CENTREPIECE

Phantom voters, dead souls and departed patients

COLIN WELCH

'T he 500,000 members who don't exist: Labour's phantom union votes', ran a recent headline in the Sunday Times. The story underneath related how a group of

prominent unions bought votes at the 1983 Labour conference, which elected Mr Kin- nock leader, by affiliating 500,000 who had not paid the political levy. The phantom votes added up to more than the total membership of all constituecy Labour par- ties.

The story of the phantom voters recalled to me Gogol's Dead Souls and also an odd incident years ago which threw fresh light on parts of the National Health Service. In Dead Souls, you will recall, the hero Chichikov travels widely through old rural Russia, running into the most extraordin- ary people and having picaresque adven- tures. The purpose of his journey is to buy up the papers of dead souls, i.e., of serfs in fact dead yet still registered as alive on the census list. Why he wanted them, I can't at this moment swear. He told different stories at different times. Did he need these dead souls to impress prospective parents-in-law with delusions of his wealth? Or did he need them to get a job in the imperial service, open then only to men of substance, possessors of many souls? A masterpiece resulted, anyway.

The odd incident was 20 or 25 uniform official buff cards cascading through my letter-box in Putney one day, producing in me surprise, in the dog hysteria. The message on each one was the same: that Dr So-and-So had retired and that the addres- see, one of his patients, would be transfer- red automatically to the list of his succes- sor, unless he or she made representations. The addresses were nearly all foreign, mostly young ladies — Miss Hedwig Schmidt, Miss Habibullah, Miss Ho, Mlle F. Chose and so on.

A previous owner of my house was the second Lord Lindsay of Birker, known as Chinese Lindsay because of his long sou- journs in that country, his presumed sym- pathy with its new rulers and his Chinese wife. Tradition had it that he had let out lodgings to foreign students, packing them in up to the eaves (the house had been bigger in his day, before it was split in half). Now he had gone and they had gone, far and wide, married, gone home, off to fresh adventures, some perhaps unhappily dead. Yet all maintained a shadowy exist- ence here on the list of Dr So-and-So and then of his successor. They were phantom patients. Dr So-and-So presumably had pocketed their capitation fees for years. His successor may still do so for all I know.

Had Chichikov been a qualified medical doctor, he would at once have seen possibi- lities. He might have visited all his col- leagues, assiduously buying up the papers of patients who had disappeared. In this way, with patience and luck, he could have hoped to build up a whole practice consist- ing entirely of phantom patients. They would give little trouble and bring in a steady income. Might it then be possible to extend the practice by natural increase, as it were, by attributing imaginary issue to imaginary patients — to Miss Ho, say, twins. Would the authorities smell a rat, something funny going on? Would they send round inspectors to see? Would Dr Chichikov hastily have to assemble Potem- kin patients, film extras to pack his surgery with a wheezing, palsied, coughing, ban- daged, limping yet still grateful throng?

The farcical possibilities are perhaps greater than the actual, sad to say. Yet the Department of Health does confess that the number entered on doctor's lists is greater than the total population, by an unknown amount. In this grey area a Chichikov might operate. Or he might prefer these days somehow to buy up all the phantom union votes, thus making himself arbiter of Labour's destinies.

The road through Aldbourne, where I live, used to be the A419. It has now been demoted to B4192. All the road signs have been altered, no, not all: A419 still sur- vives here and there, a ghostly presence, adding to the confusion. The expense must have been considerable. And for what conceivable purpose or fathomable end?

Most of the roads around Swindon have been renumbered, three figures mostly making way for four, which are obviously less memorable. All existing local maps are thus, 'at a stroke', rendered in this respect

obsolete. Giving directions becomes more difficult and uncertain. I thought at first this was a local aberration, the whim of some crazed bureaucrat in Thamesdown (Heatho-Walkerian for Swindon). The Wilts C.C. would hardly dp anything so silly. Then I noticed a Times announce- ment of gardens open to the public: 'Essex: The Manor House, Little Easton, on B194 (previously A130), two miles NW of Dun- mow'. Is it going on all over the country?

All numbered roads have distinct char- acters. The old A130 is or was a road of memories for me. It began and ended in the drab suburbs of Cambridge and South- end. Between Saffron Walden and Chelmsford, it meandered, dipped and twisted among Essex's unemphatic hills, past high-chimneyed halls (including one at Barnston which, when Welch aunts were little, rose from a shaded sea of blue-bells), past dark ponds and sounding rookeries, through morris-dancing Thaxted with its spire and guildhall, through snoring Dun- mow, famous for wedded bliss, past the haunts of progressive pacifist parsons (the Revds Conrad Noel and Jack Putterill of Thaxted) and collectivist countesses (of Warwick, at Easton), between the Bard- fields, Sampfords and Finchingfield on the left and Molehill Green and the Rodings on the right, past broad echoing greens across which the genuinely bucolic, slow and grasping, and the homespun fake surveyed each other uncomprehendingly.

One memorable encounter between the two took place during the 1945 election campaign. An old Essex farmer was hang- ing over his gate. A sandalled Fabian summer-school girl harangued him about the beauties of co-operative buying and marketing. He listened with patient scep- ticism, bursting out at last: 'Now, listen, moi dear, Oi've made my pile, and you go to buggery.' A real A130 reproof. And now, aunts, countesses, parsons, rustics, even the road number which linked them — all gone.

Nor is the madness confined to Britain. Whether France caught it from us or vice

versa, she has mutilated the great French road-numbering system. The numbers of many former routes nationales change whenever you cross a departmental bound- ary. Could anything be sillier?

The function of national governments is the preserve order where it exists and to create it Where it doesn't. Yet confront them with any existing order, not of their Making, and quite Caliban-like is their zeal to destroy it and put chaos in its place.