6 JANUARY 1967, Page 9

Spectator's Notebook

IWAS pleased to see that the Prime Minister, in his speech on the press on Tuesday, echoed my colleague Donald McLachlan's repeated chal- lenge to the newspaper proprietors to publish (arid be publicly damned by) the Economist In- telligence Unit's report on the efficiency of Fleet Street. I was even more pleased to see the Guardian so promptly picking up the gauntlet— a particularly brave decision since that paper's own managerial failings provide a paradigm case of what Mr Browne's team found to be a root cause of Fleet Street's present crisis. Cer- tainly, I don't think anyone can still be surprised at the Guardian's acute predicament after watch- ing the lamentable performance of its chairman, Mr Laurence Scott, in last week's Panorama.

Mr Wilson, of course, has a love-hate relation- ship with the press of an intensity greater than that of any other politician I have known— which is saying a great deal, since many ministers (and this goes for all governments) scarcely be- lieve in their own existence unless they can find confirmation of it in the press. The explanation, I have long suspected, is that Mr Wilson is at heart a journalist himself (and a very good one) rather than a statesman; who runs the nation's affairs as if it were some great mass- circulation newspaper, and invariably thinks in headline terms—very often composing the head- line first and then making up the story to fit it.

Sins of the Fathers

Unfortunately, like the comments of most journalists (mangoes or otherwise) on the press, the Prime Minister's homily was as short on practical proposals as it was long ago on ex- hortation and rebuke. His one concrete sug- gestion—that newspapers ihould insure against damage from unofficial hold-ups—was both peripheral and unworkable, while his analysis of the place of advertising could scarcely have been more muddled. So far from the balance between sales revenue and advertising income having be- come so distorted that no newspaper price in- crease could restore viability, it is only by in- creasing prices that the balance can become less 'distorted.' The plain fact is that if (and it's a big if) the public really wants to stop half the papers in Fleet Street from going out of business it can easily do so by paying more for them.

That's not to say (to come back to the point at which I began) that there isn't a clear need for newspaper managements to take a tough line for once with trade union blackmail (to use the Prime Minister's words) and restrictive practices of all kinds. The difficulty for newspaper man- agements today is that the sins of the fathers are being visited on the sons. The real culprits are the successful proprietors who encouraged high-cost restrictive agreements in the past so as to force less successful competitors out of business. Now that the cold wind is blowing on rich and poor alike it is up to those same successful proprietors, or their heirs, to take the lead in ridding the in- dustry of its luddite inheritance.

Mao's Opposition Amid all the horrors now going on within China, the excesses of the Red Guards, the kill- ings and the suicides, the persecution of all who are believed to show 'bourgeois' tendencies or have non-proletarian origins, the wanton destruc- tion and the reign of terror that is being prose- cuted by the Mao-Lin Piao ruling group, I find

it immensely encouraging that a powerful oppo- sition to this madness still seems to survive. The most heartening indication to have emerged this week is not merely that the leaders of this opposition are officially named as two senior members of the hierarchy—Liu Shao-chi (Mao's one-time deputy) and Teng Hsiao-Ping (the former Secretary-General of the Chinese Communists)—but that both Liu and Teng, in spite of seemingly confessing their sins in public in October, are strong enough to remain members of the leadership and to appear, undenounced, alongside Mao and Lin at Red Guard rallies. Nor is there any evidence that Mao's writ really runs in some of the outlying provinces, in par- ticular Sinkiang. And the People's Daily has only this week warned that 'the very few persons who stubbornly persist in the bourgeois reac- tionary line are not reconciled to their defeat.'

The notion that Mao's opposition really wants to 'restore capitalism' in China is, of course, simply standard Communist propaganda. What we are witnessing is no doubt first and fore- most a straightforward power struggle. But all the same, it's difficult to believe that a move- ment as alien to Chinese tradition as the Red Guards' great cultural revolution' can really commend itself for long to the bulk of the Chinese people, quite apart from its manifest incompatibility with industrial efficiency. The fact that those in high places who oppose Mac are now revealed to be as strong as the evi- dence suggests gives more hope for the future than has seemed justified for some time.

Danger : Brains I hear that the Public Schools Commission, which has been visiting a large number of the schools on which it is to report, has made the remarkable discovery that many of them deserve to survive on purely educational grounds. Some such rumour, perhaps, might explain the alarm expressed last week by Sir Alec Clegg, the chief education officer for the West Riding of York- shire and a leading advocate of comprehensive schools. Warning darkly against the danger of segregating children according to the size of their brains and turning the public schools into schools 'for a super-intellectual elite,' he asked 'why is it (having rejected grading by birth and wealth) that we cannot resist this compulsion to create a status structure in our society?'

Well, Sir Alec, for one thing because 90 per cent of the lasting achievements that throughout the history of mankind have given any meaning to the term 'civilisation' are the products of an educated few, and for another thing because since only a minority of people are going to rule over us in the future as in the past it is perhaps just as well that they should get a good education. What kind of elite—what the relative emphasis should be on birth, money, brains and beauty—is another question : that it should be an open rather than a closed elite is an obvious need. But to suggest that there should be no differentiation at all is the anathema of civilisa- tion and the enemy of education itself. Sir Alec complains that this is an odd way of preparing children to work—when grown up—with all sorts of men. I doubt whether this is so at all. But even if it were, would it be too much for our modern educationalists to acknowledge that there are higher values than mateyness?

NIGEL LAWSON