Notebook
The 'Council of Social Democracy' seems an awfully dull name. I was going to suggest that the Jenkins—Williams group should be called the League of Agweeahle Fellows Incommoded by Tiresome Extweemism — or Lafite for short. Lafite have had a mixed press in the last few days. The critics concentrate on their nerveless dithering. It is true that the Gang of Four are in what might be called an ongoing poor cat i' the adage situation. But it is not their timorousness which I find depressing so much as the unimaginative dreariness of their ideas. Perhaps this is not surprising. There is, after all, something irredeemably second-rate about the Gang. None of them has the flair or the intellectual ability of Anthony Crosland. Compare Face the Future with The Future of Socialism. You may conclude that Dr Owen should stick to torturing rats. Mrs Williams is a charming woman but the received idea that she is a natural votewinner is, like many received ideas, preposterous. It is an especially perverse thing to say of someone who has recently lost her Parliamentary seat. Mr Jenkins himself is Possibly the most over-rated figure in British politics, a competent administrator but an uninspiring speaker and an irritating writer. He gave his political testament in the Dimbleby Lecture the November before last: 'You want the class system to fade Without being replaced either by an aggressive and intolerant proletarianism or by the dominance of the brash and selfish values of a "get rich quick" society.' In other words, as Ferdinand Mount glossed at the time, You want to keep the yobs away from the best claret. Leave aside ad hominem jokes about a man who preaches the virtues of a get poor slow society from his garret at Morgan Grenfell (in between counting his coppers from an ungrateful European Commission); this does not sound electionWinning stuff. The Labour Party will be in poor shape two years hence, but even when Lafite have steeled themselves (or Steeled themselves) to break ranks, I do not see their tired manifesto as posing a grave threat to Mrs Thatcher. Bookmakers are currently offering 11-10 against the Tories winning the next election. It must be a good Price.
Mr Rupert Murdoch has clearly put the fear of God into the printing unions at Times ewspapers. What effect he has had on the Iournalists is not yet clear but will be of keen Interest to Dr Rachel Jenkins of the Institute of Psychiatry. She has sent Out a questionnaire on 'Health effects of possible _redundancy and unemployment among Have You The questions include: nave you recently: been able to concen trate on whatever you're doing?. . . been able to feel warmth and affection for those near you?. . been thinking of yourself as a worthless person?. . . felt that life isn't worth living?' These are to be answered on a scale from 'Not at all' to 'Much more than usual'. I don't mind Dr Jenkins putting these questions, or ones on 'job satisfaction'. But she goes on to ask questions which no compassionate, caring society should ever allow journalists to be asked: 'On how many occasions in the last seven days have you had beer. . . on average, how many pints did you drink on each occasion (please be generous in your estimate!). . How many times in the last week have you drunk a bottle of wine at a sitting?. . . On how many occasions in the last weeks. have you had drinks containing spirits? (The category "spirits" includes whisky, vodka, brandy and gin Ithanksi)'. The threat of closure, or even the threat of Murdoch, may induce depression. Ouestionnaires like this can only drive everyone to the pub.
Students of jurisprudence know the difference between natural rights and Austinian positivism. They were neatly encapsulated by two signs I saw not long ago in a New York street: 'Littering is dirty and antisocial. Don't do it', and, outside a bank, 'Bank robbery is a felony punishable by ten years imprisonment'. But I am not sure where to place the sign now seen at the front of the top deck of London buses: 'Smokers are asked to occupy rear seats'. The notice has no force. As often as not someone is sitting in the front seat smoking. It takes courage (and lack of reserve) to ask them to stop. What if they persist? I have pointed it out to conductors but they understandably don't want to get involved, although they soon stop people smoking downstairs. I have mixed feelings about this, disliking the fanaticism of the anti-smoking lobby more than smoke-filled rooms. But only England encourages public smoking on such a scale. In no foreign city, anywhere that I know of, can you smoke on a bus or a tube train. Like our distinguished television critic I rarely watch the box. Unlike him I quite enjoyed The History Man,, which I did watch, some of it. It was not as funny or as subtle as Malcolm Bradbury's s book, but that was doubtless less the fault of the direction or of Christopher Hampton's screenplay than of the medium itself which coarsens and vulgarises everything that it touches. Does the series presage an antiKirk reaction? There have been several horror-shock pieces in the papers about Marxist infiltration in the universities, and by coincidence the television programme overlapped with l'affaire McCabe. But of course, the point about Howard Kirk isn't that he is a Marxist or a structuralist, but that he is a charlatan and a shit. If one wants to draw a moral from The History Man, it is not the dangers of left-wing sociology or, as it might be, Lacan and Foucault: I have every confidence in the ability of our academic community to protect itself from Continental ideas or indeed from abstract thought generally. The moral is that the whole Robbins dream has been a terrible flop, The new universities are the academic equivalent of motorway ring-roads and highrise council blocks. And like those other disastrous products of the Macmillan— Wilson era they were begotten by snobbery. The plate-glass universities were supposed. to be glamorous in a way that older non-Oxbridge universities were not. In fact, none of the post-Robbins universities has yet achieved anything like the intellectual distinction of Manchester, say, in the days of Tait and Tout. Much of this goes back to ,a now forgotten book, Truscott's Red Brick University, published in 1943. Mr A.J.P. Taylor says of it that it was epoch-making. 'Before it, civic universities did not know that they were inferior, After it, academic snobbery never looked hack.' Truscote (in fact F. A. Peers) has much to answer for.
After four years of warming, or being supported by, the literary editor's chair here I hand it over next week to Patrick Marnham. I knew the time had come to leave at the end of November when I picked up from the back of my desk a batch of more than two dozen invitations to publishers' parties in the past month. I had not been to one of the parties, and realised that I did not mind. A man who is tired of publishing parties is, well, tired of publishing parties. The moment has come to retire into private life, as Wodehouse put it, and try and write a book, or something. The book trade is supposed to be in recession. One would not know it from the extraordinary output of books now moving accelerando after the Christmas trough. If I had the slightest word of valedictory criticism of the London publishing business it is that there are too many books published which are not only worthless but which cannot conceivably be commercial propositions. Before long economic reality must surely stem the flood.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
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