ANOTHER VOICE
A few examples of the distressing English sentimentality about children
AUBERON WAUGH
Ido not know how the Conservative Party manages to find them. No doubt people like Mr David Waddington are still to be discovered in provincial solicitors' offices, but even there, I imagine, they are more likely than not to be seen as an embarrassment and a joke. In his hot youth — or at any rate when he was 39 or so — he managed to get himself elected a Conservative Member for Nelson and Col- ne, at a by-election in 1968. It was not a constituency which anybody could have expected to go Conservative at that time. As I remember the incident — I was then political correspondent of the Spectator — the by-election was caused by the death of the Labour incumbent, Mr Sydney Silver- man, who was a passionate opponent of capital punishment. It was a general back- lash against the Moors Murderers in that area which explained the freakish result of the 1968 by-election, and first introduced Mr David Waddington to the national stage. He disappeared from sight after the second election of 1974, but reappeared in the Conservative revival of 1979, being appointed a whip by Mrs Thatcher on the spot. Now he is a minister of state in the Home Office, representing somewhere cal- led the Ribble Valley, which I suspect of being in Lancashire.
Perhaps it was his earlier training over the Moors Murders which he brought to bear in discussing the hilarious case of Mr Mohsen Nikbaht, the 27-year-old Iranian student, and his 12-year-old bride, called Elham Bahrami. There can be no doubt that his indignation was genuine. He also carried the Attorney General and Mrs Thatcher with him in his furious indigna- tion, borrowed from the slightly more suspect indignation of the Sun newspaper that morning. Now legislation is being rushed through Parliament making it ill- egal for foreign nationals to bring their child-brides to Britain.
There is nothing more disgusting in British political life than the sight of a Conservative who thinks he has public opinion behind him. Watching this prize oaf on television, I began to understand why the campaign of his fellow Home Office minister, Mr David 'Dave' Mellor, against heroin has been such a conspicuous failure although Dave is 20 years younger than David, and there can be no doubt that public opinion is solidly in favour of discouraging young people from taking heroin. As new research just released by the Central Office of Information (and reported by Brian Deer in the Observer) confirms, Dave's £3.4 million advertising campaign has so far had exactly the oppo- site effect to that intended among those young people most likely to be exposed to the temptation of heroin. Leah Davidson, a worker in the field, was quoted as saying: 'Advertising may be good for vote- catching, but the money should be spent on projects that work.'
It is the same pattern that I have frequently discerned in the schools' cam- paign against smoking. Young people now demonstrably smoke as never before — a cause for c bration among taxpayers, who might r ect that an end to the habit would probablr mean an extra 15p on the standard rate of income tax.
But I have no desire to marry a 12-year- old Iranian girl, let alone an English comprehensive school-girl of that age, any more than most male Spectator readers have, I imagine. Nor are these foreign- contracted marriages a major feature in the Changing Face of Britain, as the Sun's delight in having discovered Mohsen and Elham amply illustrates. The problem is to show up the absurdity of Mr Waddington's stance without seeming to urge a general violation of sickly, pre-pubescent English schoolgirls.
Mr Waddington may not be aware of the fact, but until the year of his birth — 1929 — 12 was the legal age for marriage in England. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 introduced the 16-year-old age of consent to sexual intercourse, but by some anomaly the age for marriage re- mained at 12 until the Marriage Act of 1929 (now incorporated in the 1949 Mar- riage Act) raised it to 16.
These interesting facts can all be found in Sex Law by Tony Honore (Duckworth 1978) along with the equally significant fact that in 1860 the average age of puberty in English girls was 16-17, whereas now it is 12-13. In countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia I imagine it is even younger.
Islam has always allowed marriage at puberty, possibly reckoning that if you are going to die at 25 you might as well get married at 11 or 12. Over here, of course, women do not die on average until they have reached the monstrous age of 75 or 76 and do not marry until they have reached the average age of 231/2. There can be other explanations for the cultural difference, not least that English law has often been shy of recognising female puberty, prefer- ring to set some arbitrary age limit on these activities, and in our cold climate it is by no means uncommon for girls to reach the age of 14 or even 15 before the onset of puberty. None of which excuses Mr Waddington in treating the unfortunate Iranian student as if he were some sort of Moors Murderer, any more than it excuses the prurient gutter press for hounding this unfortunate couple out of their home. I suspect that the confusion of this ripe Iranian maiden with our own whey-faced pre-pubescent school- girls was delii -rate. In fact the Sexual Offences Act ch. 1956 provides this unfor- tunate couple with a mant.c of legalitY. They have done nothing wrong by the laws of either their country or o. .r own. The Parliamentary Question of hi Geoffrey Dickens (C., Littleborough and Saddle- worth) to ask the Attorney General if he will initiate a prosecution of Mr Mohsen Nikbaht, of Greater Manchester, for hav" ing intercourse with a girl under the age of 16 years, namely Elham Bahrami, is 3 vulgar impertinence. Against this, of course, is the argurVent that British residents in such countries as Iran and Saudi Arabia are expected t° abide by their customs, notably the vil! and barbaric interdiction of alcohol whiell makes Islam stink in the nostrils of Christ" ians. The answer to that is that two wrcing,s do not make a right. If we cannot sll°' ourselves more civilised than these temper" ance savages, why take any pride in °lir civilisation? But the real explanation for Mr Vi/a,_cl- dington's vote-catching posture is to be found in the Englishman's disgusting sell- timentality about children. It was the sarrie attitude as made the ambitious Australian; Clive James, once accuse Richard Ingranle of making children cry on the way b°1h, from school. As anybody knows who ha; been a child, let alone had children, thel,, is nothing less important than a chit° ' tears. Children cry, then they stop erYi,h! and move to the next thing. I fancy it is tric'_ same sentimentality, in even more extreul! form, which explains the success of Pit!". pubescent girl prostitutes in Liverpool wird ask a Mars Bar a time. Personally, I won' prefer the Mars Bar.
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