SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
J. W. M. THOMPSON
By drawing attention this week to the possibility of a snap election in November, Mr Hogg may be considered to have formally opened the true Silly Season of our politics. This trying time will now continue until the date of the general election is finally announced. Under the traditional rules of the game, opposition politicians will hence- forth issue frequent warnings that the Prime Minister may be plotting some sudden stroke. They will also canvass the attractions (from Mr Wilson's point of view, of course) of next spring or next autumn, and a few extremists will talk of spring 1971. Mean- while, government supporters will speak high-mindedly of the importance of getting on with the job of governing, while privately hoping that their leader will be cunning enough to seize precisely the most favourable moment to appeal to the country. I am sure it brings much zest into their otherwise drab lives.
Yet this game of juggling with election dates is perhaps the least rational feature of our revered, but ramshackle and haphazard, parliamentary system. No doubt it even accounts for some of the prevailing distaste for politicians and their little ways. A nation of football fans, after all, could scarcely approve if the captain of one team had the right to call the referee on to the ground only when it suited him; and the referee in politics is or ought to be the electorate. Local elec- tions are already held at fixed intervals and, in all logic, the same should surely apply to national elections (subject to a government keeping its majority in the Commons).
No one even pretends that the timing of this week's by-elections was decided by anything but calculations of party advan- tage. They would have been held months ago if the prospects for Labour had not then looked black. Is this sensible? But the general election will be timed in precisely the same way. Both parties, of course, take equal advantage of the sys- tem when they have the opportunity, which is why it has lasted so long. We voters may think that elections are really for our benefit: but politicians in power take a rather different view.
Field work The marvellous autumn weather has been, I am glad to learn, a great boon to the potato- picking fraternity—or, rather, sorority. I learned something about this oddly anachronistic element in rural life at the weekend from a farmer. Because the country- side seems to be filling up nowadays with houses and motorways, one forgets that the basic country activity, farming, is becoming an increasingly solitary way of life. It is typically performed by one man alone with a tractor for an entire day, perhaps with no other human being in sight from start to finish. But potato picking is different. I pass most days along a country road where fields stretch to the horizon and often there is not a worker to be seen. At this season, however, some of these fields suddenly take on the animated, populous look of the days of pre- industrial agriculture, as cheerful-looking women mustered from miles around arrive to gather and crate the potato crop. The scene is almost antique: small children clambering around the furrows, an occasional wood fire to boil a kettle, rows of bent backs, and the sound of voices instead of moro, heard across the fields.
The farmer agreed that the work was har but said he had no difficulty in recruitin help. In the past, no doubt, sheer necess4 prompted the workers, but today's rur, wives tend to look upon it as a sort e strenuous holiday with £30 or £40 profit the end. 'They usually mean to buy a washin machine or something like that,' he said. 'On woman told me she needed forty pounds t pay for her driving lessons.' It seems surprir log that no machine has yet been perfected t do this work, but apparently potato-pickig machines aren't much good on clay Rd they cannot tell spuds from clods of earl' So we get this annual reminder of a vanishe agriculture. And although this is said to be, poor year for potatoes the sunshine has mad it a wonderful year for the potato pickers.
Brush with authority
'Bristol City Council is considering prosecut log parents who fail to see that their childrer clean their teeth properly.' This small nen item has filled me not, I regret to say, la surprise, but rather with mild inquiry as where the kindly intervention of authori may next be expected in the domestic seek For if negligence over tooth-brushing is ti be dealt with in the courts of law, what eb will follow? Why not prosecutions for exces sive sweet-eating, which is far more dams Mg to the teeth? And ought parents to unprosecuted for tolerating late bedtim insufficient taking of exercise, prolong television watching, addiction to do windows, and other unhealthy habits? I no reason why Bristol's wise and all-know city councillors should restrict themselves mere physical wellbeing. If tooth-cleaning a matter for the law, so surely is men hygiene—with proper supervision by local authority of children's reading matte choice of friends and conversation. Perha it would be better, in fact, if the Bristol Ci Council took over the entire responsibili for the upbringing of children in their c thus freeing parents for more socially usef work—on exports, for example.
Express and admirable
Those much-rumoured, startlingly fast n passenger trains, capable of up to 150 in an hour on ordinary track, will apparently ready for service in four or five years' What I find particularly pleasing in this n is that at one stiiike poor old British R have thus made their presumptuous rivals the British Airports Authority look silly. whole case for siting airports where the will torment large numbers of people by and by night is based on the need for e access; and this case collapses comple when such fast rail links are possible. Peter Maseffeld refers to Foulness as 'remote' site, but with 150 mile-an-hour tra from London one would get there quic than one usually reaches Heathrow present methods. Perhaps the Rosk ill c mission will wonder, as I am beginning do, whether Foulness is far enough aA
The joys of liberty
'Biggs Skips—Without Clothes.' (Flea in the Evening Standard, 22 October.)
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