ANOTHER VOICE
The recreations of Sir Nicholas, or what a condom cannot do
CHARLES MOORE
Anyone who frequents the Palace of Westminster cannot avoid being familiar with Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, the Conserva- tive Member of Parliament for Perth and Kinross. According to his Who's Who entry for 1991, his recreations are 'loving beauty and beautifying love'. According to his entry for 1990, his recreations are `growling, prowling, scowling and owling'. In pursuit of all these, perhaps, he will tell you, particularly after lunch, more than you necessarily wanted to be told about the mysteries of human sexuality. Sir Nicholas' father was a leading psychiatrist and expert in the field. His son would like you to recognise that his own knowledge of the subject is of a less theoretical nature and all the better for that. In 1989, his recreations were 'draining brains and scanning bodies'. In 1986, it was simply 'ornitholatry', not, I think he wishes you to understand (and as he is quite capable of putting it), of the feathered variety.
Last week, this 'author, forester, paint- er, poet, television and radio broadcaster, journalist, dress-designer, landscape gardener, bon viveur and wit' (Who's Who 1991) applied his knowledge to the world stage. He attacked the Overseas Develop- ment Minister, Mrs Lynda Chalker (re- creations: 'music, the disabled, cooking, theatre, driving', ditto) for saving lives in Bangladesh, something of which few of her other critics had accused her. 'All she is doing is giving these poor people the chance to breed more children who will suffer the same horrible fate as their parents: death by starvation,' said the complete Renaissance Scotsman (recrea- tions: 'being blunt and sharp at the same time', Who's Who 1983): 'It is not death which is our problem, as the media would have you think, but birth. . . . If we had spent the £167 million on condoms, we wouldn't have had these problems in the first place.'
`Before I am 65,' said the 57-year-old bon viveur (recreations: 'bunking and de- bunking', Who's Who 1978), almost as if it were a personal boast, 'the population of the world will have moved from the pre- sent figure of 5,800 million to 10,000 million,' According to the United Nations population fund, UNFPA, in figures pub- lished on Monday, the situation is not quite as dramatic as that: the 10 billion point will probably not be reached until 2050 when Sir Nicholas, assuming he has. avoided natural disasters such as drowning in a butt of malmsey, will be 116 and will have had to devise 59 amusing new recreations for Who's Who.
In a way I am grateful to him because the • argument in favour of mass contraception is often taken to be a feminist one, and its espousal by Sir Nicholas (recreations: 'phi- lanthropy and philogyny', Who's Who 1985) makes clear that it is not. It is, at root, the feeling that birth and not death is the problem.
In her recent Counterblast pamphlet The Pope and Contraception, the diabolical doctrine, Brenda Maddox writes: 'Women should parade with placards demanding that the Church give them the most impor- tant right of all: to choose not to become pregnant.' Leaving aside the fact that they do have that right anyway, even without contraception, could it really be the most important right of all? How have Sir Nicholas and Mrs Maddox and, in milder form, almost everyone in the Western world come to think this way?
I am not talking here about why people in the West use contraception themselves. They obviously do so because they do not believe that, in the words of the Humanae Vitae encyclical, 'each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life', and so they think they are free to consult their own convenience. This could be for a good reason, such as that the doctors had warned the woman that having another baby would kill her. It could be because they are fed up with reproduction altogether (Sir Nicholas has not listed 'creating' as his recreation in Who's Who since 1976). This is a more or less separate question from the one raised by Sir Nicho- las — the belief that contraception is what is needed in the Third World, and that the population explosion will destroy us all.
It sounds like common sense to say that if the world produces more babies it will have more difficulty in feeding them. Like most things which sound like common sense, however, it is not true. Individual wealth has almost invariably grown be- cause population has grown, and a fall in population has almost invariably produced greater poverty. The earth's goods may be limited, but so great has been people's ingenuity that those goods have been put to much better use than before. The earth always had penicillin, but it was not avail- able as a good until men unearthed it. The fact that so many more people are alive today than have ever been before is surely evidence not that the world is about to collapse, but that most people, including most people in poor countries, are much richer than ever before. They live longer, and they lose fewer of their children; they are healthier. Population growth is like economic growth. It has disagreeable con- sequences, but the consequences of the opposite are far worse.
What seems intolerable to the Fairbairns of the First World is just that there are so jolly many of these wretched people. 'I hope I will not sound unpitiful,' said Sir Nicholas, 'if I remind you that the popula- tion of Bangladesh, reduced by 120,000 ten days ago, has already overtaken that num- ber.' Well, yes, he does sound unpitiful. Not content with drawing on our over- worked wells of sympathy by drowning in large numbers, these piccaninnies have the effrontery to go on reproducing them- selves. That is the message of Sir Nicholas (recreations: 'giving and forgiving', Who's Who 1980). If he thinks they are peopling the world with Calibans he should look at his own face in the glass.
At the Daily Telegraph we have a daily conference in which we discuss, among other things, the faults of that morning's paper. About two weeks ago, I pointed out what I thought was an odd juxtaposition on the front page. A substantial two-column story appeared under the headline 'VAT late payers win court ruling'. Next to it was a two-paragraph story headed: '50,000 may have died in cyclone'. My objection was overruled. The 50,000 figure was not accu- rate (hence 'may have died'), the VAT story was an authentic court report, and besides, more Daily Telegraph readers are late with their VAT than have lost relatives in the Bay of Bengal.
What I had priggishly thought callous was actually sane and rational. We cannot have a very great effect on whether the people of Bangladesh live or die. But we do at least owe it to our common humanity to let them live in the way that they choose, and not rail against them for existing.
Some good may have come from the great debate. In response to Sir Nicholas, a senior Oxfam spokesman was quoted as saying: 'A condom can't stop a cyclone.' We are all going to have to learn that there are really many, many things that a con- dom cannot do.
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