ANOTHER VOICE
Perhaps we should be grateful for the cowardice factor in politics
AUBERON WAUGH
The best joke about the local elections was made by Frank Peters in a letter which appeared in Saturday's Telegraph:
Sir — Mr Major tells us: `When your back's to the wall it's time to turn round and fight.' Why pick on the wall?
This question seems to sum up the Con- servative predicament very well. There may be a certain amount of entertainment to be derived from the spectacle of Mr Major punching a wall. I am sure he would under- take the task with courage and persever- ance. We might applaud, but we will not join the fray and stand shoulder to shoul- der, punching the wall with him. This is partly because it is a painful and pointless thing to do, partly because Mr Major lacks those powers of leadership which might persuade us to sacrifice life and limb in a hopeless cause.
One problem for the Conservative Party is that it has lost its voice. Labour has a clear and unmistakable voice, for all Mr Blair's attempts to disguise it. It is the voice of 5.2 million public employees demanding more money to spend, and it is backed by the moans and wails of the entire depen- dency culture — unmarried mothers, unemployed youf, whole streets, villages and towns of professional scroungers in the north of England. Add to these the twitter- ing voices of those Guardian readers who are not on the public payroll — the privi- leged inadequates or educated guilt- merchants — and you have a mighty chorus demanding change.
Against this powerful anthem, which invites disgruntled former Tories to join it although the cause of their disgruntlement is certainly not represented among its notes, we have the spectacle of Mr Major, all alone, punching a wall. The Government has lost its voice because it has nothing to say. It may be seen as a more or less random collection of classless slobs and power-fanciers. They make a nuisance of themselves with fatuous, instant decisions about dangerous dogs and drugs, the storage of shotguns, police road- blocks and unpasteurised cheese. But with- out leadership or sustaining loyalty to a class, a culture, even a group of friends, it does not dare draw attention to the minefield ahead, let alone take action to neutralise or evade it.
I don't think this matters. There is no advantage in being ahead of your times in democratic politics. Solutions to unper- ceived problems are not generally welcome, especially if the solutions involve great hardship. It is all very well to say that when I come to power I will sack one in three public employees. I will demand GCSE 0- level Latin as a condition of employment at any grade in the Civil Service, I will decrim- inalise drugs, I will abolish the higher levels of taxation and I will allow the wages of domestic servants to be deducted from an employer's taxable income. Then I will re- start the Lilley countdown on welfare bene- fits.
It is all very well to say these things, but it would be the act of a madman to propose any of them. Britain is going through a very foolish phase at the moment — as its clear intention to elect a party of increased pub- lic spending illustrates. Being unable to identify any of its more serious problems, it is scarcely in a position to agree solutions to them. Perhaps it would be helpful to list the problems: 1) the inexorable growth of unproductive, parasitic public employment. This is generated from within the state jug- gernaut; politicians have shown themselves too idle and cowardly to oppose it; 2) the collapse of educational standards, adding to the unemployability of the young and leaving Britain the dunce of Europe, with public debate reduced to populist sound- bites and Sun headlines; 3) the growth of the criminal underclass, fuelled by unem- ployability and drugs. It is said that nearly 70 per cent of youth offences are drug- related. To decriminalise drugs might cost 15,000 deaths a year, many of them among young people, but someone must decide that this is preferable to supporting one- and-a-half million full-time, often violent criminals in our midst. It would also spare us the gigantic and costly apparatus of oppression needed to reduce the supply.
A less urgent problem in our society is the odious level of envy directed at anyone who succeeds or is lucky. Higher levels of taxation — or 'progressive taxation' as it is `I'd like to meet another girl called Louise.' called, indicating that the purpose of taxa- tion is to impose material equality — are the embodiment of this, as well as being a great nuisance to pay. Finally, the unem- ployability of so many young people is fur- ther aggravated by the high rates of pay and high standards required in modern jobs. Nothing is so alienating or conducive to criminality as unemployment. The obvi- ous solution is to employ our unemploy- ables at low wages, with bed and board, to do simple jobs like nannying, cooking, cleaning shoes, driving the car and what you will. The tax concession required is infinitely cheaper than keeping them in approved schools, or housing them, and cheaper even than keeping them under surveillance on probation.
I could go on for ever with useful sugges- tions — how probation officers should be traded in for disapprobation officers, whose job it is to pull faces and make noises of disgust at their charges — but the point is that none of these things will ever be done. On top of the stupidity factor, in democrat- ic politics you have the cowardice factor, and on balance I feel we should be grateful for it. We have reached a point where we do not have the faintest idea what we should do next. Among more astute observers, socialism has discredited itself not only in its public ownership and central planning manifestations (which plainly don't work) but also in its central appeal of state welfarism. The trouble with state wel- fare is that it grows and it grows, and its bureaucracy grows and grows, until the economy which supports both forms of par- asite — its beneficiaries and its bureaucrats — collapses.
Ours is about to collapse, as Mr Clarke's deficits of £50 billion and £36 billion clearly indicate. Yet we propose to give welfarism another try. How, with these deficits already running against him, is Mr Blair to launch a massive resurgence of public spend- ing? A probation officer who sat next to me at dinner last week seemed to think it would be taken from defence expenditure. That, I fear, is the level of political interest at the moment and I am sorry to have bored read- ers by writing about politics. But the answer to the growing criminal underclass is either to put it in nanny's uniform or give it a phial of cut-price heroin and see how it gets on. But life has been extraordinarily pleasant these last 16 years, when all is said and done, and the good times aren't over yet.
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