Second Prize
Much ado about nothing Catherine Poulton (Horsham High) It is symptomatic of a nation that no longer takes itself seriously, not indeed deserves to be taken seriously, by itself or anyone else, that its people evolve for themselves a new set of morals, issues, and causes, or at least what they believe to be morals, issues and causes, and these usually turn out to be ammoral, acausal nonissues. In girding up the collective loin for these mammoth challenges that lie ahead, they carelessly hurl about references to a bygone age, a cause celebre of the past, or any old reference to the past that seems apposite, in an attempt to bring together enough diverse influences to make the collective voice shout loud enough to drown the diversities. Hence for us Britons, the Spirit of Dunkirk will see us through almost anything that someone cares to invite it to see us through. (Regardless of the fact that we fled at Dunkirk.)
Such is the fate of British Society today, or at least the noisier elements of it. The British, no longer the influential, arrogant people that they have been in the past, are looking for a new role; turning their backs on the kind of compassionate and caring society they could be (albeit not terribly effectively, due to lack of means) now see fit to throw themselves into every nonissue that rears its ugly pin-head, and contrive to go about it in the most meaningless way possible.
A few years ago, Consumerism boated across the Atlantic, and swept along by a tide of publicity from the media, is now being bandied about by anybody who feels it is in their interest, along with a few public minded souls who feel it is in the general interest; in addition it is being paid lip-service to by any politician who has the wit to realise that the way to a voter's heart is through his stomach, Japanese stereo equipment or soap-suds. The whole truth about the bally-hoo over such apparently stirring issues as the quality of weed-killers is that the Western nations, having become so materialistically, well-endowed (leaving aside our under-privileged minorities) that, lacking much to complain about, have turned to complaining about their materialistic endowments instead.
This same law of scraping the bottom of the barrel for some assailable-looking bandwagon applies to our political life as well; our political leaders, lacking the imagination and the funds to produce the sort of brain-children that some American politicians are capable of producing, providing us with no scandals of such staggering proportions as those seen on the other side of the Atlantic, provide a vacuum that the Forces of National Concern have to fill with revelations of the sexual lives of a few junior Ministers of whom hardly anybody has heard.
The only relief (apart from the comic relief) afforded in this fond attachment for worthless crusades is that every such crusade passes away as quickly as it has arisen, buried in the over-crowded rubbish bin of history. Who now can offer any comment on the furore over the census returns of 1971, when forces rallied round to deplore that a computer was going to know how much one earnt, how many people were abiding in one's household, whether Auntie Flo came up from Shoreham two or three times a week, whether one was sleeping with the next-door neighbour's torn cat? Who now cares in the slightest what the Longford Report came up with (possibly due to the fact that it came up with absolutely nothing, save some startling glimpses of the obvious and some revelations which I can only presume were intended to arouse the conscience of all hitherto uncorrupted persons, but had, in fact long been realised and quite rightly ignored.) Who now associates Mrs Whitehouse with any potential threat, save the threat that some overworked TV scriptwriter will come up with yet another joke about her. Who now spends sleepless nights and tormented coffee-breaks pandering the great imponderable Who is the Third Minister?
But although this obsession with trivia has its merciful side, it also has a more lamentable and lessconsidered one. In emphasising the less important we are obscuring the more important. When we tear our hair out over the abandonment of free school milk, we are providing ourselves with an umbrella under which all right-thinking people can be sheltered, hence postponing the real debate on the kind of educational structure we ought to have, with all the brain-taxing and moral questions that it raises. Furthermore, the free milk debate fell neatly into party political pigeonholes, and everyone knew where they stood; reassuring after the
Prime Ministerial election of 1970, so steeped in consensus. The Fuss pots-against-the-census brigade could have put their talents to far better uses than belly-aching about the right of privacy and an Englishman's home is his castle and so on; it might have been a good deal more useful if people had demanded that the census returns be published; but instead, the statistical witnesses of social inequality lie mouldering in some bastion of bureaucracy in Whitehall; Whitehall knows Best and can do its best to keep quiet about it. (Not that this campaign was without its useful political spin-off, either; the so-called threat to the right of privacy encroached on a Liberal principle, thus serving notice that there was still room for Liberal principles in a society which had long since absorbed and taken for granted all Liberal principles.) The onslaught of consumerism, with its probing of the standards of manufactured goods, might be able to furnish some answers as to why we are assuming the muchtalked-about role of a banana republic; but who wants to do that when it is vastly more entertaining to sit and watch the television stars present us with spectacles of defunct washing machines being hurtled off the White Cliffs, and battered vehicles being made into a set of bag-pipes by some whizz-kid who has a penchant for that sort of useless creativity.
Although I have suggested that Britain's newly-found lack of identity (if such a thing can be said to be found) has led us to this role of such a happy band of dedicated fusspots, I suppose that it is possible that this peculiar trait may have been with us a longer time, a supposition not too easy to prove, as mercifully this sort of behaviour doesn't get accorded much space in the history books. It is true that this insistence on sexual niceties is only a recent phenomena (in George Ill's day, for example, Who is the Third Minister would probably have been a reference to yet another change of government by this hapless monarch), but for all I know, the nation's peasants may have been up in arms about the invasion of privacy thrust upon them by the Domesday Book returns, and it would be silly to deny that it is ever anything more than very rare to see people as upset by the misfortunes of others as they are by their own often less important ones. Yet it is pleasant to imagine a day when this nauseating trivia would feature less prominently in our lives, when we could scrape away the topsoil of society and begin a healthy period of critical self-examination, and, having come to terms with the great chasms in our own society, might look further afield (boundlessly optimistic, this) to a world which at present requires our assistance, but could well overtake the Western World when the pendulum swings in their direction, and would then be fully justified in dancing on our grave. The energy is not lacking, as the bally-hoo over meaningless causes shows; what is missing is the will to harness it in the right direction. Praise the Lord and pass the volition.
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