Another voice
Bathroom whispers
Auberon Waugh
Perhaps it is' asking too much that the Queen should submit to a public whipping by the Maharishi, although her illustrious . predecessor Henry II knew where his duty lay after the murder of Thomas a Becket in 1170. The very best we could have done to show our national penitence over Sir Richard Dobson's unspeakable remarks would have been to appoint Tariq Ali in his place as £22,500 non-executive part-time chairman of British Leyland.
One of the criticisms of Sir Richard's appointment — made by Mr Robert Cryer, Labour MP for Keighley — was that it was ' unlikely to inspire the work-force: 'How ill the appointment of a man earning £58,000 a year, doing part-time work for £22,500 a year and holding well-known antinationalisation views inspire British Ley ' land workers?' he demanded in March 1976.
If Mr Cryer were honest, he would know that the situation was never quite as bad as that. My accountant has just confirmed the 'melancholy fact in a letter to me that if I am to take on any extra work this year, I must resign myself to paying 80 per cent income tax on it: in other words, for every £20 fee I 'earn, I will be allowed to keep £4 and must 'give £16 to the government or, effectively, to the trade unions. No protection racket or a 'extortion gang could hope to get away with such a high proportion of a man's earnings. On paper, at any rate, it looks as if Sir , Richard's net benefit from his chairmanship of British Leyland would scarcely be able to hire him an au pair to baby-sit while he attended the odd private dinner party among friends. But if a chairman's belief in nationalisation is sufficient to inspire British Leyland workers to greater efforts, then Tariq is unmistakably their man.
Tom Litterick, the passionate member for Selly Oak, would probably agree with this. He claims that managers of nationalised industries who are hostile to the principles of public ownership are saboteurs. 'What I want to see is ideological discrimination in picking managers for the public sector', he said. It could be argued, I suppose, that Tariq is a little to the left of Labour Party orthodoxy, but the trouble is that Labour's middle-of-the-roaders have , already been showered with public Appointments of this sort and one after the other they are turning out to be crooks.
No, on the face of it there seems every , reason why everybody would have been delighted at Tariq's appointment, and the main purpose of industrial strategy nowadays must be to keep shop stewards sweet, work force happy. It should also reassure British Leyland's customers in the third world. As the Daily Express said: `We do a lot of business with African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries, and the fact is that they are very sensitive about public attitudes which remind them of the days of colonial rule and the superior attitudes of their former white rulers.'
It may be argued that Tariq knows little about motor-cars, but at least he has interested himself in the subject of industrial relations. Two of Sir Richard's most memorable utterances in the course of a Times profile written in happier times were: 'I don't know anything about motor-cars', and 'I don't know very much about industrial relations.' In any case, Tariq could scarcely make a worse mess of it than Lord Ryder, and might require less exorbitant tipping at the end of his term of office. I can think of thousands of reasons why he would have been the obvious choice, not least of which that he is of respectable birth. It is my observation that industrial relations are worst whenever upwardly-mobile proletarian whiz-kids are put in charge — the Sunday Times is only the most obvious example. But of course the overriding reason is that although it would be inaccurate to describe him as a Black and insulting to describe him as 'blackish', he is, well, you know, a Pakistani.
His appointment would have proved a test of the genuineness of trade union indignation over Sir Richard's remarks at the Twenty Club meeting. Far the most telling of Sir Richard's critical remarks about the unions, and the one which has been least noticed, came in the second part of his commentary on the Grunwick dispute. This is what he said although, of course, I fully accept that the lines are taken out of context and don't represent his views at all, although he would be probably prepared to say them again in a whisper, in his bathroom. Having suggested that Grunwick demonstrators were hardly 'passionately concerned that a number of blackish people in North London are being underpaid', he added these highly relevant words: 'As a matter of fact there are very few blackish people who are overpaid, either, in the mines or the docks or even the motor industry. They are, on the whole, excluded from these areas'.
It is not the first time that I have heard it suggested that coloured workers are excluded from many of the better-paid jobs in British industry, but it is the first time I have heard it suggested by a captain of industry. On other occasions when I have heard this monstrous charge, it was made by journalists, who can always say afterwards that they were drunk, or thought they were in the bathroom. Drunkenness, like insanity, may be no defence in libel (see Lord Esher's notorious ruling of 1892 in Hanbury v. Hanbury) but it can almost certainly be used in mitigation of damages.
The outrageous suggestion would appear to be that white unionists in the coal mining, dock working and motor industries discriminate against coloured people for the better paid jobs. Coloured folk are protected from insults of this sort by the various community relations Acts, but as yet trade unions enjoy no special privileges in this field. Before long, I feel sure, this glaring anomaly in the law will be removed. Imputations against trade unions will be punished very severely indeed. But while it is still legal to do so, and while I still have a sporting chance of getting the questions printed, perhaps I may be permitted to ask Mr Jones just how many of his £140 a week dockers are black. How many, Mr Scargill, of the Yorkshire miners for whom you demand such enormous wage increase are from what we call the New Commonwealth? I am not talking about canteen workers or office cleaners, but those with their fingers in the honeypot. The unions at British Leyland are too numerous and confused to address, but we already have the ex-chairman's word for it that blackish people are excluded from the better-paid areas.
One might extend the inquiry and ask Mr Clive Jenkins how many of his airline pilots are black, but we would soon be on dangerous ground. I have no intention, for instance, of asking such a question of the printing unions, whose members include some of the nicest, most intelligent and best-looking people it would be possible to meet. Under the interesting restraints imposed on the published word in Britain — whether by law or by the need to avoid provoking trade unionists — there would appear to be two levels of truth. On one level, the level of official or publishable truth, there never was a Leyland 'slush' fund, Jeremy Thorpe never had a homosexual affair with Norman Scott (C) The Sunday Times), the Wilson government of 19661970 had no hand in murdering two million Biafran children, the trade union movement is anti-racialist to a man. The other level can only be reached by studying various straws in the wind, and whispering our conclusions in the privacy of the bathroom.
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