Another voice
Two levels of truth
Auberon Waugh
Certain truths of our society are too obvious to require demonstration. One of them is that workers' power in industry has impoverished the workers. Among intelligent, thoughtful people in this country, who have no interest in either believing or affecting to disbelieve it, the truth has long been apparent that unions have trans formed the worker in heavy industry from being a creator of wealth to being at best a quaint anachronism in modern British soc iety, at worst a destructive and possibly lethal parasite on the productive efforts of everybody else.
Although it has been a painful experience, over the past years, to watch official spokesmen and news sources ignoring this obvious truth as if it were somehow contentious, the awareness was, surely, always present. There has undoubtedly been a severe and marked decline in the intellectual vitality of the nation as a result of the impoverishment of the middle classes, the disruption and dilution of further edu cation, the emigration of over two million British citizens in the last ten years, and the tacit acceptance of 'positive discrimination' in appointing people of working-class sympathies to responsible positions in industry, government, the universities, journalism and what you will, but I do not think that we are yet so stupid as to have failed to notice what was happening. Opinions may differ on what, if anything, can be done about this new development, but a general consensus after the Heath debacle seems to be that there is probably nothing to be done. For this reason, perhaps, there, has been very little comment on it apart from occasional excited 'yips' from those like myself who openly regard the spectacle of proletarian affluence with even greater distaste than they regard the prospect of their own impoverishment. The general attitude of the intelligentsia (from which I exclude the Marxist intelligentsia on the grounds that its thought processes are unfathomable) has been one of gloomy resignation, accepting that the working classes are far too stupid to understand where the unions are leading, and far too wet to do anything about it even if they do understand.
But acceptance of such truth exists at various levels. So long as there is a vociferous minority dedicated to denying it, nobody is prepared to accept anything as truth until some random event occurs to promote it from perceived truth to acknowledged truth. Throughout the 'thirties, ample documentary evidence was available to convince anyone of the true nature of the socialist regime in Russia, but for some reason it was not until Khrushchev's speech
to the Twentieth Congress in 1956 that Stalin's crimes became 'official'. Similarly, but not identically, we now learn that the fate of the two million forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union after the war had already been documented twenty years ago; Solzhenitsyn referred to it in Gulag Archipelago and the essential facts were made available in Lord Bethell's book The Last Secret which I reviewed for the New Statesman in 1974. But it was only with the publication of Nikolai Tolstoy's Victims of Yalta this year that people have been prepared to sit up and take notice.
Admittedly, Tolstoy's book is longer and better documented than Bethell's, but the essential truth was already known. Nor, in 1974, did anybody bother to deny it. One explanation for the delayed shock horror reaction from the press may be that in 1974 Lord Brimelow was still permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office and head of the Diplomatic Service. None of the creepy little men who serve as diplomatic correspondents and foreign editors of our major newspapers wanted to annoy anyone quite so important. The same consideration
Cit.7%-j may well apply in the public handling of a much more recent and equally atrocious episode of our history: the assistance given by Labour's 1966-1970 government in the deliberate starvation to death of two million civilians, mostly children, in the Nigerian civil war. All the facts and documents have been available ever since: reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the World Council of Churches and Caritas, the evidence of a British 'genocide observer' at his employment tribunal that he had been hired by the Foreign Office to assist the Federal war effort, the hushed-up but irrefutable fact of a British pilot seconded from the RAF killed flying a Russian Mig at Port Harcourt. No doubt we shall have to wait until the retirement of various Guilty Men not only in politics and the FCO but also in journalism until this truth becomes official. Then we will be able to rub our eyesin disbelief that the British could ever have been so wicked. But all the evidence is there for anyone who is interested, and it has all been published. If ever Mrs Thatcher becomes annoyed by Mr Callaghan's attacks which allege an improper attitude on her part towards blacks, she might threaten an official inquiry into this episode.
Similar publiC inquiries could be threatened on aspects of the Thorpe affair, the Stonehouse affair and the whole question of national security under Mr Callaghan's predecessor. So long as these two levels of truth exist, it is simply not good enough to leave it to the random mood of newspaper editors to decide which truth should be discussed and which should be left alone. Our pernicious laws of libel maY seem to work in favour of politicians, protecting any incompetents, crooks, perverts, traitors, criminal conspirators or mass murderers in high places from public exposure, but they are a double-edged weapon and prevent aspiring leaders from profiting elec. torally, as they should, from the errors, crimes and vices of the government in office and its allies. The time has come for Mrs Thatcher to go for broke and promise public inquiries into all these matters. Perhaps, when they glimpse the terrible alternative of judicial inquiries, politicians will come to recognise the advantages of genuinely open communication between citizens, with freedom to guess, speculate, gossip and even invent malicious rumours.
These reflections are prompted by the, Sunday Times's decision to `go official' on the stale and obvious truth that trade union power has already impoverished the workers of this country vis-à-vis the workers of other countries. As we all know, it will soon cripple our industrial economy, destroy our trading position and lead to outbreaks of cannibalism in the West Midlands, but-that has not been made official yet. All we have is a brilliantly researched 10,000-word article by Mr Stephen Fay pointing out that workers are not quite so well off as they would be if the unions let them work harder or more efficiently. Well done, Stephen. Now we must decide what attitude to take towards this important new discovery. Since there is absolutely nothing to be done about it the unions won't budge, no party will be elected which threatens confrontation with unions and if a democratically-elected goy' ernment tried confrontation, it would be defeated I suggest we look on the brighter side. It may be whimsical to suggest that the workers of this country simply don't want to get any richer. Perhaps they really do, but are too stupid or too wet to do anything about it. Or perhaps they dislike work even more, and who is to blame them? Obviously Mrs Thatcher can't go to the country prom ising to increase the number of unemployed
to three million, because that would be thought insulting, although sicretly manY
workers might welcome such a prograMMe•
But she should certainly, I think, go to the country promising the fullest cooperation with the unions, which amounts to the salve thing. There is a secret society in the land, recognisable only by a certain way we have of touching our noses. The Last Secret of the English ruling class is that we don t
really want to see the workers any richer, and would be happy to see them quite a lot poorer. But don't tell the Sunday Times or it may become official.
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