SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
J. W. M. THOMPSON
If I had a hundred dollars to spare I think I would spend the money on becoming an honorary citizen of Anguilla. The misfortunes of this minute Caribbean island, which have given it a certain obscure place in the world news recently, are very touching. Its ambition is to be independent: its fate (and with British connivance at that) is to be handed over to a bullying administration in the nearby island of St Kitts. To their credit they have shown spirit enough to resist. Some of their leaders, after being kept in prison in St Kitts for months, are due to come up for trial next week. I hope the trial, which has a nasty smell about it even before it opens, gets properly reported in the wider world.
Meanwhile the Anguillians are campaigning for support in America. One of their flourishes is to offer honorary citizenship to any supporter who sends a hundred dollars to their trust fund to finance independence. They have told their story in a rather movingly naive advertisement in American newspapers. One of their fears is that if they lose their independence the island is to be taken over for 'development' by American gambling and hotel interests. They reject the prospect of being turned into 'a nation of waiters and servants.' All they ask (and what optimists they must be) is to be left alone, especially by the new colonialism of gambling syndicates and international big business. 'We wouldn't think it polite,' they explain, 'that so many visitors should be on the island at once that they couldn't at least have lunch with the President.'
Hush-hush
I have mixed feelings about the fact that the D Notice system, by means of which the Govern- ment maintains a 'security' censorship of the press, appears to be collapsing. I dare say some people in Whitehall are wringing their hands about this, as Donald McLachlan reports else- where in this issue; but if so they have asked for it. Mr Wilson's absurd battle with the Daily Express earlier this year really began the col- lapse, because it seemed to many journalists then that the censorship issue was being invoked for non-security (that is to say political) reasons. Only one such episode is needed for everyone to start looking more closely at what has been accepted hitherto without much question. As it happens the Philby furore, and officialdom's reaction to it, has provided another unhappy example of the system's workings. The Sunday Times had to disobey two D Notices to get its Philby story into print, and I congratulate them on backing their own judgment in this way. Simultaneously Mr John Gordon in the Sunday Express informs readers that one recent D Notice orders a complete blackout of informa- tion about people who are or have been em- ployed by our intelligence services. The publica- tion of the gist of a D Notice in this way is itself a breach of the censorship (there was a fearful hullaballoo, it will be remembered, when the SPECTATOR helpfully printed the terms of a couple of Notices involved in the Daily Express affair). But, again, I don't doubt that John Gordon was right to break the taboo, even though my colleague Donald McLachlan may take the opposite view. Censorship on such a scale is scarcely acceptable in a free country.
Which brings me to the real danger in all this —that with the present system toppling (and it will take more than this week's appointment of a successor to Colonel Sammy Lohan to bring back the old order) the interests of the magic word 'security' will lead to some more severe form of control being devised. One must hope (with fair confidence, happily) that the press will refuse to fall for this.
Anomaly'
A prosecution in a magistrates' court the other day involved an anomalous aspect of the law on sexual offences which appears not to have been much noticed. A man and a woman were accused of having committed buggery together. Under recent legislation this is no longer an offence when practised by two adult males. Heterosexual buggery only continues to be an offence, surely, by virtue of a parliamentary oversight; in fact, Wolfenden mentioned that if it were to be legalised between consenting male adults, Parliament would presumably accept the logic of legalising heterosexual buggery at the same time. It seems strange that the charge should still exist.
Departures
This has been an impressive week for deaths: the obituary columns seem to have been filled with names of significance—from Attlee to Sar- gent, Vernon Watkins to Jimmy Gold, Andre Maurois to Norman Angell. I find that these two last names have both reminded me of schooldays, for quite different reasons. Sir Norman Angell came to lecture at my school just before the war. He was regarded as a welcome prophet, because it was widely be- lieved that in The Great Illusion he had some- how demonstrated that war was impossible in the modern world. It was an extraordinary reputation. I don't suppose any other writer has been so dogged by popular misunderstand- ing of his message. Those who actually read his writings realised that in fact he was saying something quite different, but of course when any book has the enormous vogue enjoyed by The Great Illusion many more people become aware of it by hearsay than go to the trouble of digesting it. Norman Angell was occupied in trying to correct the misapprehension through several decades of his long life. I don't remember what he said in his lecture, except that he left us convinced (as of course we all were anyhow, at heart) that we would soon be at war.
The death of Andre Maurois brought back the 'thirties for me in a different way. His biography of Shelley was the first book ever to be published as a Penguin. It is hard now to remember, in a world overflowing with mar- vellous paperbacks, what a delightful surprise it was to be able to buy decently printed new books for sixpence. Perhaps Sir Allen Lane is today not sufficiently recognised as the great liberator he has been.
The permissive society
A nine year old girl came home from school this week reporting that her class had been studying the Ten Commandments, and conse- quently had learned what `to commit adulter'; meant. 'It means putting sand in sugar,' she said.
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