Another voice
Timing the Counter-revolution
Auberon Waugh
Browsing idly among the papers in my wife's desk last week I came across a letter from Stanley Baldwin to her paternal grandfather. It was sent from Downing Street on 20 July 1923 and is marked Secret:
'My Dear Onslow,
'As you know Davidson has been appointed Chief Civil Commissioner in succession to Amery. I should be very much obliged if you would consent to undertake the duties of Civil Commissioner of the Reading division under the arrangement for dealing with industrial unrest. I still hope the emergency may not arise and that it will not be necessary to call upon you; but it is essential that the commissioners should be more acquainted beforehand with the nature of the work they would be called upon to carry out should a general strike take place.
'[would be glad to know at your earliest convenience whether I may rely upon you to discharge these duties.
'Yours sincerely Stanley Baldwin' The fifth Earl of Onslow, to whom this letter is addressed, was a country landowner who had recently given up an only moderately successful career in the diplomatic service and was currently pottering around the political scene as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health. He was not even made a Privy Councillor until three years later. But the most interesting thing about this letter—no doubt it is only one of about forty sent out in the Prime Minister's hand at the time—is that plans to counter the General Strike were well in hand three years before it occurred. Perhaps this explains why it only lasted nine days.
How are our preparations this time ? So far as L know there are no earls within a ten mile radius of Taunton and precious few peers of lesser degree. Perhaps somebody has been earmarked for the job of Civil Commissioner and will emerge in the troubles ahead waving his letter from Mr Callaghan and telling us all to obey him, but if so, I wonder who ? It is a feature of country life that everyone more or less knows everyone else. Certainly I have received no such letter, although I would have thought I was the obvious candidate in the neighbourhood. Perhaps, like all the best jobs, it is earmarked for some superannuated Labour politician who may or may not have been a friend of Poulson. But who, in Taunton, is going to pay any attention to such a man when he starts telling us to put a brick in our lavatory cistern and hand in our firearms?
More importantly, who is going to lift a finger to save the present government or the parliamentary system which produced it
when rioting eventually begins ? Looting will obviously excite the strongest possible lawenforcement turn-out, and aroused public opinion will be solidly behind the forces of law and order, but the control of looting and its aftermath will create a situation where the police, army and, for all I know, Civil Defence will be exercising authority which does not derive from Parliament or the law of the land and which, even if it did, would be effectively beyond parliamentary or legal control. Personally, I cannot imagine any combination of circumstances by which the forces of law and order will then restore authority to a government or to a parliamentary system which has, by its ineptitude, created the conditions for economic collapse and anarchy—or, even if they wished to restore lawful authority in this way, any combination of circumstances in which public opinion would allow them to do so. Quite rightly the public no longer believes a word any politician utters, and I simply can't believe that the same old faces will be permitted to mouth the same anodyne falsehoods to create the same economic catastrophe a second time round.
Boobies often maintain that the only alternative to our system is a socialist or fascist tyranny, but one day the penny will drop and people will realise that there are a hundred forms of government better suited to our present needs. Since there is no popular demand for either a socialist or a fascist tyranny (outside a handful of enthusiasts) it is most unlikely that one will arrive overnight. The only thing which is certain is that our present generation of politicians is too much corrupted by powerhunger to give us a new constitution based on some workable European or transatlantic model, or to make any substantial change in an existing constitution which still offers them some slim prospect of hanging on to power.
Let us first look into Old Waugh's Almanac and construct a scenario for the next eighteen months when the last loan begins to run out. With average male wages in Britain now above £.70 and with average productivity between one third and one half of the German and American models, it is easy to see that the true value of the pound is now around parity with the dollar, although it will presumably be rather less by the time the government of the day decides to impose a semi-siege or wartime economy. This will have the effect of adding shortages to the existing discontents of high inflation and high unemployment. Since the only way the British working man knows how to express discontent is to go on strike, it seems more likely than not that we shall have a break down of services while Parliament prints more and more money in a desperate attempt to postpone the evil hour when it is thrown into the Thames.
This scenario is constructed more or less independently of whether Callaghan and Healey hold on, or whether they make way for a Bennite administration, or whether they form a coalition with the Tories, or whether they go to the country and are replaced by Mrs Thatcher and her young friend Mr Heseltine. Of all these possibilities, the most satisfactory seems to me that a coalition should reap the whirlwind sown bY Heath, Wilson and Healey, since this might help convince people of the bankruptcy of our two-party system, although it is tempting to hope that a Bennite administration will carry the chopper in this little game of oranges and lemons.
But by far the least satisfactory possibility is surely that Mrs Thatcher should arrive on the scene, all grinning, keen and eager to reap this particular whirlwind. In fact, if the Tories had any sense of history or timing, they would refuse to participate in any semi crisis election except on a programme °f such radical reform of industrial relations as would make Robert Carr's pathetic proposals seem like the Communist Manifesto, and which—more importantly---would be unacceptable to the electorate. But of course the Tories have no sense of timing or history and this foolish, power-hungry woman has no thought beyond winning the next election as soon as possible.
Her proposals, as they stand, are a recipe for disaster and defeat by the unions. She relies on union co-operation with the threat of legal sanctions in reserve, but since legal sanctions have lost all credibility she plainlY has no industrial relations policy whatever, no idea of the fight she has on her hands: of how many heads must be broken, how manY individuals must sadly be removed from our midst and how many factories closed pour encourager les attires before there is the remotest chance of economic sanity being restored. She has no thought in her prettY, shrewd little head except how to get int° Downing Street. Once there, she will inherit all the odiurrl which properly belongs to Heath, Wils°11 and Healey and in the process, do much t° discredit the idea that there might be a On,: socialist way out of our difficulties. Although there is none of our present discontents which cannot quite properly be laid at the door of our two-party system, the case for a multi-party system is a trifle complicated for: the electorate, and it seems more importanI at the present time to fix the immediate causes in people's minds: government overspending and the excessive power of the unions. Mrs Thatcher's arrival on the scene, with her littlelist of inadequate and doom°. palliatives, could only confuse people's Pre occupation on this vital point. Let us hare_ that Callaghan has the sense to see how Thatcher government is the last thing ,wk want at present. Oddly enough, 1 thIll he has.
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