POLITICS
From the halls of Marks and Spencer to the shores of Tripoli
FERDINAND MOUNT
A more cynical and self-protective Brit- ish Prime Minister would have behaved as M. Mitterrand and Mr Craxi did and refused all part in the venture. But Mrs Thatcher, while by no means admiring of Mr Reagan's intellect or judgment, has an unambiguous belief in both the Western Alliance and the punishment of evil. So she went along, protesting, but she went along. And the damage done will, I suspect, long outlive a week which had already seen the double blow of the Fulham by-election and the killing of the Shops Bill.
The Tory benches are in a state of only half-suppressed outrage. The Labour ben- ches are packed and jubilant as I have not seen them since Harold Wilson's time. Will President Reagan turn out to be the first American President to destroy a friendly Allied government — and make it infinite- ly easier for an incoming Labour govern- ment to close the American bases?
Mr Reagan's action is far from unpre- cedented. Since long before the War of Jenkins' Ear, infuriated great powers have hit out disproportionately against regimes which sheltered or fostered piracy. Napier's zapping of Ethiopia at Magdala was a far more brutal and indiscriminate slaughter. But such abuse by a civilised nation of its technological superiority al- ways leaves scars which may take a century or more to heal, whatever may be its immediate effect on Arab leadership or Arab terrorism.
For the British Government, the miser- able adventure. comes at a particularly awkward time, not so much because anti- American feeling is running high as be- cause, on a variety of issues, the Govern- ment has begun to look out of touch with popular feeling, or unable to make its will effective, or both. From the halls of Marks and Spencer to the shores of Tripoli, the Government sounds off-key.
The downfall of the Shops Bill on the night of the Libya, raids was a clear case of Pharisees 1 Publicans 0. But it was a splendid transformation scene, rather like the bit in the Book of Revelation when St John is shown the things which must be hereafter and everyone comes on clothed in white raiment with crowns of gold on their heads. All those old backbenchers whom one had previously thought of as merely ex-economics lecturers and direc- tors of defunct advertising agencies, most of them prone to this or that weakness of the flesh, to say nothing of their share of envy, malice and all uncharitableness, sud- denly turn out to be the most tremendous Christians, churchwardens even. As the afternoon wore on, the odour of sanctity was suffocating. 'Remove not the ancient landmarks, which thy fathers have kept,' crooned Mr Donald Stewart, the Scottish Nationalist leader from the Western Isles. `Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy' — almost everyone could manage that one. Only Mr Nicholas Fairbairn (another terrific Christian) riposted with the passage about the hungry disciples plucking the ears of corn on the Sabbath although, so far as I can see, that would only entitle one to take Sunday brunch at the local wholefood restaurant.
Mr Fairbairn, like several Scottish MPs, attempted to decode the mystery of the Scottish Sabbath. Mr Pym, in a speech of superb Eeyoreishness (`the nation will live to regret' etc), argued that the Scots did not need to have a criminal law against Sunday trading, because 'Scotland has a deeply rooted and much stronger tradition in relation to Sundays than exists in Eng- land today'. But if the tradition is so shallowly rooted in England, what business is it of the criminal law to enforce it?
In any case, as Mr Donald Stewart observed with as near menace as his soft Hebridean accents can muster, 'There are other restraints on Sunday trading in Scot- land.' Vide old Punch joke: ENGLISH ANGLER: I say,is it all right to fish on Sundays here?
HIGHLANDER: Och aye, ye can — only . . . the last twa veesitors who tried it waur stoned. (Collapse of stout Waltonian.) The Home Secretary pointed out, in a speech which had Hurd shares moving up another penny or two, that effective cri- minal legislation against Sunday trading had been in force only since 1936. The churches, delighted to find a cause they can unite on, have been a little slapdash ill their history of Lord's Day observance, for example, in Dr Runcie's claim that it has been 'enshrined in England's law for more than a thousand years'. True, the author- ities have always tried to force people to go to Church, but the hostility to rival amuse- ments was a distinctively Puritan innova- tion.
The laws against Sunday trading are in fact a typical product of the Thirties, part of those great interwar years of regulating, licensing and nationalising everything from the bus services to the BBC — interven- tions less notorious than those of the Attlee Terror because they were carried out not in the name of socialism but in the name of efficiency or public protection, though they had much the same effects, and seem even more difficult to undo. As soon as Mr Hurd conceded, amid general surprise, that the Government would not only allow free votes on the committee stage of the Bill but would not even apply the guillotine (a position later modified, to nobody's satisfaction, by Mr Kenneth Clarke winding up the debate), it became pretty clear that the Bill would either die the death on the spot or be slowly strangled over the coming months. It has been a humiliating week for the Government, and Labour's best since 1974. The Fulham by-election confirmed the indications of the Brecon and Radnor by-election last July, that quite a few people are ready to vote Labour again, provided that the candidate faintly resem- bles a member of the human race. You have to go back a generation to find a by-election in which Labour increased both its share of the vote and its actual vote o dramatically. True, in Fulham it was start- ing from a very low base, but many commentators (e.g. this column three weeks ago) refused to believe that Labour could do even as well as that. From here, it is quite easy to envisage Labour creeping up a little further in the opinion polls and next month's local elections. Respectabil- ity breeds respectability, and the prospee,t of success is one way to keep the Lett quiet, for a time.
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