Another voice

Aux armes, citoyens

Auberon Waugh

The part of France where my family has its holiday home, and where,1 will bolt when the trade unions finally make life unendurable for everybody else in England, is apparently in a state of open insurrection. In two weeks' time I shall be there and reporting from the front line in the Languedoc wine war, or the Passchendaele of Plonk or whatever it has become by then.

But in fact there is trouble of one sort or another in the Midi every year, either now or soon after the harvest. Three years ago, our market town of Castelnaudary was occupied by schcolchildren who sat in the streets singing "Debre salaud!' against the then Minister of Defence's ruling on the . deferment of call-up. They won the pc i it, eventually. Two years ago, the main road from Toulouse to Carcassonne was blocked by farmers protesting about agricultural prices. They won, too. Last year, I saw a festive crowd in Carcassonne suddenly turn nasty on the driver of a juggernaut lorry which was ol ts way to Narbonn and order him back .o Toulouse or Limoux or Perpignan or whereyer h had come from. The man t-arned back. Thirteen years ago a policeman became over-excited at a village fête nearby, drew his pistol and shot a youth in the shculder. The villagers chased the policemar into a jam, set it aligh and kept the poll:pier.c at bay .itil he had burnt to death. This year, we learn that a thousand viticulte have been involved in a shootout witt the CRS leaving t least two dead and thi,:ty wounded.

Not very nice. '1 hank heaven we don't mq.nage things that way in England. But my point is precisely the opposite one, that there are things to be learned from these foreigners which we can ill afford to ignore at the present time.

My friends in the Languedoc—nearly all are small farmers, since ..-te admirable French laws of inheritance make big landholdings almost impossible—are qqitating against imports of na-.1y, cheap Italian ..

in competition with their own almost undrinkable, rnore expensive product. The qi:ne producing areas of LanguedocCorbiert._ Roussillr i and Minervois-used to produce e' .-.ellent wine and a few prope-ties stili co, but until recently official olicy encouraged them to go for quantity rather than quality with the result now known as the wine ' ,ke. In time, no doubt, market pressure, win encourage them to make a smaller quantity of better wine, but for the present they are feeling the squeeze.

If the French viticulteurs are prepared to fight—and fight to the death—for marl p-oft advantage in selling for consumption over selling to the Lake, just think what they would be prepared to do if the government tried to take away their land, which is what the Home Policy Committee of the Labour Party proposes to do to English farmers. Where the French are concerned, there is no danger, of course. The French Communist Party is not only sound on land ownership, it is even resolutely opposed to any form of capital gains tax.

When Stalin introduced his collectivisadon of agriculture in 1928-9, it involved the deaths by execution or starvation of some ten million people in the next four years. it was alwo:. s pronosed, of course, that the kulaks should be 'liquidated as a class'— that is, deported to labour camps in Siberia and central Asia. It was the failure of socialist agriculture which led, through the assassination of Kirov in 1934, to the Great Purge of 1936-68, as well as producing the purges of 1929 and 1933 and most of Russia's greatest sorrows ever since. But Me first reaction to Stalin's proposals for the socialisation of agriculture was the rnobilsiation of peasant resistance in the Ukraine, North Caucasus and Volga regions, and the halving of Russia's livestock resources as kulaks and `middle peasants' slaughtered their animals in advance.

Now let us examine the reaction of British farmers to the threat of nat ionalisadon. I mean, where is this reaction? The scheme has men well enough circulated by word of mouth. It is the brainchild of Mr 134.:nn and a sinister, half-witted unmarried lady called Joan Maynard on the Home Policy Committee of the Labour Party Executive. I personally doubt whether Ms Maynard cares much either way, but Mr Benn must be confident by now that the nationalisation of land can be carried through by nor nal parliamentary procedure, wit:– at an armed insurrection, a class liquitation or even the destruction of British ..griculture.

On the last point, they are probably indifferent, since it is socialist agriculture which still, after fifty years, leaves Russia at the mercy of American grain supplies. In any ci the Committee document reckons that L. kruptcy, brought about by the capital tratisf:, and ealth taxes, will prove a cheaper me 'l od of '.cquiring land for the Agricultural La d Commission than compulsory purchase, so plainly the destruction of bourgeois agriculture is a first step towards introducing the unworkable socialist model.

One can easily agree that there is no real darger— Benn is mad and only interested iii his own advancement, so will probably

drop the plan if it ms into a hot potato,

while Maynard, however sinister, is too obviously stupid to pose a threat. But the truth of the matter is that the Labour Left know less about agriculture than Maynard. and probably even less about economics than Benn. I shall be most surprised if these raving proposals do not appear on the next Labour manifesto. And the only reaction I have seen so far is a pained whimper from the landowners' federation that if agricultural land really must be taken over there should be safeguards for sitting proprietors.

The justification for armed uprising in the Midi is plainly that official policy— sanctioned by law and 'mandated' by a proper majority vote—is seen as unjust to the wine growers. There are those, like the great Bernard Levin, who maintain that the rule of law must be absolute: `untune that string and hark! what discord follows'.

Mr Levin's ruling sounds nice and probably represents the deepest feelings of the British middle class. But there have been few periods in history when it was applicable and the period we are entering now is plainly not going to be one of them. The first calculation of government in framing new laws must be whether it can get away with them without being defied or ignored. Once the string has been untuned, as it has been by the present Attorney-General, the continued application of Levin's Law can only mean that those who observe it will be clobbered more and more by those who don't. The only protection which minorities enjoy against'the majority (even supposing that there was ever a majority in favour of land nationalisation) must be outside the electoral system, simply by making themselves unpleasant.

My own last hope that salvation might be found within the electoral system expired with Mrs Thatcher's promise that if elected she would repeal none of Mr Foot's trade union legislation. Our own Mr Cosgrave may be of the opinion that there is more than one way of skinning a cat, but I should like to know what the other ways are. To me, this was a plain statement that to secure some drivelling and irrelevant electoral advantage, Mrs Thatcher is prepared t° offer no resistance to the advance of the workers' state except possibly the most fatal of all, delay.

The rule of law has already gone by the board and only the pretence remains, but the English are a timid, deferential race and many are reluctant to believe this. Others are prepared to anoint the unelected heads of Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon with the same holy chrism that once shone from Mr Heath's sun-tanned brow. These are not easy circumstances for getting the CounterRevolution under way. Perhaps, for a start. I shall re-name Combe Florey 'The Blue House' and fill it with out-of-work actresses. That, at any rate, will be a way of passing the time. Or perhaps I shall softly and silently vanish away to the other side of the Channel, where democracy still seems to work. In any case, I think it is definitely time I took a holiday.