DIARY
DOMINIC LAWSON This week's letters pages suggest that our readers generally support The Spectator's rather lonely campaign against the Government's iniquitous proposal, in its Housing and Urban Development Bill, to force freeholders to sell their property rights to tenants who wish to buy them out. Like the Maastricht Bill, this is a proposal which has the rare luxury of support from the leaders of all the three main political parties. Perhaps it should henceforth be considered an axiom of modern British pol- itics that whatever unites the front benches must be wrong.
By coincidence, last Thursday both I and the Che Guevara of the leaseholders — the housing minister, Sir George Young — were on the same edition of BBC TV's Question Time. It was the day after it was revealed that the Duke of Westminster had resigned from the Conservative Party over Sir George's Bill. The Labour MP Kate Hoey — another guest of the programme — sprang to the Government's defence: 'We support very much what Sir George is doing .. . there is something criminally and morally wrong that someone like the Duke of Westminster should own that amount of property.' Sir George did not demur at this remarkable statement from someone who, apparently, represents the middle ground of the Labour Party. So I asked Miss Hoey, 'How much property is one allowed to own before one becomes immoral?' She was unable at the time to come up with an exact figure — that will be for the next Labour Government to decide — but replied, 'I'm sure everyone in this audience feels emo- tionally it's wrong to own so much proper- ty. It's. . . it's immoral.' Again Sir George, representing the Conservative Party on the platform, did not express dissent.
Aterwards I thought that Sir George and I made a very odd pair. He is the 6th Baronet, whose family, as he proudly told me before we went on air, have been living in the same house for 200 years. And yet he is striking a savage blow against the rights of inheritance. Meanwhile I, who am defending the rights of freeholders, am cur- rently involved in negotiating to buy the freehold of the house in which I live from the scion of one of Britain's great landown- ing families. He might eventually decide not to sell his freehold to me. I should have absolutely no complaint: when I bought the lease on the property it was crystal clear that that was all I was buying, and I do not desire to call the state in aid to take from my landlord something that he does not wish to sell to me. But what actuates Sir George? Is it that most dangerous of Tory weaknesses, upper-class guilt? At any rate, it is not that which inspires the Prime Min- ister, to whose classless heart the Housing and Urban Development Bill is apparently very close.
When, last Easter, the newly appoint- ed Education Secretary, John Patten, wrote in The Spectator about the rise in youth crime and asserted that young people 'choose whether to be good or bad' he was widely ridiculed. Even the robustly right of centre Daily Star opined 'Mr Patten gets nought out of ten for his loopy views.' Now, apparently because of the brutal murder of one little boy, a national consensus has emerged that John Was Right, that there is a spirit of evil in the land, which must be countered by old-fashioned morality and condign punishment. Even the Labour Party's shadow home secretary, Tony Blair, now talks in language which would be cheered by the twinset-and-pearls brigade at a Tory party conference law and order debate. The Guardian, formerly the mouth- piece of the social working class, is now full of thunderous calls for a return to family values, even families which include two par- ents. But fortunately for public debate there is still one small voice reedily inton- ing the suddenly, unfashionable view that victims bear responsibility for crimes. I refer to the Independent newspaper. Its leading article last Saturday addressed itself to the fastest growing crime, the theft and vandalism of cars, and stated 'To the jobless, bored, frustrated teenager, cars symbolise that world of possessions so relentlessly advertised on television, from which they have been cut off. Those proud but stupid digits indicating engine size that say to their owner "Power, performance!" say to the joyrider: "Nick me!" They should, for a start, be suppressed by manu- facturers.' So now we have it: cars them- selves should be blamed for being stolen. They are asking for it. But why stop with the suppression of manufacturers' logos on cars? Clearly, anyone who wears a tie with a designer label is asking to have it ripped from his neck. And as for women wearing jewellery out of doors — obviously that too must be 'suppressed' in order to avoid offence to bored and jobless teenagers. I imagine the Independent's leader writer would not be satisfied until we all walk around in Mao suits and drive to work in Trabants. Incidentally, I wonder what car he drives? Nothing too provocative, I hope.
The tabloid papers generally refer to youth crime as 'an epidemic'. If this is real- ly so, how is the virus transmitted? I con- sulted Doctor Theodore Dalrymple, well known to Spectator readers for his regular medical reports from one of Her Majesty's prisons. The good doctor advised me not to sneer at the hyperbole of the tabloid press. 'It has often occurred to me', he said 'that criminality is indeed a virus, spread by an infected tattooist's needle. There is much circumstantial evidence for this.' The link between loutish or criminal behaviour and the wearing of tattoos has been made much of recently, notably by Mr Tony Parsons' The Tattooed Jungle — a televised tirade against the working classes. But the maligned working classes are merely fol- lowing a fashion set by the highest in the land. These days it is scarcely possible to open a page of the Tatler without seeing a photograph of a Duke's daughter sporting a tattoo on a deliberately bared shoulder. And as for the royal family! I have recently been reading Kenneth Rose's marvellous biography of George V. Mr Rose reveals how in 1879 both Prince George and his elder brother Albert spent three hours each under the needle of a Tokyo tattooist. 'Fur- ther designs,' writes Mr Rose, 'were added in Kyoto and Jerusalem. . . . George Burchett, the doyen of British tattooists, many years later inspected the ornaments which Prince George carried for the rest of his life: "I was honoured", he wrote demurely in his memoirs, "to be called upon to make certain improvements to them which the King instituted on Queen Mary's suggestion."'
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