The first 155 days
Auberon Waugh
They say it is the cruellest thing you can do to a pit pony if you take it to the surface and show it the sky, the sun and the fields. After six years of writing a regular weekly commentary on public affairs, I took three months away, but my journey was not upwards to the fresh air and buttercups but deeper down into the mineshaft, among the debris of abandoned workings, collapsed pit-props, flooded excavations and the powdered remains of countless frogs which once sprang miraculously to life after thousands of years trapped in the coalface. The Liberal Party is not a very healthy interest for anyone under 40, even if he subscribes to the fashionable enthusiasm for things past, hatred of the present and terror of the future. My book on the trial of Jeremy Thorpe is finished. It is inordinately long, but I should like to think it is thorough and will serve as a monument to the Liberal Party of the Sixties and Seventies. My chief interest in the subject lay in the emergence of something like a consensus, far beyond the motley collection of simpletons, exhibitionists, crooks, boy scouts and sexual deviants who make up the Liberal Party. There seemed to me to be widespread agreement, reaching to the very top of public life, that even if Thorpe had intended to murder Norman Scott he would have been quite right to do so.
If this corruption has really invaded the upper reaches of politics, business and law, it seems to me that ours is indeed a decadent and probably doomed society. Even as I emerge from that particular dark tunnel, the question remains: what are the Conservatives going to do about it? They can only work with the human material available, and the sad truth would appear to be that the British are now a thoroughly demoralised and degenerate race. But their proposals should be attuned to this perception, not to some make-believe world of sturdy British workers anxious to better themselves who are constantly frustrated by timid, Luddite or communist-inspired shop stewards.
Another perception which I constantly urge on the Conservatives in government is to accept that the tide of history did not suddenly turn on 3 May of this year. They are only here for a short time. Labour will be back — quite probably at the next election, almost certainly the one after. The unions brought down the last two governments and there is no reason to doubt they will succeed in bringing down this one. The will to defeat them does not exist at any level outside the saloon bars, and while it is tempting to urge Mr Prior to pass laws withdrawing all social assistance from strikpre families and making it legal for drivers to run over pickets, the only result would be to reanimate the trade union movement.
Let us examine what little the Government has done so far. The reduction of higher rates of income tax was certainly pleasing to some of us, but whom does Sir Geoffrey Howe hope to please by tightening up on tax-free perks? Does he see himself as a party politician with limited time available to advance the sectional interests of a group which has been discriminated against, or does he see himself as God handing down marble tablets to an adoring multitude? When Labour come back they will keep his repressive innovations, restore the old rates and we will be worse off than before.
It would be absurd to pretend that any government can do anything at this late stage to save Britain's heavy industry — steel, cars, shipbuilding — and it would plainly be the greatest mistake to try. But government can still do something to shape the sort of society which emerges from our industrial decline. Last week we learned from Sir Charles Villiers, chairman of the Steel Corporation, that our steel productivity was not only the worst in the world, which we could have guessed, but that our investment over the past five years was the highest and our actual production the lowest. Unlike Sir Charles, I see this succession of records as a hopeful sign, a series of Gold Medals in my private Olympic games. Obviously, nothing can be done with the unions' agreement to lift our steel industry from its present remarkable state to anything resembling a competitive position with the rest of the world. The stupidest person in England can see that. Yet Tories mistakenly see the unions.as the enemy of the steel workers, rather than as representing their deepest, inarticulate longing — that the steel industry should close down. The same is true, to a greater or lesser extent, of cars, shipbuilding and coal.
At first glance there would appear to be two contradictory emotions struggling in the breast of the British worker, one showing itself in his attitude to jobs, the other in his attitude to work. Jobs, it would seem, are sacred: they must be preserved, even if it means having nine men sitting around to do the work of one. The creation of jobs justifies any social crime you care to mention: pollution of the atmosphere, poisoning of rivers, spoilation of the countryside.
Work, on the other hand, is seen as inconvenient at best and degrading at worst. There is no necessary or apparent connection between having a job and working. Work is something which may be undertaken on a voluntary basis, if the conditions are exactly right, the attitude of the employer is suitably humble and there is nothing much better to do.
Conservatives sometimes wonder what can be done with a carrot or a stick to change this second attitude, but it never occurs to them to question the point. To change attitudes to work alone would require a major philosophical adjustment. But Conservatives, wh'en they think of political philosophy, think of themselves, not of the other human material involved. What is needed is a small transposition of ideas, so that jobs are recognised as humiliating and degrading— whiCh they surely are, things to be undertaken by women, if at all — and work is seen as something wildly enjoyable, rather wicked, and absolutely essential to the good life. Partly, no doubt, because he has not just taken three months off work, the Chancellor cannot see that the answer to the apparently insuperable problem is staring him in the face in a single hyphenated word: self-employment. Everybody can see that there is no future for British Leyland, British Steel or British Shipbuilders. Even the workersin these industries, I maintain — although this might be disputed — secretly want them closed. All the Government must do to close them down is refuse the next pay claim. The dignity of unemployment would be greatly enhanced if there were no DoE or DHSS inspection to investigate the moonlighting activities of those on the dole. The dole would thus become, effectively, a selfemployment subsidy, thereby reversing Mrs Castle's infamous Self-Employment Tax in a way which Labour would scarcely dare attack.
In a society where huge numbers — possibly a majority — were self-emplOyed, income tax would have to be levied at source, like VAT, at a single standard rate. There would be no graduated tax unless tax payers chose to claim back expenses — the decision would be theirs.
The unions might feel rather left out in the cold, but not if they were encouraged to renew themselves as labour contractors on , the model of the building trade's lump. They would be liable, in law, for the performance of their members, but also armed, in law, with sufficient authority over their members to enable them to enforce contracts negotiated on their behalf. They would certainly be no poorer, as labour contractors, than they are now, as warriors in a class struggle where all the adversaries have melted away. These, then, are the fruits of my three months' absence contemplating the ruins of the Liberal Party. The Conservatives cannot and should not try to lead the country towards an ideal society. All they can hope to do in the months ahead is to work with the materials available in such a way as to make life more difficult for a Labour government wishing to apply the fatuous, discredited and bloodstained nostrums of socialism. One grows impatient at the delay. It is time the pit ponies of Westminister were brought to the surface to see the light and be given a sound whipping before being sent back to their humble duties underground.
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