Another voice

Thoughts on the Trooping

Auberon Waugh

For the first time I managed to watch Trooping the Colour without a lump in my throat last week. This may have been because I now have coloured television and was able to see the guardsmen's faces in all their brutal stupidity at close range a sight I had forgotten since my days at the Guards Depot, Caterham, over twenty years ago. Or it may, as I believe, mark a new social awareness. One can still find it enjoyable to imagine the Household Cavalry trotting down Whitehall occupying the House of Commons and putting everyone inside to the sabre. But it is harder to imagine that they would make a less disastrous job of governing the country, and one can no longer accept the pageantry as symbolising an Old England which has passed away.

In the first place, the footguards never represented anything except a tiny part of Old England, and by no means its pleasantest part. They were never more than a collection of the oafish sons of the rich who had somehow persuaded some even more oafish sons of the poor to jump through hoops for them. Many died bravely, but so did those in lesser regiments, even in the RAF.

In the second place, the England its officers represent has not passed away at all but is to be found in merchant banks and insurance offices, on hunting fields and in silly, fashionable resorts on the Continent, in drawling voices on the Fourth of June and expensive, hideously furnished houses in the country. Forty years ago one might have found this world of the unintelligent rich hateful, nowadays it is merely embarrassing. The England represented by those whey-faced other ranks — stupid, poor and terrified — is not one which anyone would mourn who was not a sadist or an officer in the Brigade of Guards.

Through all the bogusness and brutality of the occasion, the Royal Family shone out for the beauty and benignity of its presence. But it would be absurd to imagine the monarchy as part of an old England which is passing or has passed. I doubt if it was ever more secure than it is now, if any English monarch has ever enjoyed so much affection as the present Queen — thanks largely to television — or if any monarch had ever been so much richer (in terms of disposable income) than her richest subjects. Far from being a reminder of times past, the Queen is essentially a modern phenomenon giving the illusion of national identity to a country which has lost it. As a symbol of threatened permanence I should have thought the monarchy would stay on the road indefinitely, certainly long after we have descended into the collectivist egalitarian hell which Professor Milton Friedman was prophesying for us until recently.

If one has to define the sort of England which does seem threatened and worth defending one is on trickier ground, in some danger of exposing oneself to the ridicule of those with other preferences. For my own part, I carry in my mind the idea of a society of benign, highly educated, intelligent, slightly dotty individuals whose feeling of security in their privileges and talents is untroubled by philosophical doubts and inspired by a fundamental awareness of the absurdity of human pretensions. Perhaps I should be more specific, explaining that I feel the same ungovernable rage which is excited in other breasts by attacks on the Queen when I read disgraceful and uncouth attacks on the person of Mr. William Rees-Mogg, editor of The Times. Others, I have noticed, appear equally disturbed by anything, however jocular or good-natured, which might be interpreted as criticising Mr. Harold Evans, the RAF hero and expert on Good English, who is responsible for what has happened to the Sunday Times.

But we can surely all agree that something, somewhere in England, is threatened which is worth defending. All is not as it should be. There is no need to be more specific than that. In this context, Trooping the Colour must be seen as the opium of the middle classes. Whatever else is threatened, it is not the Queen or the Brigade of Guards. If we cannot agree on what is threatened, let us at least agree on where the threat is coming from. Is it, perhaps, from the power of organised labour?

Mr. Enoch Powell does not appear to think so, and one hesitates to disagree with him too hastily because his is one of the few minds in politics which roams free of con ventional errors and platitudes. At a speech in Eastbourne last week, he attacked the 'myth of trade union power', arguing that politicians used the unions as a scapegoat for their own failure to control money supply. Inflation causes wage claims, not wage claims inflation, he said: 'Whatever be the scarcity value of the small numbers of persons occupying supposedly key technological positions, that value is already expressed by their relative remuneration. If withdrawal of labour would extort a higher figure, the figure would have been extorted already.'

Whatever be Enoch thinking of? One should always beware politicians when they break into what Fowler calls the antiquated or 'survival' subjunctive. The point about technology is that it has made practically every man on the production line a 'key' worker, and in the process it has bust the market mechanism in labour. He is right when he argues that the TUC has no particular desire to govern, and would have been right, too, if he had argued that the real shift of power has been from organised to disorganised labour. But the power of the working class to get its own way within the existing organisation of work is now pretty nearly absolute for as long as work exists. Since he omitted two of these points, I must suppose he was simply sucking up to the unions in his forlorn search for a power base.

Now let us examine Professor Milton Friedman's inaugural Hoover Foundation lecture at Strathclyde, where he argued that the collectivist tide has turned in England. He based this on the growing unpopularity of heavy taxation and the fact that nobody has a good word to say for nationalisation: 'In this country, I believe the old Fabian left is intellectually bankrupt. It has nothing to say that can any longer excite the enthusiasm of the youth.' Quite possibly not, but Professor Friedman is surely wrong to suggest that youth Is 'far more likely to be attracted by free market doctrines'. Quite apart from the fact that closed shops have destroyed the free market in labour and technological interdependence has destroyed free bargaining, there can be no question of our collectively conscious working class ever adopting free market doctrines voluntarily. It is too timid, too unintellectual and, in the last resort, too sensible.

So it looks as if we may be swept by these tides, as Professor Friedman puts it, 'through hyper-inflation to a wholly col lectivist society'. But the Old England I have in mind — and, I suspect, most other people's Old England — could probably sur vive even this. It does not require efficient industry or a prosperous working class. Although we cannot all agree on what Is threatened, or by whom, I think we might agree on what needs to be done about it. To restore the serenity of mind, a sense of pur pose and general benignity, to encourage

greater investment, greater adventurousness in industry, to supply incentive

and metaphysical hope to a battered nation, the government has only to remove the punitive element in personal taxation. After such a reform, which would be wildly popU

lar in the press, and cost practically nothing, all bitterness and rancour would disappear.

Some of us might even be prepared to lend the working class a hand to solve the problems it has created for itself. Trooping the Colour is not enough.