ANOTHER VOICE
Perhaps it is time to leave the young well alone
AUBERON WAUGH
Miss Cristina Odone, the personable 32-year-old editor of the Catholic Herald, has caused paroxysms of delight in the Sun- day Telegraph with her claim: 'Recently, we have attracted younger, more conservative readers.' The idea that the younger these new readers are the more conservative they are likely to be may stand a cliché or two on its head, but accords with my own obser- vation and must cause great pleasure to Charles Moore, whose appointment as edi- tor of The Spectator at the age of 27 in 1984 raised a few eyebrows.
By coincidence, the Catholic Herald was the first newspaper to give me my own weekly column, 30 years ago this February, at the age of 23. Its reception was noisy and mixed, and many letters were received like this one from Julian David, a ghastly young man of the time: I am also cancelling my order for your paper. Any paper that can afford to be made a fool of by Auberon Waugh can certainly do with- out my subscription . .. The whole concep- tion of employing this person is irresponsible and above all deeply stupid. I suppose you wanted to show that you could be frivolous and daring too. What confidence can one have in an editorial policy which commits this sort of naïveté?
I suspect I was saved by a letter from Miss C. Vassall, 17, of Barnet, Herts, who wrote after the battle had raged for five months: 'As a teenager and possible repre- sentative of future Catholic Herald readers, I cast my vote pro-Waugh . . . Please keep him.'
The column lasted 18 months, after which I handed it over to Norman St John Stevas, as he then was, who kept it going for many years. Miss Vassall, bless her, must now be 47. She has had plenty of time to reconsider her earlier enthusiasm. Would she write again in the same terms? Is it a useful or worthwhile thing to appeal to the very young?
Richard Ingrams — influenced, appar- ently, by Mr Heseltine's heart attack — thinks it is time we had another Labour government. This would allow the Conser- vatives to take a much-needed rest. Ingrams, of course, who is 92, sits at the opposite end of the age spectrum to Miss Odone's new readers. Even I, who at 53 am somewhere in the middle of it, find myself wondering whether a short spell of Labour government would be such a terrible thing as it has invariably proved to be in the past. The question is whether the new Conserva- tive Party, under its nice young leader, and with all these new young members, is really worth supporting.
The opinions of the young on most sub- jects are well chronicled by innumerable surveys. They are not really conservative at all, except to the extent that they repudiate the effects of applied Marxism-Leninism and other forms of dogmatic socialism. For the most part, they are neither left-wing nor right-wing, but goofily conformist, repeating what half-witted teachers have told them about the danger to tropical rain- forests. If there is a single label to be attached to them, it would be that of 'right- on', the English equivalent of 'politically correct'. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist, concerned about global warming and ozone, think the worst crime is cruelty to animals, the second worst is drunk driving . . .
If anybody hopes to lead this pack of goofs by repeating the same half-witted opinions back at them, he (or she) is wel- come to try, but I see no reason to assist. For a taste of the dynamic leadership such 'conservatism' produces, one has only to look at the last years of Mrs Thatcher, after the foam began to appear on her lips in 1988. In 1989 this demented nanny gave us the Children's Act, allowing 20-year-old social workers to confiscate the children of those parents deemed to be giving them insufficient emotional and intellectual stim- ulation. In 1990 we had the Community Care Act, enabling the same social workers to close down old people's homes by mak- ing unrealistic demands for expensive improvement. In the same year we had the Food Safety Act, allowing an army of inex- perienced young Environmental Health Officers to harass and close down anybody involved in the production of food, with grotesque demands for expenditure on unnecessary hygiene. The same year also produced the monstrous Environmental Protection Act, 240 pages long with thou- sands of pages of supporting regulations, whose incompetent and tyrannical prescrip- 'There goes Article 51 again.' tions are only beginning to be applied, but will eventually stretch over every human activity from disposing of a dead budgeri- gar to baking bread or brewing beer — at a cost of many billions of pounds, and with the recruitment of yet another oppressive army of bureaucratic inspectors.
Christopher Booker points out that cases of food-poisoning have increased by 60 per cent in the last 18 months, since the 'hygiene blitz' envisaged by the 1990 Food Safety Act got under way. I think he con- fuses cause and effect. These ludicrous statistics are, in fact, the product of Envi- ronmental Health Officers playing up the importance of their role, demanding more money, more recruitment, more powers. GPs register 'food-poisoning' as the ideal explanation on their doctors' certificates since it requires no follow-up. The statistics are totally bogus. The number of annual deaths from food-poisoning is minuscule and shrinking. It does not begin to justify the measures taken against it — nor, of course, does the figure for road mortality where alcohol is a factor, about which I hope to write again in the near future.
By asking for a more decisive and dynamic form of 'conservatism' than Mr Major's, we are, in fact, asking for a bureaucratic tyranny such as we have never known. The threat of European bureau- cratic tyranny is much reduced by the fact that all those French, Italians, Portuguese and Spanish are out there fighting against it in a way which our own Conservatives are not prepared to fight. Their own imposi- tions are the more oppressive of the two.
One great reason for fearing a Labour government is its tradition of rancorous envy against higher earners. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that Mr Smith is more opposed to punitive action of this sort than the new Conservatives. Most of the rancour and vindictiveness nowadays seems to come from young Conservatives (as does most of the opposition to Europe), while former socialists are content to make gooey noises about the old, the homeless and the unemployed. We shall see. The Observer this week carried what was presumably a Treasury briefing to the effect that Mr Clarke was seriously considering higher dis- criminatory taxation against higher earners by a new fiddle on the allowance thresh- olds. If so, we will have no reason whatever to support the new, youthful Conservative Party, and every reason to send it packing.
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