ANOTHER VOICE
The helicopter that was wasted on Tina Beechook
AUBERON WAUGH
as I alone, I wonder, among tax- payers and GLC ratepayers to feel a twinge of alarm when I read in the Standard that a police helicopter with a searchlight had been hovering over Southwark Park for a whole night last week, searching for the body of seven-year-old Tina Beechook, later found strangled under a mattress in her mother's flat? I imagine that at least two, probably three policemen were in the helicopter and no doubt others were on the ground, communicating with each other through expensive wireless sets, and all being paid overtime. But it was the thought of the helicopter which really appalled me. Do Southwark police own these machines all the year round, and if so, what possible justification is there for such extravagance? How often are they used, and what for?
Perhaps, in the case of Tina Beechook, the helicopter was specially hired by the police for the occasion, but that seems even more extraordinary. Who authorised such an extravagance? Why this unseemly haste to discover the pathetic remains of a presumably murdered seven-year-old? Like the East Enders who attacked press reporters and photographers as soon as the body was found, I tend to blame the newspapers: the hunt was not so much for Tina Beechook as for a good story on which we could pin suitable exclamations of horror and amazement. What is happen- ing to Britain that we have all started murdering small children in this way? Are divisive government cuts to blame? Or is it unemployment? Should we, perhaps, start thinking seriously about voting for Mrs Shirley Williams?
If I am right, then Mr Murdoch should have been paying for the helicopter, or Lord Matthews. Certainly not the police or ratepayers. But of course the public sector is only too happy to respond to vulgar enthusiasms in this way. From the number of helicopters which pass over Combe Florey, one has the impression that local government nowadays uses helicopters in place of the murderously expensive local bus service. Anybody with eyes to see must be aware that public spending has run hopelessly out of control in nearly every department. On Taunton station, both platforms have been equipped with a bat- tery of six closed circuit television sets, making 12 in all, which give train times. They are illegible in the daylight, and the same information can be found more easily on a printed notice, or when you buy your ticket at the ticket office. And the ordinary return fare to Paddington is now £32.60, against £6 in a coach.
Occasionally — just occasionally — one reads of the Government finding some- thing sensible or humane to spend its money on: a 22-year-old youth in Glamor- gan was awarded a £1,000 grant plus £40 a week by the Youth Business Initiative Scheme to buy himself a car and darts and set himself up as a professional darts player. That at least made someone happy and might easily have set him in a useful occupation in the private sector, making no smells and producing no foul plastic objects for the Government to waste its money on, or for private citizens to litter the countryside with.
But I started with the example of the police, and might as well continue with it. Mrs Thatcher is proud of having increased expenditure on the police, reckoning that it testifies to the sincerity of her anxieties about law. and order. It is a politician's first article of faith that by spending money on a problem you solve it. The result is that the police now work shorter hours, earn more overtime and drive around in helicopters instead of bicycles while the rate of re- ported crime rises and the rate of convic- tion falls.
Three months ago there was a belated scare in the newspapers about the wave of heroin addiction among young people which most of us had been observing quietly for the past three years. Once again, the Government promised urgent action. Vast resources are to be diverted, the police and customs given a huge battery of new powers, in order to stamp out this vile trade in human misery etc, etc. It is not widely known that the customs now regularly open letters from abroad in case they hold heroin or cocaine. Yet in their wildest moments neither police nor customs have ever claimed to be able to stop more than ten per cent of the traffic coming in and reaching the consumer. What difference can ten per cent make,
except to force the price a little higher, increase the incidence of mugging and burglary and encourage addicts to become pushers, introducing new punters into the fancy in order to finance their habit?
I do not propose to spell out once again my proposals for tackling the drug problem and will confine myself to pointing out how newspapers and opinion-mongers invari- ably play into the hands of these public spendthrifts by demanding drastic govern- ment action on each and every social wrong they perceive. By indulging their vicarious power fantasies in this way, journalists are feeding the real power urges of those in central and local government. A politician who claims to be standing for reduced public expenditure is exactly the same as a drunk who claims to be standing for temperance. Nobody would be drawn to politics in the first place if he did not sincerely want to spend our money for us, reckoning that he can spend it better than we can.
I hope I can convert a few people to my own jaundiced view of the political pro- cess, but I rather fear it may be too late to do anything about it. Such a large propor- tion of the electorate now subsists in whole or in part on the public payroll that I rather doubt if we will ever again be able to elect a government which will be prepared even to pretend to want to cut expenditure, except in tiny and insignificant particulars like aid to the Third World or grants to would-be darts champions.
Capitalism might have been able to survive if it had refused,. from the earliest times, to lend money to governments. In fact, banking has done little else, at any rate since the Medicis. Unless the free world is to collapse into a Liverpool posture — as much of Latin America has already done, and countries like Ireland and Mexico are fast doing — it seems inevitable that governments will grab more and more of everything. Mr Hattersley's proposal to seize all the nation's personal savings in pensions and insurance schemes for his own purposes is only different in time-scale from Mrs Thatcher's proposal to reform local taxation, making the very rich, perhaps, pay a tiny bit more. . . . I would like to think that the citizens of Rotherhithe who attacked pressmen when Tina Beechook's body was found were protesting against the waste of public money spent on that helicopter. Even if they were not conscious of that, I feel their instincts were right.
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