ANOTHER VOICE
Prince Philip decides to take a hand in the government of the country
AUBERON WAUGH
Oddly enough, I had just received a similar report from my younger daughter about living conditions among Oxford undergraduates in digs. She returned from a short, but obviously agreeable visit with a harrowing account of rooms which were a foot deep in dirty socks and underpants, coffee mugs festering in every corner, blocked lavatories shared by the multiple occupants of a boarding house which would have made any Royal Commission weep and sent Mr Pilger into a terminal ecstasy — except that the occupants were all middle-class, all from well-to-do homes, some even connected to the peerage.
After leaving Oxford these people will go to live in identical squalor in London, often five or six of them in a two- bedroomed basement flat. An enormous amount of attention has been paid to housing for the working class in the past hundred years, and prodigious, unimagin- able sums of money have been spent on it. Is it not time for a Royal Commission on housing for the Younger Middle Classes?
It was once fashionable — at any rate before the Thatchers arrived on the scene — to remark that Prince Philip had one of the most difficult and possibly disagreeable jobs in Britain, at any rate among white collar workers. There was always an ele- ment of conscious perversity in this judg- ment, a calculated affront to the under- dog's snarl, 'It's all right for some', which measures human happiness in cash terms. But I remember thinking that for an opinionated man — and the Prince is unquestionably a highly opinionated man — the restraints imposed by being Royal Consort might prove irksome. It was in recognition of these restraints that we — the great British middle class — refused to envy him his L180,000 odd pocket money on the Civil List, his mortgage-free resi-
dences in Pimlico, Windsor, Norfolk and Aberdeenshire, his use of private aero- planes and the royal yacht. It was also, of course, in recognition of the fact that his privileged existence, although inflated out of all proportion, mirrored our own much smaller advantages over the common herd of those less fortunate than ourselves, and somehow even sanctified these little differ- ences. Just as we set a good example by not being jealous of the Duke, so the common cry of curs had no business to be jealous of our little comforts and treats: our occasion- al glass of wine with our meals, our robustly built Volvos and our little holiday cottages in the Dordogne or wherever.
The report of this committee under the Duke's chairmanship will not be with us, as I say, until 25 July, but already enough has been leaked to tell us what sort of line it will take. One might have guessed from a study of its members, knowing that among well-mannered English committee folk the 'moderate' left always prevails. There was Mr Ronald Bowlby, Anglican Bishop of Southwark, Professor Valerie Karn, of Salford University, she who spent so many years on the Housing Panel of Birmingham Community Relations Committee, contri- buting useful articles to Race, Social Policy and New Community . . .
The committee published a summary of its evidence in January. Prince Philip, in his preface to it, appeared to accept the committee's conclusion, that the 'in- equities' of tax relief on mortgage interest payments were in part responsible for an alleged failure to 'generate finance' for new and improved municipal housing for the lower classes — i.e. the working classes and those who for one reason or another are not actually working. Anybody who studied the matter from the other end of the telescope — that is to say from the Treasury's point of view — would know 'I know we're all economy, we're members of the black black economy tax collectors.' perfectly well that this is untrue. Any money 'saved' (i.e. seized) by the Treasury by the ending of mortgage interest tax relief would immediately be swallowed up by public employees in the never-ending inflation of public sector consumption. What the Duke's committee is advocating, in fact, is an increase in both taxation and public expenditure in the vague hope that this might result in more council accom- modation — at a time when the elected government is pursuing a policy of selling council houses, with enormous public sup- port.
So much for the Duke's impartiality in political matters. But what is interesting from the point of view of the middle classes is the means by which his committee reached the unwelcome conclusion that mortgage relief should be ended. It re- vealed the startling discovery that 'the allowances against tax for those borrowing for house purchase are worth more to the highest rate taxpayers than to those with lower income; and more to those able to afford a large mortgage than to those able to buy a cheaper house. Many of those presenting evidence felt the impact of these concessions to be inequitable.'
Coo! But it is that use of the word 'inequitable' which gives everything away. I wonder if the Duke knows what it means. Equity is not the same thing as equality, or his own position would be the most in- equitable thing imaginable. It has nothing to do with equitation. You see, your Royal Highness, higher tax payers are people who pay more tax. Their taxes help pro- vide housing for lower tax payers. But higher tax payers need houses, too. The middle classes want middle-class housing just as much as the working classes want new and improved working-class housing.
Unlike many workers, the middle classes have to pay for their houses, which are more expensive. But they cannot do that if the government grabs all their money and gives it to the working classes.
Perhaps Prince Philip sincerely believes that everybody except himself and other members of the Royal Family should be equal. It is a position which others have held before him. God is widely thought to take the same view of the human race, but God is somewhat less vulnerable to public opinion. The middle classes decide what public opinion is to be, and the middle classes will ultimately decide whether or not the Government needs an alternative opposition in Buckingham Palace.
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