Another voice
Honey still for tea
Auberon Waugh
Montmaur, Aude The French have an greeablydecontracte air about them this year. For fifteen years now I have come to this remote area of the Languedoc to spend the summer months. At first, we rather puzzled the agricultural community who had scarcely seen an Englishman down here since Wellington Passed through on his way back from the Peninsular campaign, leaving British cemeteries dotted around as his men succumbed to dysentery-and the nasty foreign food. Throughout the last war the area was Pretty staunchly pro-German, sending many of its sons to die as volunteers on the eastern front. In fifteen years of Common Market prosperity, its farmers have changed from being quaint, red-faced peasants, talking to their strangely shaped cattle 1.n an incomprehensible patois, to being Irnmensely rich grandees, perched on top of a combine harvester the size of three council houses. In the course of that time they have Made up their minds about the English: we are not like other people, our lives are governed by different rules, we do no work, we somehow muddle through; above all, we are very funny. Now, whenever they see us, their great red faces break into a huge grin. Sometimes they give us honey, or vegetables from their gardens, even a rabbit. Other times they just laugh and shake their heads in disbelief.
Last week a photograph appeared in the French newspapers showing Mr Healey with the French finance minister M. ,M°nory at some conference or other for `-ornmon Market finance ministers in Brussels. Mr Healey looked red-faced, gritty, acerbic, but M. Monory, who is not known for his sense of humour, was for some teason roaring with laughter. As I studied Mr Healey's angry, determined face, I could n. ot help laughing too. Can't he see the Joke? Nothing he says, no attitude he strikes, will make the slightest difference. 14. 0 promise or threat he makes can ever be LIMPlemented because events have gone ueYond his control and the English have decided to stop working. However much he enjoys meeting his French opposite number and being photographed with him in the French newspapers, however much he enjoys making speeches and pretending to be a minister of finance like all the others, everybody knows he is only pretending. No
Matter what he says the English will do, they Won't do it. Power does not even rest with trade union leaders, as they have no effective control over their members. Everything In public life is a charade.
The wonder is that the English have not Yet caught on. They are usually quite quick to see a joke, especially one against their political leaders. Perhaps this joke is too enormous for us to grasp. If one lived on a planet made of cheese, one would see nothing particularly funny in the idea,
The joke has obvious applications on the domestic scene. Even the most humourless Englishman can scarcely help smiling when he thinks of our steel industry, or little Mr Edwardes's motor industry, or our former ship-building industry or the London docks. Each and every one of these industrial catastrophes which have together reduced most of British heavy industry to the status of Marie Antoinette's model dairy — with quaint little figures dressed up as 'workers' pretending to have 'jobs' and hold 'disputes' and 'consultation procedures' as if they were the real thing — is attributable to the same cause, which is workers' power. A child of six could have seen that as soon as workers were given enough say in determining their own terms and conditions of work they would elect to do practically none. Yet the troupe of gormandisers, poseurs and posturing ninnies who act the part of our political leaders — with deferential under-secretaries,, ingenious means of communicating with each other, large cars and important luncheon engagements — must still hail workers' power as the great new idea of the 1970s, something pioneered in Britain which will yet save us from the Slough of Despond in which we have inexplicably fallen. It was Mr Callaghan's opposition to In Place of Strife in 1969 which determined the Labour Party's future; Mr Foot's industrial relations legislation of 1974 which has ended all voluntary investment in British industry and brought the nationalised sector to its state of lethal parasitism on the national economy. Well may Mr Healey huff and puff and blow his cheeks out at international conferences of money ministers. If they weren't prepared to laugh at him they would surely kick him out for his insolence in pretending to be one of their exalted number.
Stands the Franc at 8.33 And is there honey still for tea?
The amazing thing is that nothing seems to make much difference. That is surely what gives us the last laugh — or at any rate, the loudest present one. True, the Government has decided to destroy secondary education, large parts of the health service have been closed down and we have no national defence to speak of, but in every other respect the land is flowing with milk and honey. Education is surely much overrated as a general benefit — few are made much happier by it, and many are made miserable by being confronted with their own ignorance and incuriosity; good health is something one either has or doesn't have and anything else is no more than a postponement; and the effectiveness of defence can only be judged by whether or not our freedom survives.
As 1 watch the Frenchmen all around me, slaving away in the sunshine to produce their ridiculous crops, I can't help laughing a little. And they laugh back at me. If I am right, and the English have proved that work isn't really necessary, we shall have the last laugh. Logic insists that we are living in a fool's paradise, but, illogically, we seem able to live in it for year after year after year. And so long as nobody tries to provoke us by working, like the Asians in Grunwick last year, we seem quite a happy, stable sort of society.
Of course our comparative prosperity is bound to decline, but as I never tire of pointing out, prosperity is no longer measured by infant mortality, deaths in childbirth, incidence of rickets, deaths aggravated by malnutrition. These are so small as to be negligible. In a proletarian technological age, prosperity is measured by numbers of motor boats, transistor radios, foreign holidays, hideous new accommodation for the working class and its recreational appetites. It is something to be regarded with abhorrence by the cultivated or reflective mind.
So perhaps we should all have the courage to vote Labour. Mrs Thatcher hasn't a cat in hell's chance of converting the country to her wholesome philosophy of selfhelp, and I have received no intimations from her that she proposes to adopt the only two reforms which would make any difference in the long run — abandoning the graduated System of income tax and recasting our laws of inheritance on the European model.
Only, perhaps, in defence does our country's fecklessness sometimes produce bad dreams. Last week our nuclear deterrent, called HMS Revenge, couldn't put to sea because of labour trouble at Faslane naval base on the Clyde. A personal order for it to put to sea from our joke Prime Minister, seated at his important telephone in Downing Street, was countermanded by a Mr Thomas 'Tommy' Killen, the shipyard's union secretary. Should we not be alarmed that the unions can now paralyse the country's defence as well as its industry?
I don't think so. The British deterrent has been a joke ever since Nassau, which effectively kept us out of the European community for eleven years. Since the retreat from Empire, our armed forces have been no more and no less than toys for politicians to foster their illusions of importance. They are no use even for strike-breaking, as the Ulster one-day strike proved conclusively. Any contribution we might have been able to make towards military and political decision-making would almost certainly have been baneful and half-baked. We are well rid of the world and its problems and the world is well rid of us.
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