Little Benn

Ex-Honourable Tony Benn, The champion of all Common Men, Dismisses with derisive scorn Such lords as Hogg or Viscount Pont (Even drops Wedgwood from his lottery As redolent of bourgeois pottery.) The nation's income, he's decided, Is most unequally divided. Yet nobody is certain which Of it is poor and which is rich. The workers he summons to his aid Are usually highly paid. Himself he votes with acclamation To raise his own remuneration And candidates whom he endorses Do not come home as winning horses.

The people shout, the people hiss 'We don't want any more of this.' He tells them what they want, but they All go and vote the other way What though the Common Man protest? Their friend, the people's friend, knows best.

obliged to inform him that he has been talking — to coin a phrase — balls. Beautifully presented balls, exquisitely rounded and polished, but unmistakable balls. The genuine article.

His general theme is scarifying. It is to the effect that the poor populations of the world have suddenly discovered their power and their potentials, have learned their bitter lesson, and are about to rise up, and smite us, and assume the role of masters, while we grovel at their feet. All this, it seems, they have decided upon in the past few weeks.

If this is indeed the case, may one gently inquire why they did not think of it before?

Bernard will cast his beady eye back to the year 1066 he will observe a little island, storm-lashed by the northern seas, with a barren soil, a hostile climate and a tiny population — under foreign rule.

He will also observe, to the south, an immense continent crammed with natural riches, endowed with every, conceivable advantage, inhabited by peoples of exceptional physical virility. Peoples who, incidentally, were troubled by no foreign oppressor.

And then, if he will switch on the clock of history for a few centuries he will note — apparently with surprise — that the few inhabitants of the unpromising little island have reached to every corner of the globe and founded the greatest empire the world has ever known. He will also note that they have produced a literature of incomparable splendour, and a glorious architecture, that they have triumphed in every realm of science, and invented a system of democratic government that is still the envy of the world.

While to the south? What has been happening during these centuries, in that vast continent with its teeming millions and unlimited treasure? I shall not attempt to answer that question, for I have no intention of writing anything that could conceivably be construed as offensive by the Race Relations Board. So let the Board answer the question themselves. Presumably they will be obliged to grant that nothing has been accomplished that is remotely comparable with the achievements of the little island in the north.

And perhaps they will tell us why. I only ask for information.

This " oppression-enslavement-and-generalstultification" school of thought is most vocal when the target is India, about which I may claim to know as much as most of the protagonists of the Liberal Left. The sub-continent accommodates one fifth of the human race and the British rule lasted for 170 years, During that period we gave India peace, and it was not the peace of the desert; we gave India law, and it was not the law of the strong and—in the final judgement we gave India liberty, for it was the ideals of Milton, of Locke, of Bright and Gladstone to an understanding of what liberty really is. And we achieved this miracle with a total military and civil force of 170,000, which is roughly the population of Brighton. Can the population of Brighton oppress, enslave and stultify one fifth of the human race, with a display of force so minuscule that in 170 years the total loss of life was less than a year's casualties on the roads?

If so, the ozone of Brighton must be even more invigorating than one has so often been led to believe.

I have not quite finished with Mr Levin; his Jeremiads are sweeping enough to suggest that around the end of November he ate something that greatly disagreed with him. The gloom of his prophecy is only excelled by the despair of his philosophy. From the spate of his agonised inquiries about the future that lies before us I select a single example: "We have to ask whether anybody ought to have an income scores of times greater than the poorest among us have."

The answer, of course, in any free society or any civilised community at all, is a resounding "Yes". Any great artist, dancer, actor, painter, composer is entitled to such rewards. In short, any great star is entitled to such rewards, even if the star has nothing to offer but physical beauty. And the rest of us, in the audience of humanity, should applaud those rewards and consider ourselves lucky that we are privileged .to contribute to them. For to live in a society where the stars were quenched would be to take a very long journey into night.

I do not believe that we are going to take that journey. I do not believe that we, as a people, have lost all those qualities that made us great. Nor — pace--the Race Relations

Board — do I believe that all the "underdeveloped" countries have suddenly, in the past few weeks, acquired all the qualities which will make them masters of the world.

With which potent thought — coupled with the suggestion that he should pay less atten tion to the stop press news and more atten tion to the study of history — I will wish a Happy New Year to one of my favourite stars

— whose name, in case you had not guessed it, is Bernard Levin, whom God preserve and whom, I confidently believe, God will continue to preserve for many years to come, at a salary befitting his abundant talents.

Nature note

At the darkest hour of the war, when even dear Bernard might have been stunned into silence, I wrote a sentence of nine words, which I will now write again. The words were

. "Whatever happens, Hitler can't stop the daffodils coming up." Although this sounds like a rough draft for a prose poem by Whilhelmina Stitch, it seems apposite to the present occasion.

My daffodils are not yet coming up, but there is a touch of gold on the winter jasmine,, and the snowdrops are breaking through the sullen earth. Which reminds me of one of the, most exquisite lines in English poetry, by. Coventry Patmore, who described the, snowdrop as "hailing far summer with a lifted spear."

Maybe summer is not so far away.

Beverley Nichols