VIEW FROM THE GALLERY

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SALLY VINCENT

We are, it would appear, shortly to find ourselves facing up to a future in a land unfit for chauvinist heroes. Noble Lords permit- ting, we are about to experience the upshot of a bit. of law reform that lifts female members of the species an inch or two from the mire. From now on a woman who has been widowed as the result of the negligence of her husband's employer may no longer be publicly appraised and assessed as a sexual abject. When deciding on her award for damages, a judge may not consider either the fact or the prospect of her remarriage. She may be as old and ugly as sin or young and lovely as an angel and not be compen- sated for the one and penalised for the other. She is now, in law as well as in fact, a woman who has lost the earning capacity of her husband and must be compensated for it regardless of boyfriend, lover, fiance or second husband.

All this, of course, has the lawyers in a bit of a tizzy. Learned QCS have already penned their anxieties to the Times. Distin- guished barristers on the right of the House are in a positive frenzy. My God, some poor woman might be over-compensated. How illogical! How unjust!

The author of this worryingly open- minded piece of, law reform, Arthur Probert (Lab, Aberdare) is a small and dusty Welsh- man who has probably been no nearer a Bar than it takes to purchase a humble beer. Real life, as experienced by the legal lumi- naries, has passed him by. He doesn't know, as they and Sam Weller know so well, that You have to be wery careful o' widders.

Mr Probert, in his innocence, sits as close to Leo Abse as propriety will allow in the middle of otherwise deserted Labour benches and assures a Chamber con- spicuously and infuriatingly devoid of any female member, of encouraging support for his Bill from women's organisations. He is, he says, therefore emboldened to ask for a third reading. Giving thanks and praise to all those who have been good enough to devote their attention to his Bill, he slips in a gentle reminder of his determination to keep the remarriage clause in the Act. It !yin, he admits, produce an occasionally Illogical position in law, but then the present law is itself sometimes illogical. And logic itself can be inconsistent with human justice. The contentious part of the Bill, he insists, accords with the best human sentiment.

The.gentlemen across the way shoot their eyebrows and decide to play it their own Way. Legal justice is their plea.

First juicy lawyer's speech, then, from Edward Gardner (Con, South Fylde), point- mg out the legal purpose of widows' dam- ages. They are not, he explains with utmost delicacy, awarded as recompense for distress caused by the loss of the person to whom She has devoted her life, but for pecuniary loss only. Nobody is being punished for her husband's- death. This, he submits, is not only the law, but the good law. If her hus- band used to give her £20 a week, then the court can see quite clearly what she has lost and make an award on that basis.

So far so good. But Mr Gardner is now, on his own admission, going to speak

crudely. Supposing—and he would have us know that it happens in 'real life'—the young widow remanries a fellow who gives her £40 a week! What price her compensation then? She would (crudely, crudely) be mak- ing a profit.

And so, urges Mr Gardner, it is absurd to refrain from speculating on the remarriage

prospects of a widow, lest she has her cake

and eats it too. Of course they will evade the law, live in sin, tell little untruths, refrain

from remarriage in order to get their hands on their award, but that, to Mr Gardner, is not so bad as the possibility of getting away with a sum of money to which there is no legal entitlement.

In case anybody failed to comprehend the purport of Mr Gardner's remarks, Martin McLaren (Con, Bristol North West) rises to say it all again, only, as he puts it, in his own words'. If the contentious clause goes through, he says dreamily, it would be like driving a coach and six through the whole theory of assessment of damages.

Then, on the off chance that somebody missed Mr McLaren, a young-looking fellow with nobby hair follows him to remark with great conviction that we are `driving a coach and horses through the principles of the Fatal Accident Act'.

When the thunder of hooves has faded, we can observe what a perfectly splendid person the owner of the nobby hair is. He is Norman Miscampbell (Con, Blackpool North) a lawyer with a penchant for point- ing out all sorts of things that have just been said which we might, inadvertently, have slept through. We might not, for instance,

have read the ocs' letter to the Times. Mr

Miscampbell has though. If the remarriage of widows is not taken into account, goes the idea, a widow of thirty-nine with five children and slim marriage prospects will get less money than a young twenty-one year old with greater prospects. As between the two plaintiffs, exclaims Mr Miscampbell, that is unfair. There is no suggestion, how- ever, that if the twenty-one year old gets less the thirty-nine year old will get more.

The next part of Mr Miscampbell's speech, is, to say the least, original. He does not agree with certain hon. friends, he says, that there is some magical distinction to be made between the widow who comes to court married and the one who comes engaged, or living with a man, or with marriage in prospect. Such a distinction, he cries, is nonsense. What's a marriage licence here or there for a mere widow? They will, he says, 'have to be seen'. The performance of scrutinising a woman as to her marriage- ability is not something Mr Miscampbell feels squeamish about. It is not, he says, an uncivilised procedure; It is just something that 'has to be done', and 'there is no more to it than that'.

Sir Elwyn Jones (Lab, West Ham South) is so moved by the blatant quality of Mr Miscampbell's decision that he rises to plead with him. Surely, he asks, in his experience at the Bar, he has felt the painful embarrass- ment of questioning a widow in the witness box? He himself, he says encouragingly, finds it positively intolerable.

Mr Miscampbell replies by boasting of the many times he has been involved in cases where evidence has been obtained about the widow by inquiry agents and provided for him to use in cross-examination.

Miscalculating Miscampbell chunters on, oblivious of the worried frowns around him. Indeed, he is so sure of himself that when the Solicitor-General, in a gentle and judicious appraisal of the situation, re- marks that the possible over-compensation of a widow is just something the country, Parliament and the courts will have to live with, he is unmoved. And when his elder and better cosily concludes with the hope that the women of this country will be ap- preciative of the efforts made on their behalf by a House constituting entirely 'hard backed males', our Norman flings himself into a paroxysm of mirth.

Such argument as Mr Miscampbell sup- ports is shortly and wisely dispelled by Leo Abse in a summing-up speech that betrays, as usual, his rare breadth of imagination. As befits a man who has the independence to attend the House in a well-cut suit, Mr Abse shows that this matter is something he can afford to be generous about. He dares to suggest that if he, or any other member of the House, was thinking of marrying a widow with children, he (and they) would be more inclined to take up the emotional responsibility involved if the widow in ques- tion possessed a little money of her own. Family life, he says, is the keystone of our society, and widows should be given every encouragement, financial and otherwise, to re-establish themselves as wives.

In the teeth of such imperative logic, Mr Miscampbell gets up and busily walks away.