Another voice
Back to the front
Auberon Waugh
Liverpool Living as one does, or tends to do, in rather a large country mansion surrounded by its own meadows, lakes and wooded pleasure grounds, I sometimes find that the normal satisfaction a man might be expected to feel in the elegance and superiority of his own appointments is marred by a certain nervousness. Wherever the class war is being fought, it has not yet reached the Taunton area, but even in West Somerset we hear— or imagine we hear—the rumble of distant guns. My neighbours take refuge in bizarre, violent and sometimes unpleasant political attitudes, most of which seem to involve the killing or imprisonment of large numbers of their fellow-citizens. Even the mildest of them demand the instant appointment of Enoch Powell to a position somewhere between that of wartime Prime Minister of England and Chancellor of the German Reich in the same period.
Having studied Enoch for a long time, I am almost sure that he would be a spectacular disaster. But so, it seems to me, would Mrs Thatcher be a disaster, if a less spectacular one, and elementary fairness seems to require that Enoch be given a try. Wherever I go I find warm affection for Enoch, often in the most unlikely quarters, possibly for the only reason that he is a pariah to the Whitehall and Westminster establishments. The only substantial opposition to him seems to come from committed, card-bearing members of the Conservative Party, and even they are split. In fact, I would not be at all surprised if a referendum held tomorrow on the simple issue of 'Enoch—Oui ou Non' without further debate or explanation produced a respectable majority of 'Ouis'.
In Liverpool, for instance, there is a substantial body of opinion which appears to regard him as a Catholic left-wing rebel from the Labour Party (but not so left-wing as to be unrespectable) whose chief concern is to ensure that the department of Liverpool Corporation responsible for mending windows and unblocking lavatories in council estates does its work promptly.
How on earth, it might be asked, do I know what people are thinking in Liverpool ? It is a fair question. Nobody even told me what a beautiful city it was—and still is, despite some of the vilest modern buildings in Europe—and in thirty-six years I had never so much as visited it before this week. It just seemed a good place to start if I was going to involve myself more thoroughly in the class struggle to which we should all be dedicating ourselves, as I argued in the Spectator a few weeks ago.
• What had alarmed me in my view of the
class war from West Somerset, as I reported at the time, was that all the gunfire seeme,d to be coming from the other camp. Whether out of wetness or, as I prefer to believe, natural sanctity, the middle classes were taking all the punishment, not only in taxes but also in the war of words and ideas. The first task in my lonely but undeniably admirable campaign was to seek out and confront this class animosity at its roots. It is for this reason that I have spent my time since returning from France trailing round the slums of Manchester, the twilight areas of Birkenhead and docks of Liverpool with a merry crew of assistants and researchers. My role has been to taunt the unemployed in pubs, lecture slum-dwellers in their pitiful homes, insult dockers at their place of work and generally make myself useful in an understanding of this delicate problem.
My efforis have been surprisingly unsuccessful, although there was an excellent moment in a pub. An unemployed electrician whom I had been taunting with the reminder of how much richer I was leaned forward and said: 'What are your qualifications? I know exactly what your qualifications are. You bent over in the showers to pick up some soap at Eton and Harrow, like all the rest of them.'
But my most surprising discovery so far has been how little class animosity exists where one might expect to find it most. Certainly, it is not that people up here are especially polite. They are not at all polite in the conventional sense, and far franker than their equivalents in my part of the country. But they have an indomitable goodwill, a friendliness, a refusal to believe that anyone can dissent from their own conclusions and attitudes which I found almost impossible to overcome.
Among the dockers, it is true, this absence of class animosity may have been a temporary phenomenon. Insult and goad them as I would, I could only draw the tolerant, contented purr of cats which have suddenly found their cream ration doubled. But among the unemployed and poor the lack of class animosity was not the result, as might be supposed, of the sort of political apathy which is well known to afflict starving Africans and Indians. On the contrary, many of them were vocal and militant, but all their militancy was directed to securing better service from the Liverpool Corporation and more benefits from the Department of Social Security. Such animosity as
existed—and was very strong indeed in places—was all directed against faceless bureaucrats in these two departments, wh° are regarded at the same time as the universal providers and class enemies of the entire human race outside. It was only then that I saw the extent of the gulf which divides the English. No doubt people are friendlier in the North and conditions are also worse. For most of the unemployed there is not the slightest prospect of employment even if they wanted it verY much indeed, which some of them do. But those who are employed have exactly the same attitude, that if a window is broken they will wait three months for the Corpur ation to come and mend it. In the course of time they will pester the Corporation offices with telephone calls and personal Wear" ances, they will take days off work to organise a petition and even a demonstration/ they will expend twice the money and twenty times the energy needed to mend the window themselves, but they would sooner live with a broken window for the rest of their lives than mend it themselves. If anYbody doubts the truth of this, I can take hilt on a tour of estates in Manchester, Liverpool and Birkenhead which will prove the point.
Nearly everybody I have met up here has been extraordinarily nice, but the two most dynamic people I have met were both fullY (and independently) engaged in teaching their fellow-citizens to claim whichever uf the forty-one'state benefits were available to them. They are not idle or reluctant to helP themselves; the only difference is that selfhelp means forcing the Council or corpora tion to help you.
One of the most important documents have read for some time is a pamphlet bY the little-known Tory back-bencher RalPh Howell in which, with the help of tables and charts, he shows how nearly half the population is now better off not working than working. It is called Why Work ?(Conservative Political Centre 75p) and shows how 3 married man with two or more children is now better off not working until he can earn more than £65 (for a single man, the figure is £40). If anybody really wishes to knoW what is happening in Britain, I can onlY suggest he reads this document, which iS unfortunately very boring.
People have been talking in hushed, corn' passionate voices for as long as I can remember about the Poverty Trap, by which means-tested benefits make it a waste uf time for growing sections of the population to earn money. If one adds the ProsperitY Trap which greets anyone who escapes frog' the Poverty Trap with punitive taxation, then one begins to see why the class war has withered. Perhaps it only survives among political activists jockeying for position, half-witted Marxist schoolteachers, actresses, bad journalists and debauthed nlaY reviewers. But we must not be discouraged. The cure is plainly worse than the disease and any attempt to solve our present eco" nomic difficulties will revive it.
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