Another voice
'The bastards won't back us!'
Auberon Waugh
In reply to the smear of "The Buggers Won't Work" the workers of the UK have every, reason to say of the media, and of some Boards of Directors, "The Bastards Won't Back us!"' Thus Mr Jack Jones, concluding a long reply to an article by Dr A. L. Rowse in the 3unday Telegraph. Dr Rowse's views are held up as typical of those being expressed in the newspapers and on television nowadays: `Dr Rowse and writers with similar views are given space and time and massive support by the media to peddle their antiWorker prejudices at home and abroad.' None of which would matter, says Mr Jones, if important foreigners did not accept such views at their face value: 'Those who support or permit the international broadcasting of this divisive rubbish Will presumably be pleased to know that they are surprisingly effective in gaining acceptance of their views. Virtually every week of the year foreign visitors come to Transport House . . . The clear majority come convinced that the "British sickness" IS the unwillingness of our people to work, that we are lazy and indolent.' , No, no, the British sickness is something altogether different, thinks Mr Jones. It Comes from insufficient investment in industry and bad management. The British Worker is paid less, works longer hours, has fewer holidays, strikes no more often and takes fewer days off work than most of his eftpetitors. It is true that there might be a peed for greater productivity • in certain Industries, even for the lifting of restrictive Practices and overmanning agreements — !lone of us is perfect — but 'it is just as ilnPortant to recognise our strengths and successes as it is to analyse and define our, weaknesses.'
suppose it just depends whose side you are Ofl We know that the British car worker is less than half as productive with the same equiPment as his French or German equivalent, because the Government Think T s ank report on the car industry has told us :* We know that millions and millions of Pounds of taxpayers' investment in new Plant for British Steel is lying idle at Port Talbot because the unions can't agree on ml ajlning arrangements. Subtract the nationalised giants of car manufacture and !le. el from British industry, and you are left 71th ship-building where, according to a recent television programme on Japan, we are between eleven and thirteen times less Productive than our Japanese equivalents. tn of course there are a few brighter spots _on the industrial scene, and no doubt we may hear about them now that the Daily -cxpress has sorted out its printing prob lems. Perhaps it would be considered unbearably divisive to suggest that, apart from Dr Rowse and myself, nobody has claimed our present plight is the fault of the British worker; everybody has blamed the unions for creating the conditions which make further investment impossible. Like Mr Jones and possibly Dr Rowse, I believe that the unions represent the workers' attitudes perfectly well, but ours is not the fashionable view.
However, I can't accept that influential foreigners are aware of the mess this country is in. On the contrary, Government and union propaganda (ably assisted by the Cleverest Young Man in Britain, Mr Peter Jay) seems to have been extraordinarily successful, as shown by the recent article in Der Spiegel. How otherwise does Mr Jones explain Ford's apparently lunatic decision to build a 1 tiOm car factory near Bridgend, Glamorganshire, not twelve miles from the cold furnaces and idle steel mills of Port Talbot?
Two versions of our current situation are available, one from Government, union and commercial public relations services, the other from newspapers, television and our own observation. As I say, it depends which side you are an. Mr Jones is plainly justified in saying that the Bastards Don't Back Him, in that nearly every independent (or apparently independent) commentator has decided (1) that we are in a terrible mess and (2) that the unions are mostly to blame. If he is unprepared to concede point (1) there can be no useful discussion of point (2), of course. But he has put his finger on a major and largely unremarked phenomenon of our times when he observes that British journalists of newspapers and television are no longer prepared to accept official briefings on the state of.the nation.
True, politicians' utterances and crooked statistics about the rate of inflation are still reported. But nobody pretends to believe them any more. How does Mr Jones account for this curious disenchantment with the Labour government? If he is a fool, he will see the hand of proprietorial direction. The plain truth is that after three years of union government, there is scarcely a journalist working in Fleet Street — apart from a handful of hacks waiting for their life peerages on the Mirror — who will even pretend to believe in it.
One explanation is that Fleet Street is particularly exposed to union militancy. But I do not think that is the true explanation. Anxiety about the ultimate security of their jobs is cushioned, for the hacks of Fleet Street, by the prospect of lavish severance payments, and few object to being pre vented from working for a few days. The true explanation, I feel, lies deeper than that, and is easiest to see in television journalism, where strikes are fewer but the technicians' stranglehold is even more marked. It lies in a new awareness of the hostility and jealous hatred which the work-, ing class feels for anyone who is cleverer, more articulate or more nimble than it is.
I have often remarked how, like so many apes in the zoo, a working class in power cannot bear to be laughed at. Nor, it seems, can it bear to be criticised in any way, however seriously or responsibly. I wonder, whether Mr Jones ever read the speech by Mr Moss Evans, general secretary-elect of his own union, the TGWU, at the TUC's, special conference on trade unions and the media a few months ago: 'Our standpoint, therefore, is clear. The public are entitled to protection from abuse of this power to influence it (sic). Those who possess these powers must be required to exercise them within the terms of an "operator's licence". The qualifications for holding such a licence must be acceptance and practice of clearly defined standards of responsibility and accountability.' These clearly defined standards involve acceptance of a 'continuous monitoring service covering all the media to keep under scrutiny treatment of all our [the TUC's] activities, and those aspects of domestic and international news relating to our activities'.
This monitoring commission will have powers to take 'full, immediate action necessary to correct any misleading information or to redress any lack of balance'. In case we had not got his point, Mr Evans added: `And we must insist upon real public control of television and radio in order to give the public freedom of expression.'
In order to understand this gobbledygook, it might be wise to take into account Mr Hugh Scanlon's definition of liberty: 'Liberty, in my view, is conforming to public opinion'.
Now let us look at that model of a Workers' State, The Soviet Union. Last week, security police removed all copies of Animal Farm from the Moscow Book Fair, held to advertise the spirit of the Helsinki Agreement. Mr Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, explained Soviet treatment of dissidents at a celebration to mark the hundredth anniversary of Dzershinsky's birth. There were still small numbers of such people, 'just as there are thieves, bribe-takers, speculators and other offenders', he said: 'Both the former and the latter do harm to our society, and for that reason must be punished.'
Last week, Mr Jones opposed a TUC motion condemning the Soviet Union on the civil rights question. Such behaviour was not in the tradition of the British socialist movement, he said. Does he think it at all odd that the mighty Soviet Union is still frightened of a thirty-five-year-old fairy tale about animals? And is he still surprised and hurt that the bastards won't back him?
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