Another voice
After the floods
Auberon Waugh
Quite a few of my readers, I dare say, are , old enought to remember the Lynmouth flood disaster of the 1950s. I think about thirteen people died, and many cows, chic, kens and pigs died with them. These were early days of television, and perhaps the populace was more suggestible. We lived in Gloucestershire then, but most of my friends and relations were in the affected area of Exmoor, on the Somerset-North Devon border. It was with some chagrin that we recognised them on television, grinning wolfishly and eating bananas, the gift of the High Commissioner for Ghana. But in those days the whole country was seized by a Dunkirk or Blitz-style hysteria. Old age pensioners in our remote village of Stinchcombe limped their way to the village hall and surrendered their life savings for the benefit of the flood victims. The Commonwealth joined in with shiploads of bananas, copra and monkey skins.
No such scenes have greeted the recent flood disaster in south-western France, where thiry-nine people were drowned in the small town of Auch alone and immeasurable damage has been done to the agricultural community. The area was immediately put under the charge of France's magnificent riot police, the CRS, who arrested most of the inhabitants for looting. Many of those who escaped arrest can now be found limping. This, I have heard it said, is due to a misunderstanding by sightseers who visited the scene in their thousands; some mistook their compatriots struggling in the flood waters for frogs and started nibbling at their ankles until loud Gallic oaths convinced them of their mistake.
It would be unfair, I suppose, to draw any firm conclusions about the two national characters from these isolated incidents, Apart from anything else, they are more than twenty years apart in time, and there is no reason to suppose that a new Lynmouth would evoke the same response today. Aberfan produced a similar oversubscription, but not quite the same generosity of spirit. This may be explained in part by the traditional British hatred of children, in part by the feeling that the Welsh village had done little to deserve our fullest sympathy. There is nothing so distressing as Grand Opera which, by a single warble or shift of key, can descend into blackest farce, The disaster occurred because thieving villagers had removed an essential telephone wire for its shillingsworth of copper strand so many times that the Coal Board eventually decided it would be a waste of time to replace it. Bitter squabbles about the share-out of booty con tinue, for all I know, to this day. Probably few of those who fare generously as a measure of their distress over the tragedy were aware of the undercurrents, but I remember sardonic comments about a certain Royal personage who may have had less reason than most to feel sentimental about the Welsh and who reportedly chose to mark the event by sending a lorry load of teddy bears. On the other hand, I suppose,one can say that the Aberfan incident demonstrates only the already well-known national characteristics of the Welsh.
Worse than anything, as a sign of the times, has been the public reaction in England to the long-running thalidomide saga. At its inception, with the Lady Mayoress's Appeal, it seemed part of the grand tradition of British disasters. The shame, in our materialist age, is that all such sorrows must be measured in terms of money. If only the editor of the Sunday Times, whose name for the moment escapes me, had been able to demonstrate his own big-heartedness and the moral viability of his staff by urging their readers to say a decade of the rosary for the nation's thalidomide victims. Instead, when the nation's charity ran dry, we were left to demonstrate our compassion vicariously through the courts, urging ever-greater damages at no cost to ourselves until all sense of proportion was lost. Whatever modest expectation of profit the Distillers Company may have had when it first put thalidomide on the market, the product's name now conjures up quite a different sort of profiteering.
Perhaps we have seen just one thalidomide victim too many on our television screens. What once caused a thrill of shock and guilt is now seen as a cynical striving after a cheap effect. Possibly the same happened at the time of the Biafran war, and explains the British people's imperviousness to the consequences of their own government's policy. In France, by contrast — and in Holland and West Germany and other countries — Biafra had quite another effect, convincing many young people at the time that the British were as viciously immoral in their treatment of other people as they are sentimental and incompetent in their treatment of themselves. But I have no doubt whatever that next yeat's television marathon Holocaust — in which Marvin Chomsky will give us eight hours on the mass-murder of the Jews — will have just the same deadening effect, with consequences which may be even more disturbing in the long run.
These sombre reflections are prompted in part by a survey carried out by the European Commission on attitudes to poverty
within the EEC. It is this same Commission, I imagine — or at any rate a sub-committee — which has just decided that the AttorneyGeneral's suppression of a Sunday Times article on thalidomide constitutes a breach of human rights. For myself, I have been dreading the article for several years now, and 'cancelled my subscription to the Sunday Times in anticipation of its appearance. Surely, it has already appeared several times over, at enormous length? Obviously the Attorney-General has no business to suppress it, however boring and longwinded it may be, but I would not be happy for Europeans to form the impression that this incident shows a rigid and hard-hearted executive stamping on Englishmen with their naturally warm instincts and widely proclaimed passion for social justice. Nor would anyone who has read the Commission's report Perceptions of Poverty in Europe retain such an impression for a moment.
The survey covers a sample of 8,600 people over the age of fifteen throughout the nine member states of the Economic 'Community. From it, the British emerge as dramatically the least sympathetic towards the victims of poverty (i.e. the poor), giving a high place to laziness and drink as the reasons for this condition.
When the results of the poll were collected, they divided the answers into various categories between the extreme of 'cynics' on the one hand, which embraced 'the hard core of social egoists and conservatives of the most reactionary type', and 'militants for social justice' on the other extreme, which embraced all those committed to changing the society in which they lived. Britain came spectacularly highest in the cynic stakes, with 27 per cent of Britons falling into this category (Germans were second with 17 per cent, the EEC average was 14 per cent). In all categories, France and Italy are the most radical, Britain is the most conservative.
The Commission appears to attribute the phenomenon, which becomes more striking the more one studies the figures, to the Protestant ethic, although it is not singled out by name. It suggests that this strict attitude to poverty is 'tied up with a set of beliefs whereby the poor are primarily responsible for their social disgrace.'
I disagree. It seems to me that this attitude is a natural and obvious consequence of the welfare state. For years We have been laughing at the French, who find it necessary to create an offence within their criminal code for those who refuse to go to the assistance of' someone in peril of death. Recent experiments by the AA, in which the apparent victim of a road accident appealed for help from passing motorists, reveal us as a nation of High Priests and Levites. We may not be acquisitive enough to loot, or greedy enough (or gastronomically adventurous enough) to resort to cannibalism in a food crisis situation, but our heads are the softest, our hearts the hardest in Europe.
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