Notebook
It has been a better year so far for the House ot Commons than for the Government. It would have been better still if the vote after Tuesday's debate on the blacklist had gone the other way. The use of 'discretionary sanctions' is an extreme example of the slide towards government by ukase. If Parliament can do nothing to halt this tendency, what is the use of it? There will be Other opportunities for the Government to be kept in order. It is more than likely that there will be an attempt to extract Mr George Cunningham's amendment to the Scotland Bill. Let the Opposition and the Labour back benches resist this. We know that there is not a majority of MPs in favour of devolution. Neither of course is there a majority of the British people. There is Probably not a majority in Scotland. That is Why the whole episode is so discreditable. A few politicians were deceived — or deceived themselves — into thinking that devolution was 'inevitable'. The Labour Party's managers decide that some sop to opinion in Scotland was necessary to their electoral survival. After that it has just been a story of helpless drift. I was appalled, incidentally, to be told recently by a member of the shadow cabinet that if the Conservatives won an election held before the passage of the Scotland Bill, they would introduce a more radical devolution measure. If this is the case Mrs Thatcher should say so, for the benefit of those people who might be voting for the Tories as the party of the Union.
A moment comes in intellectual history When a pre-science becomes a true science: as for example with the discovery of Brownian movement. Some pre-sciences don't take off in this way: who would claim for example that either economics or Psychiatry was yet a true science in the sense that biology or chemistry is? Then again it seems possible for a pre-science actually to move backwards. Sociology is the obvious case in point. Not long ago it looked to have the makings of a serious academic discipline. Now a great part of what passes as sociology is no more than higher nonsense, mumbo-jumbo on a level with astrology and alchemy. This can be seen from the books that sociologists produce. Some time ago three books came into the office in quick succession, all from reputable publishers. They were called The Disappearing Grandmother, The Lesbian Mother and — I am not making this up — The Urban Aunt in The nonsense would not matter if it did not have a practical application. A friend who is a social worker recently told me about her activities in `family therapy', itself a revealing phrase. Patients (or clients, or victims) are first made to construct a 'gerleOgraph by recounting their family background. They are then, if married, asked a number of impertinent questions for marking on a `marital happiness graph'. The latest therapeutic technique imported from America is `sculpting'. Under the eye of the social worker one person, a wife, say, manipulates her husband — physically, literally — into a posture suggestive of their relationship. Or, alternatively, the social workers can act out among themselves the `family conflict situations' with which they are dealing. At the last count there were nearly 30,000 social workers in the country. I suppose it is one way of tackling unemployment.
Social work is not the only, or even the most grievous, form of local governmental folly. The appointments columns of New Society and Time Out tell their own story: Toy Library Co-ordinators here, Street Dance Organisers there. Living in Islington and working in Camden, under the two local authorities which set the national standard for profligacy, no doubt jaundices one. Two of Islington's recent ventures at the ratepayers' expense have been to set up a Gay Advisory Centre and to build a bar for the council dustmen, evidently sensitive fellows who find it painful to mix with rest of us in the pub. Camden is more spendthrift and wanton still. Its finest achievement is the
Branch Hill housing estate, where the dwellings have worked out at an average cost of more than £100,000 each. Camden has been in trouble as well because of its policy of reverse discrimination in favour of employing immigrants. Mr Richard West, a Camden rate-payer himself, suggests that the trouble with this is that they have not gone far enough: let Camden demonstrate its total commitment to immigrants — by dismissing all its white employees.
There seems to be nowhere to hide from sociologists and other deranged inves
tigators. Last month Alfred Brendel gave a magnificent series of recitals of later Schubert. At one concert the audience was given a questionnaire devised by the Martin Centre for Architecture and Urban Studies. The Centre is trying to `produce a better understanding' of concert halls and theatres. The questionnaire consists of thirty scales on which one marks one's feelings about the hall somewhere between two contrasting adjectives. Thus we have to decide whether the Queen Elizabeth Hall is involving or uninvolving (or something in between); unusual or usual; clear or hazy; straight or curved; special or ordinary; private or public; long or short; gaudy or refined. Some of us found it difficult to complete the questionnaire rationally. On the other hand there is no problem thinking up suitable adjectives to describe the Martin Centre for Architecture and Urban Studies.
A handsome new book. The Encylopedia of the World's Warships, has rekindled an old interest in the naming of ships, which, once you start to explore it is an endlessly fascinating subject. Once, navies used to call their men of war by bellicose but abstract names: Invincible or Foudroyant. Then the custom grew of commemorating historical heroes (though that had its problems: the young Churchill enraged George V by proposing to call a dreadnought the Cromwell). Or names were chosen with a political significance. Presumably the Austro-Hungarian government called one of its battleships the Svent Istvan as a gesture towards Slav sentiment. Under Mussolini the Italian fleet had three cruisers aggressively named the Zara, Fiume, and Pola, all places, it will be noted, no longer in Italian hands. When a ship passes from one navy to another it changes its name; as it often does when the regime changes. Even an ill-informed observer might have guessed that something was up in Russia when the Gangut became the Oktyabrskya Revolutsia and the Sevastapol the Parizhskaya Kommuna. During the last war the Red Navy had two destroyers touchingly called the Sacco and the Vanzetti. Who knows; perhaps even now in the Baltic, or dff the East African coast, there is a flotilla of Russian corvettes called the Pritt, the Plaits-Mills, the Mikardo and the Brimelow.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
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