Another voice

The 'anguish' of Greenham

Auberon Waugh

Criticising Mrs Thatcher's appointment of Michael Heseltine as Defence Secretary in the Sunday Telegraph this week, the great and good Sir Peregrine Worsthorne — if only the Cabinet's collec- tive head contained one chicken-pellet of his wisdom! — dwelt at some length on the new Defence Secretary's lack of weighty moral stature. If that is the chief desideratum for a Defence Secretary, of course it is hard to think of any member of the present government who qualifies or, indeed, a single Member of the House of Commons. The British public seems curiously reluctant to grant its political leaders the moral stature they crave. If it had been weighty moral stature that Mrs Thatcher was after, she would have needed to go outside Parliament and recruit some- one like Sir William Rees-Mogg, Mr Jimmy Savile or Dr Runcie.

This quality was particularly necessary in a Defence Secretary who would be required to lead 'a new crusade against unilateral- ism,' said Sir Peregrine: 'For a public anguish as profound as anything in modern times is not going to be assuaged by a politician whose head is most famous for its mane of golden hair.'

I found this idea of 'a public anguish as profound as anything in modern times' rather arresting. Presumably, he is referring to English public anguishes, rather than in- viting us to compare the misgivings of feminine activists at Greenham Common with the public anguishes of Afghanistan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nigeria or India after partition. It might be said that modern Bri- tain is not particularly remarkable for the profundity of its public anguishes, although stalwart efforts are made to convince us that anguishes exist over such things as the Yorkshire Ripper, unemployment on the Mersey and the Tyne, lack of money for video machines in comprehensive school gymnasia, law and order in South London.

Where the peace women of Greenham Common are concerned, he argues, 'defence issues today have assumed such potentially cataclysmic proportions that they can be properly considered only at a level of the highest seriousness'.

Something of this level of high seriousness may be gauged from the history of Mrs Helen John, who left her husband and five children, the youngest six and four, 16 months ago to march to Greenham Common. Her family expected her back after a week, but she has stayed there ever since, resisting all appeals to return. Her husband, himself a CND sympathiser, ex- plained to George Gale that 'she has chang- ed from the housewife and mother we knew into a fervent feminist and nuclear protester — it was very frightening'. He now wants a divorce.

Mr Gale seemed less impressed by the in- tellectual and moral quality of this anguish than Sir Peregrine: 'Her self-indulgent abandonment of her children will do nothing but bring contempt upon her chosen cause and upon the women at Greenham Common who have turned her into what she has become: a woman and a mother who has repudiated womanhood and motherhood in the name of a sterile and arid feminism which is an in- sult to her sex and her humanity.'

Grand stuff. But there seems to be a con- flict of interpretation on the point whether the ladies of Greenham Common are engaged in a feminist or an anti-nuclear demonstra- tion. If the former, then Mrs Thatcher's choice of Tarzan as her Defence Secretary might have been more intelligent than Sir Peregrine allows and preferable even to so- meone of greater moral stature like Dr Runcie. By chance, I have some evidence to hand which might help us decide whether the inspiration behind Greenham Common is primarily pacifist or feminist.

Coaches to Greenham Common are organised from ten points in London by the Peace Working Group of the GLC Women's Committee which operates from Room 95 in County Hall. Telephone numbers are obtainable from the GLC Women's Committee Bulletin, pubished from the same address, which also houses the Education of Women and Girls Work- ing Group and Working Groups for Black Women, Violence against Women, Les- bians, Women with Disabilities and various other women. What follows is taken from the Bulletin's report of the Peace Working Group: 'The fact that the GLC is a Nuclear Free Zone does not mean that there are no fur- ther efforts towards securing peace that we can make, and in particular we need to make sure that the voice of women is heard in any discussion of the subject. The greatest cause of conflict is injustice in the distribution of power and economic clout, and the people who have most to lose in a world, or a country, or a community dedicated to solving conflict by non-violent means are almost exclusively male. ,4 peace which does not include a balance of justice in daily life will not be acceptable to women (my italics).'

Anybody who has been able to follow the argument of that extraordinarily Pilgerish prose to its last sentence will see it clearly stated that peace is subordinate to the aims of the women's movement. The anguish is even more vividly described in the next paragraph:

'Women suffer multiple oppression. when the Arms Race is convulsed by the insane need to escalate, or to move onto (sic) another phase of this hideous game. We suffer the pain of having babies, the anxiety of bringing them up to feel safe and happy in a mad situation, with totally inadequate support from our society. And then we suf- fer when they fight and have nightmares about what may happen ... We do not want armed forces with an arsenal of nuclear weapons in addition to the vile range of conventional weapons now made to be in charge of our "security". We will lay down our own patterns for defence and build our own structures for security.'

Whatever these patterns for defence may be, they are presumably being worked out under canvas on the dripping fields of Greenham Common. Although the GLC's lesbian activities are looked after by the Lesbian Working Group, operating from the same room as the Peace Working Group in County Hall, something of the in- terdependence of these Working Groups may be guessed from this extract which ap- pears in the report of the Education of Women and Girls Working Group in the same Bulletin of the GLC Women's Com- mittee:

'If you are not going to Block the Base at Greenham Common you might like to come along and talk about the various ways in which we can support the initiatives being made in the education of women and girls of all ages and all abilities to really come to grips with putting the Equal Opportunities Commission recommendations into prac- tice.° In other words, 'Education', which, like 'Peace', one might have thought a fairly uncontroversial subject for women to form a Working Group about, has become another synonym for militant feminism.

The tragedy is that these aggressive; il- literate women plainly have much to learn both about peace and about education. But the anguish of Greenham Common has nothing to do with a considered judgment of the balance of risks involved between a conventional or nuclear defence policy. Greenham woman is not even concerned about the horrors faced by her menfolk at war, only about her own nightmares and previous birth-pains. But chiefly she is in- volved in a retreat from reason into some collective crypto-lesbian infantilism: 'We do not want armed forces with an arsenal of nuclear weapons in addition to the vile range of conventional weapons now made to be in charge of our "security". We will lay down our own patterns for defence and build our own structures for security.'

I should have thought that the dripping plains of Greenham Common were just about the right place for these women and Tarzan just about the right man to deal with them.