ANOTHER VOICE

How we can yet win the hearts and minds of the young

AUBERON WAUGH

Devils in the splendidly antiquated make-up `stone' of the Daily Telegraph mercifully removed a chunk of Mr Peter Walker's speech to the Young Conserva- tives of Manchester from my edition on Monday morning. He had said that it was vital for the Tories to inspire the young if they were to win the next election and had reminded them that on the last occasion they had scored the hat-trick, under Mr Macmillan in 1959, it was he — Peter Walker — who had been National Chair- man of the Young Conservatives:

Campaigns conducted by the enthusiastic young have a vitality that is infectious. Campaigns devoid of the young are destined for defeat.

He was warming to this task, emphasis- ing that the young are particularly in- terested in 'health, housing and education at home and the hunger of the Third World abroad' when he was suddenly cut short:

There remains squalid housing; there con- tinues to be dreadful damage to the environ- ment and the increasing problem of the

We were left to wonder which increasing problem might yet inspire the young of ,Manchester to vote Conservative. Crumb- ling sewers? Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome? Football hooliganism, the her- oin epidemic or just the shortage of jobs? Perhaps we will never know.

In Somerset, we accept the mutilated form of the Daily Telegraph's early edi- tions as part of the great Shirley Williams era. In fact, I have been told that these printing errors are deliberate: compositors can then earn overtime by correcting them in subsequent editions. But so far as most Daily Telegraph readers in Somerset are concerned, it is all part and parcel of the new illiteracy which Haringey Council catches in its desperate cry for help, as monitored by the Times diarist when it appealed for 'COMMUNITY TOTURS': `Resorces', it said, especially if 'reletively newly form' need 'advice-help'. An 'in- duvidul' is needed for its 'unieque training project'. But 'its not essintial to hold a teach qualification or to have experince as a class tutor'.

As the state schools returned this week, it seems a good moment to reflect on the young people whom Mr Peter Walker hopes to inspire with the Conservative message, whatever it might be. A report by the National Council for Educational Stan- dards appeared in the summer, before the results of this year's exams were known, covering 380,000 pupils in 2,000 schools. This time, after a deliberate 'dirty tricks' campaign of denigration conducted by the National Union of Teachers and officials in the Department of Education to discredit an earlier report, the two researchers produced figures which were adjusted to take account of the social class of the schools' intake. Once again, they proved that exam results were 30-40 per cent better in all selective schools, whether grammar or secondary modern, than they were in Mrs Williams's comprehensives.

The trouble with Mr Walker's attempt to have himself re-elected National Chairman of the Young Conservatives is that he is now 53 years old — he was a glamorous 27 when he secured Mr Macmillan's election in 1959 — and although he may not have changed very much, with his touching concern for health, housing and education at home, the hunger of the Third World abroad, the young have changed quite a lot.

Nobody should be persuaded to the contrary by the evidence 'of the Live Aid concert, which addressed itself to a particu- lar crisis in Africa rather than to a general state of affairs. I should have thought that as the implications of this year's generally appalling exam results begin to sink in, and as school-leavers with inadequate qual- ifications compete with each other for an inadequate number of jobs, a certain re- sentment against the system will surface which might complement, rather than oppose, the self-satisfied feelings of the majority of school-leavers — 66 per cent who will have found (for the most part grotesquely over-paid) jobs by the time of the next election.

The task ahead is to focus this resent- ment where it properly belongs — on Mrs Shirley Williams and, by association, on the party she has adopted. It was Mrs Williams who, as Labour's Secretary for Education between 1976 and 1979, des- troyed the last resistance to comprehen- sivation at a time when the whole world could see it had been a disaster. Her latest posture, in the light of the havoc she has caused, is to recommend as SDP policy that Etonians should be forcibly sent to attend comprehensive schools on Merseyside, and Liverpudlians should be sent in exchange to Eton. Who will be happier as the result of this policy — Etonians in Merseyside or Liverpudlians at Eton? I am convinced that a large part of the Conservatives' appeal to the young should lie in inspiring them with a whole- hearted contempt for the SDP as exempli- fied by its apparently most loveable, scatter-headed President who combines, in fact, all the bossiness of a head mistress with the silliness of a humourless 55-year- old schoolgirl.

The second leg of this appeal must be to inspire the young with a resentment, terror and loathing of the working class move- ment whether represented by Mr Norman Willis or the local street community advice- help totur induvidul. Where the Norman Willises of this world are concerned, I feel that in their ponderous, menacing, heavily middle-aged way they already cause ripples of estrangement among most of the young wherever they go. Where the sharper Left of advice-help totur induviduls is con- cerned, the teacher's on-going industrial dispute situation is a godsend.

On 1 October teachers in the normally conservative National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers will be joining their down-market colleagues of the NUT in strike action which will cover all 104 education author- ities. Many schools will close: those that remain open will be unable to serve meals. The attitude of pupils will vary from derisive and opportunistic to genuinely aggrieved, depending on the attitude of their parents.

This would be an ideal moment for the Conservatives to channel all these feelings into a hatred for the union militants and everything they stand for, as well as a healthy contempt for the less militant colleagues who stand holding banners and grinning sheepishly. The young should be encouraged if not to lynch or even to spit at teachers' pickets, at any rate to engage them in meaningful dialogue from a safe distance with the aid of a tomato or two behind the school wall.

Mrs Thatcher is irredeemably identified as a schoolmistress, but she has an impor- tant role to play in heartening the much greater number of voters who are not young at all. She might even help to consolidate the general resentment against the young.

What she needs is a rabble-rousing figure like the young Quintin Hogg who will stir the young both against the dead hand of the unions and the entrenched left-wing establishment of teachers. I am not sure she has such a person in the House. Parkinson does not quite fit the bill. Norman St John-Stevas just might.