to be necessary. This being so, it was, I suppose, quite certain from the beginning that the Roskill Commission would advocate a solution inimical to the popular view and desire and acceptable to those interests of airlines and airports authorities which are anti-social and irrespon- sible.

More public squalor

Public authorities, too, can be astonishingly neglectful of the public interest. being much more inclined to act as hooligans—and indeed much more able, legally to do so— than are private enterprises subject to plan- ning controls. There is something about electricity which barbarises all who publicly have to make it or depend upon it. The Post Office erects loutish buildings worse even than the worst excesses of the private pro- 'Gentlemen, the atom leak cloud has dispersed. There were no ill effects: perty developers. It is arguably the worst- mannered enterprise of any size, private or public. in the country, with one glaring exception.

That exception is, of course, the nation- alised electricity supply industry. As a very minor example, when. three or four years ago, having been out of the country for a spell of three months, I returned home I dis- covered that they had begun erecting a line of wooden piles carrying power across a field I was leasing at the bottom of the garden. This was without so much as by your leave. When I remonstrated, I discovered that some way-leave man had made inquiries as to who was the owner of the field freehold but not the occupier or leaseholder— inquiries simply made of a neighbour—and having secured the owner's consent (which he had no right to give) promptly went ahead and put up the offending posts.

Gas is cleaner

The Gas Council manages to bury its pipes underground; but not the electricity boys. Electricity, which you• might have thought would be the cleanest and tidiest sort of power to distribute, is the most hideous. Most villages, except the prettiest, are de- stroyed by festoons of wires. Worst of all are the great pylons which ruthlessly trample across the countryside, far uglier than any motorway. Now I see that the Central Elec- tricity Generating Board are proposing to build the biggest pylons yet along the finest, most historic and most beautiful line or route of countryside in these islands: along Hadrian's Wall. The pylons will become as shameful as Berlin's wall.

We squander hundreds of millions of pounds upon an aircraft which nobody much wants and many people will fear and loathe; and now, to save a few million pounds. the marching trampling giant feet of pylons will stride, brutally, crudely, hideously across Northumberland. The decisions to do this are irredeemably uncivilised, and the men who took those decisions—however great their technical competence—are unfit to ad- minister an enterprise on behalf of a public whose genuine interests they so wantonly dis- regard.

Nowt so queer

An extremely obscure classified advertise- ment about 'homosexual partnerships dis- creetly arranged', which we carried in last week's issue, but out of deference to some embarrassed readers we have now dropped, also irritated Mr John Gordon of the Sunday Express. Mr Gordon saw fit to publicise the tiny advertisement in his vastly read column, even suggesting that it might be illegal: in which case his reprinting of it might also be. I suppose. Queer, this sort of mass exposure at the hands of that celebrated and ancient Scottish prude. I would not normally take issue with Mr Gordon, but, since he started it, I cannot forbear to point out that in this week's Sunday Express he retells two stories, one about thalidomide children and the other about Enoch Powell, in what many would regard as pretty poor taste.

However, I have no trouble endorsing his final sentiments this week: 'Finally, happi- ness at Christmas whatever our creed or colour, and an easing of the problems of life in the New Year'. Mr Gordon's own prob- lems of life were eased somewhat, I saw a couple of weeks ago, when he was given a new Rolls-,Rpyce as a birthday present.