ANOTHER VOICE
The moving spirit and loudest voice of our time
AUBERON WAUGH
It occurred to me as I sat down to write this week's Another voice that a man who has been publicly campaigning from the same soap-box for 25 years to establish the right of householders to shoot burglars, is not in the best position to wax indignant about a man who goes out and shoots a lorry-driver who has run over and killed his son. There are essential differences, of course, between a hot-blooded action in defence of the home and a revenge delayed until the wretched lorry driver had finished his prison sentence. Sun-reader Stephen Owen's behaviour may now be seen as a quasi-judicial act, in protest against what was thought to be an inadequate prison sentence. But 25 years of shouting from the same soap-box gives a fellow a sense of what he can get away with, and I decided to devote this week's article to a discussion of what will happen to the countryside now it is no longer required for the production of food.
It was only after I had been brooding for some time about the likely fate of the coun- tryside at the hands of Ramblers, twitchers and nature fanatics of various sorts, not to mention gun clubs, scramblers, hot rod rac- ers,and ordinary urban couples looking for somewhere to fornicate, that I realised how both problems are essentially the same. It may only be the Ramblers, twitchers and nature fanatics who explicitly deny the rights of private property, or even the right of man's dominion over nature. But they are with the clay pigeon shooters and scramblers, with the jury at Oxford which declared accidental deaths in the Gulf war to be 'unlawful' and the jury which cleared Stephen Owen even of unlawful wounding after he had shot the lorry driver Kevin Taylor. They all make the same, dismal point that the humane, liberal, bourgeois consensus which has effectively ruled this country since the Dutch Settlement of 1689 (with one short intermission in the second world war), has now lost control. What has taken its place is the rule of a mob which is sometimes sentimental, sometimes brutal, always ignorant and stupid and nearly always wrong.
At one time it suited the purpose of the ruling class to use the brutality of the mob — its passion for retributive punishment, its cruelty and greed — against itself, and thus preserve the gentle, polite, intelligent society of the educated in their drawing- rooms and about their sporting occasions
even while the corpses of hanged criminals swung on gibbets at every crossroads. No longer. The mob's hatred of itself whether in retributive 'justice', contempt for each other's comfort and possessions or pure, unfocussed violence and cruelty, as one sees in pub fights, football punch-ups etc. — is now given to no useful purpose. Our prisons, the foulest in Europe, are crowded out with more people serving longer sentences than anywhere else in the world (except Russia and, apparently, Turkey), but to no purpose except to feed the mob's appetite for punishment. It is not in defence of civilisation, private property and the rule of law that we commit these wretches to years and years of destructive humiliation, but simply because the mob, whose accents are well caught in the gutter press and by populist politicians, wishes to see them suffer. With the collapse of the bourgeois ethos, we are as much in the hands of the mob, ultimately, as any French aristocrat cowering in his attic at the time of the Terror.
This may seem rather a gloomy view to take of a country which has just elected nice Mr Major to lead it. It would be easy to say that the mob is not the same as the majority, and the majority is ultimately in control. But that is not true. It is the mob which determines the national climate, not the majority. Kelvin Mackenzie is more powerful in shaping our lives than Mr Major, because he can choose those strings in what is called the 'gut reaction' of stupid, unthinking people and play them to his own tune.
The phenomenon of nice Mr Major is easily explained. In the first place, he was chosen by a system which is left over from the bourgois ascendancy and still seems able to keep Dicks, Amess, Widdecombe, Beaumont-Dark and Teddy Taylor from the leadership. In the second place, it has become a feature of our mob rule, as it has developed, that the mob will always vote for whichever side promises lower taxes while raucously demanding increased gov- ernment expenditure in every field.
In this second aim — of higher govern- ment expenditure — the monster we have unleashed is supported by elements of the old bourgeois ascendancy. A long and interesting article on land-use in the Observer was remarkable for its almost complete disregard of the existence of pri- vate property, and its assumption that any and every recreational use for the country- side would require government subsidy, as well as government control.
It might be possible to imagine that this monster existed only in the fantasies of Murdoch's Sun if we could not see it for ourselves, squirting champagne over itself whenever a court decision goes its way, cheering Thatcherite utterances on Any Questions, forming up in every pub to give us its fatuous opinions about the Common Market. This mob may not make up the majority, but it is the moving spirit and the loudest voice of our times.
The question arises how best to oppose and defeat it. The first reaction is always to retreat into various enclaves reserved for People Like Us: switch off the television, cancel the Sun, shut our eyes and think of Glyndebourne. Such a policy accepts defeat and eventual obliteration. Most of us accept them both happily enough. But I would like to think there is some resistance somewhere. There is no point in meeting the monster's arguments with sweet reason. It is not looking for reason or argument, only for familiar sound-bites to trigger applause or derision. The only way to deal with the beast is to set it against itself.
I am not, of course, suggesting the foun- dation of a secret society of Friends of Kevin Taylor to set against the Parents of Murdered Children, Campaign Against Drunk Driving, Esther Rantzen's Childline and the rest of them. Such a society would have to be so secret that nobody could even admit its existence. I would never join it myself, nor would anyone I know. It would be horrible, shocking, inappropriate. The only dismissive adjective I would not apply is 'unthinkable'. Nothing is unthinkable. Nobody can control what we think. It is just that — a thought.
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