Another voice

Guru Guru

Auberon Waugh

Now Peter Jay has said it, we had better accept it as official: Great Britain is on the slippery slope which leads ineluctably to repudiation of the National Debt and political collapse. He attributes our predicament to the feckless and unprincipled system of deficit financing introduced by Mr Heath, by which the Government borrows to cover its current expenditure until interest payments are so huge that they can only be met by further borrowing—the classic pattern of bankruptcy.

A child of ten could have told Mr Heath or Mr Healey that this was the quickest way down the drain, but there were always clever economists at hand to bemuse us with charts and coloured pieces of paper, saying, No, on the contrary, Heath and Healey were being extremely clever. Now that Jay, who for my money is the cleverest of them all, has produced his own charts and lists of figures in different shades of ink, we know that we were right all along.

If we could get Heath and Healey into a corner to pinch their arms and stick pins into their bottoms—I exclude Lord Barber from this treatment on the grounds that he was probably being bullied by Heath at the time—they would probably say that they had no choice: the public demanded a consistently high level of public expenditure, far beyond any realistic level of taxation.

In other words, it was their only way of getting to power and staying there under the present system; the nation's plight is not a product of their own particular cowardice or dishonesty—if they had not been prepared to bankrupt the country, there were hundreds waiting to do it in their place. Blame the system, with its inbuilt tendency towards fecklessness wherever a succeeding administration composed of political rivals will have to clear up the mess.

If Jay is right—and I am sure he is, having studied his charts—when he says that our fate is ineluctable, then there is bound to be a temptation for us to sit back and gloat about it. Obviously, there are many hours of quiet enjoyment to be had in contemplating the prospect of this political collapse, but it is a sad fact of British politics that the most obviously ineluctable fates still take a very long time to ineluct, and if we adopt this contemplative role in face of the coming disaster it may require more patience than most of us are prepared to invest. The great problem is how to keep ourselves amused until such time as we can count the heads bobbing up and down in the Thames under Westminster Bridge.

Of course many people will be slightly irritated by all this, saying they don't par

ticularly want a political collapse and would much prefer our present system of government which, with all its faults . . . etc. I see what they mean, but Jay has already shown that political collapse is ineluctable, and my point was that it is the nature of our political system which makes it ineluctable, so anybody who lifts a finger to preserve our political system is also contriving to bring about the political collapse. Far better sit back and enjoy the pageant.

Nor, until last week, did I see much chance of reforming our political system before the collapse. The cats who have got their faces in the cream bowl don't want to change anything and the cats left outside can't. The most our politicians would ever do would be to prolong their own terms in the guise of some coalition government of national emergency, but even this would only be offered as a temporary measure until such time as they could return to their present errors and ineluctable processes of self-destruction.

There are those who look to Mrs Thatcher, or Mr Powell, as possible saviours, but Jay's analysis shows that the National Debt spiral is now so far out of control that not even my own programme of 'negative public spending' will service it for long. This involves selling our surplus schoolchildren and university students to the Arabs, our armed forces to the Angolans, our younger doctors and plumper nurses to the Turks and our beloved Old Age Pensioners to whoever values them most— probably the Japanese. Neither Mrs Thatcher nor Mr Powell has shown any interest in my proposals, nor does eitherlof them show any great enthusiasm for constitutional reform, although Mr Powell has some sensible things to say about the unions from the safety of his United Ulster Unionist responsibilities in South Down.

In any case, I very much doubt whether anyone could stir the English out of their wetness and torpor at the present time. It looks as if we shall have to wait until after the collapse, and it may be a very dull wait. But an idea occurred to me as I listened to the news on the wireless last week, and the more I think about it the more convinced I become that it should be possible to see some earlier action on constitutional reform. Even in the surrounding wetness there are a few embers left glowing which might be fanned into a flame.

The announcer had just given us the unpleasant news that members of the Sikh community will be required to wear metal helmets like everybody else when they ride motorbicycles. Although annoying, this new regulation affects me personally less than the contemptible new proposals about safety belts, or the inane and murderous suggestion that children be required to travel behind where they can kick the driver in the back. However, in the course of the news, I learned that there are now 250,000 Sikhs in Britain.

No doubt Mr Powell can make other use of this information and of the government's meddling determination to keep them all alive, even when they fall off their motorbicycles. But it struck me as rather a satisfactory number if one was thinking of mobilising a khalsra or sacred army for the defence of the Sikh religion. It is typical of the government's bossiness, unfettered by the restraints of a formal constitution or a Bill of Rights, that it thinks it can ride roughshod over the religious susceptibilities of its citizens. Where the English are concerned, of course, it can, but there is nothing in the proud history of Sikhism which makes one suppose that a British government will get away with it so easily where the followers of Guru Nanak and the Seven Gurus of Sokhi are concerned. It is exactly this sort of overweening behaviour which a Bill of Rights should be able to prevent, and if the autochthonous English are now too wet to secure one for themselves, they should at least let the Sikhs do their dirty work for them, as they have so often done in the past.

Certainly, if I were a Sikh I should now be sharpening my kirpan. Motorbicycle helmets are not only unsightly, unmanly and destructive of religion and morality, they are also injurious to the health. Headaches and giddiness are the first symptoms, usually leading to impotence and baldness, sometimes to blindness and insanity. They upset the fluid distribution of a woman's body, making her masculine and arid, while men become plumper and more effeminate. Mr Anthony Crosland, Secretary of State for the Environment, has been heard openly boasting that he intends to make all Sikhs wear these fiendish contraptions, not just on motorbicycles but all at times, even in their most intimate moments. This is In revenge for a humiliation he once suffered at a Punjabi restaurant in Knightsbridge.

If I were Peter Jay I would not waste MY time preaching to flabby, ineffectual Englishmen in the Times. I would grow my hair, step into my kacch (sacred drawers) and take up my kirpan (double-edged dagger), announcing myself as Guru Peter Singh Jey from Wandsworth to spread the news of what Mr Crosland has in store for the Sikhs.