ANOTHER VOICE
Time for us all to meditate about the poor and underprivileged
AUBERON WAUGH
As a result of advances in modern technology, this New Year message is having to be written ten days before Christmas. Nothing I can say will be remotely topical. In previous years I have meditated on the Circumcision of Our Lord, an aspect of the Christian calendar which seems to be neglected in the modern Church. Many modern churchmen would probably see circumcision as a form of child abuse, which might be topical. But there is something almost indecent about meditating on circumcision in the middle of Advent. Sufficient unto the day. Personal- ly, I doubt that there has been any signifi- cant increase in the sexual abuse of chil- dren recently, but if there has I lay the blame fair and square on the Christian religion, as it has evolved. It surely leads the field in the current nauseating sen- timentality about children. Even God has to be addressed in a special, soppy voice, and the name of Jesus is invariably made to sound like some new cherry-coloured fizzy drink; designed by a committee of clergy- men and child psychologists, specially for kiddies.
The Christian church seems to be in a pretty miserable state; I feel nothing useful would be achieved either by attacking it or helping it our with a sermon. Better ignore it for a while, talk about New Year resolutions and persuade people to im- prove themsleves by one's good example. My own resolution is to drink more vintage port in 1988. I say it myself, but I have a remarkably good port cellar in Somerset: all this year it has been harder and harder to find anyone prepared to drink it with me. People say that they have to drive, or that it does not agree with them. Health and drink-driving are the two great obsessions of the moment, but the retreat from port seemed to precede at any rate the drink-driving craze. On the few occasions I have offered vintage port through the Spectator Wine Club there have been embarrassingly few takers. Perhaps this is because it is no longer fashionable to meditate about the unem- ployed and the poor, something which used to be encouraged at this time of year. Vintage port is far and away the best accompaniment to this gloomy occupation — so much so that I find my thoughts turning to the poor and underprivileged almost with the first sip of old port at any time of the year. In 1987 I managed to drink the famed Quinta do Noval 1931 for the first time — at lunch with Sichel's and felt the tears running down my cheeks. I am sure it is a good thing to meditate about the poor and unemployed in this way, and we should all do more of it. In 1988, perhaps I shall achieve the legendary Nacional of 1931 of which only a few bottles survive, most of them in the cellars of the Government Hospitality Service under Lancaster House. A few sips of that, and I would probably break down altogether. Meanwhile, the best available port for drinking now is probably Taylor's 1963. I found some at £4 the glass in Bracewell's Restaurant at the Park Lane Hotel in Piccadilly — not a bad price, when you consider that it now fetches up to £65 a bottle at auction.
But enough of this. My point was that far from meditating about the poor and unem- ployed, people now spend their time brooding about health and drink-driving — even gloomier subjects, I would have thought, and without any disinterested or redeeming aspect. Reading a new biogra- phy of Vicky, the left-wing cartoonist (Secker and Warburg £9.95), I was struck by the way that as long ago as 1958 he was berating the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan for his callous indifference to the unemployment crisis. Unemployment was then hovering around the 500,000 mark. Now it is nearly six times greater, it seems to have disappeared not only from public concern but even from the arena of poliitcal invective. Perhaps Vicky had a weakness for vintage port. I do not know. What is certain is that we hear nothing but cries of anger and dismay about the Health Service.
So persuasive are the doctors, surgeons and health workers that almost everybody in the country believes Mrs Thatcher has imposed cuts in health expenditure where in fact (as I never tire of pointing out) she has increased it at an utterly reckless rate — by 30 per cent in real terms. At this level of acceleration, it will have taken over the entire gross national product in 50 years. An aging population is not the explana- tion. We may be getting older, but not that much older. What has happened is that health service employees have simply grab- bed the extra money to pay for higher real wages and (in many cases) shorter hours. They can pilger on as much as they like perhaps, in a medical context, one should call it pinkering — about closed wards and dying babies, but the blame rests with them, not with the Government. Of the extra £700 million being made available for the NHS next year, £500 million has already been allocated to wage rises, and there is a 20 per cent demand by nurses on top of that. They threaten to close down more wards, kill more babies if they don't get it, but the truth is that the wards will close, the babies die if they do.
Inevitably, NHS employees suggest the money should be raised by huge extra taxes on drink and cigarettes (which already pay for nearly half the NHS). The money would vanish, the taxes remain. As their contribution to the Government's Christ- mas drinking and driving campaign, they claim that the victims of drunk drivers are occupying beds from which cancer patients have been turned away. They win every time, of course. In the next breath, they will tell us cancer patients (whose illness is caused by smoking) are occupying beds needed by serious road casualties.
The drink-driving hysteria is something I have written about often enough. It is one of the sadder aspects of the decline of Christianity that Christmas should become a time for a handful of exhibitionist vulga- rians — whether chief constables or embit- tered individuals — to parade their vindic- tiveness. The highest estimate given for deaths from road accidents involving alco- hol throughout the year is 1,400 of which a substantial proportion is made up of drunken pedestrians and an even bigger proportion of drivers who have killed themselves. The risk of being killed by a drunk driver is tiny, and most unlikely to be reduced by any amount of further harassment of motorists. As against that, we are told that 'at least' 1,000 people a year are killed by incompetent surgeons. We have no estimate for the number of crippled and maimed. Perhaps, next year, fashions will change. Dare I hope that Mrs Currie will get off her backside and start a Christmas campaign against incompetent surgeons?
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