Beloff's Great Leap
Auberon Waugh
'My husband, our Irish help, and I have never voted other than Labour,' wrote Miss Nora Beloff at the time of the Inner London borough elections. `But the same people have been in office and offending for too long. All three of us will say: for God's sake, go.'
There would indeed be something terrifying in the spectacle of this unanimity — Miss Beloff, her husband, and their Irish daily help all proclaiming `for God's sake, go' — if one could have absolute confidence in the stated intention of the Irish daily help. It is my experience of these engaging people that they will cheerfully agree to any political or philosophical proposition. Even husbands have been known to defer to their wives' political pronouncements for the sake of domestic peace, while harbouring secret reservations. But even if one disregards this secondhand evidence about the voting intentions of her husband and her Irish help, the important fact remains that in May of last year Miss Beloff intended to vote against Labour in the borough elections.
Dare we hope for little blue stickers in her window on the great day? She was at pains to point out that her decision was based on local issues only: the filth and vandalism of her immediate neighbourhood, while a few hundred yards away the Council had built flats for the working class at a cost of £72,000 per unit; a little further off in the Branch Hill council estate, residences cost the ratepayers £90,000.
'The object of these costly exercises, we are told, is to eliminate class barriers by creating areas of social diversity. As if differences of income and well-being can be ironed out by forcing people to live together. Experience suggests the opposite.'
Whose experience, might one ask? Why, Miss Betoffs, of course. She has lived next door to the brutes. Is it too much to hope that this experience will hold lessons for Miss Beloff whose relevance goes beyond the borough elections of last year? It may be significant that she still seems prepared to pay lip service to the idea of 'ironing out' differences of income and well-being, but I would prefer to believe that this is a conditioned response dating from the time when all indignation had to be left-wing.
The Great Leap which had yet to occur in Miss Beloff s mind, at any rate in May of last year, will take her face to face with the question of whether she really wants these people as neighbours at all, even with parity of income and well-being.
Perhaps it is unfair to cite Miss Beloff as representing all those silly middle-class women (of both sexes) who have been voting Labour for the past thirty years. She is, after all, an individual in her own right, with special reasons for doing what she does: perhaps she was distressed by the unemployment in the Thirties and reacted emotionally, if irrationally, to the excitement of the Jarrow marches; perhaps her sudden access of common sense is a result of her marriage, which often has a settling effect. Even if Miss Beloff is a suitable model for all these generations of silly women, as I believe, it might be thought a little unkind to rub salt into their wounds at this particular moment. Suddenly they have been made to realise that in the blurred vision of Moss Evans as he paws the ground like an angry bull there are no important distinctions between Nora Beloff and Margaret Thatcher, between Vanessa Redgrave and Princess Anne. Would it not be kinder to hold their hands, say `there, there', and assure them that it will be all right when there is another Conservative government, that they will be able to go back to making pretty left-wing faces in their mirrors?
I don't happen to think so. I think they should be forced to make the leap, however reluctantly, and confront the ultimate sil liness, the basic intellectual dishonesty, which has been sustaining them all these years. Perhaps there is no deterrent element in this punishment, only retribution. In revenge for all the fatuousness we have suffered over the years and will suffer once again if ever a Conservative government restores the economy, let us rub their noses in it while the moment lasts. The name of the game is equality.
Dan Jacobson, writing in the Observer recently, asked why it was acceptable to put on a school play like Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle glorifying Stalin's collectivisation of agriculture, supporting the ideology behind it and reviling the former middle classes as dissolute parasites when it was not acceptable to put on a school play glorifying Hitler's New Order and reviling the Jews as usurers, devourers of Christian babies, etc. It is a question which, in various forms, has been absorbing some of us for a long time — throughout, in fact, these fatuous thirty years, which, somewhat unjustly, have decided to call the Age of Beloff. Why is it acceptable for Russia to take over Afghanistan and Angola and Cambodia while if theAmericans lend a helping hand in Chile, they are guilty of genocide?
Jacobson suggests three reasons why it is acceptable in school entertainment to praise Stalin's murderous policy of collectivisation and revile the people he murdered, while it is not acceptable to praise Hitler's policy of social reorganisation and revile the Jews: in the first place, Germany lost the war; in the second place, Russia was our ally; in the third place, Stalin's crimes were justified by an elaborate rhetoric of justice, equality and the brotherhood of nations.
In fact, I think it is only the rhetoric of equality which counts. This 'equality' determines the concept of 'justice', while the brotherhood of nations is an irrelevance, applying only to a socialist commonwealth in any case and manifestly inapplicable to the real world of China and the Soviet Union. Many lefties and post lefties in England are beginning to ask themselves whether the price of equality might not be too high in their particular circumstances and having regard to the social, educational and cultural development of the workers at this moment in time.
But they have not yet started to ask them selves — and this is the essence of the Great Leap — whether material equality is in fact a desirable goal, let alone an attainable one. It is from this acceptance of equality as a desirable goal that all our present confusions flow. The myth of human equality has taken over from the myths of Christ incarnate, human redemption and life everlasting. It is the great sustaining myth of our time. We cannot ask the Beloff generation at its age to take such a metaphysical leap into the dark as to question the myth which has sustained it up to now. What we can ask it to do, in its present mood of perplexity and doubt, is to question the attainability of equality on earth. An unattainable goal is scarcely a useful goal. Since a large part of the myth's appeal is in the ludicrous belief that it is scientifically determined, let them examine the evidence for supposing that dictatorship of the proletariat must or even can lead eventually to the withering away of the State, rather than to the replacement of one set of bully-boys by another and another and another. Let them analyse the present mood of wage militancy and cultural proletarianisation and see whether, in its inspiration or effect, it militates towards a happier, more equal society or towards a new and nastier collection of top-dogs.
Only then will they be able to see Mr Moss Evans not as some inexorable force of history but as a simple spokesman for a group of thugs who have been allowed too much latitude, and who need to be fought with the weapons which society conventionally reserves against those who threaten it — the truncheon, the rubber bullet, tear gas and fire hoses and denial of social comfort. Society may not win the fight, but it will certainly lose if it doesn't join it. The pathetic thing is that the Beloff generation will have to see the strikers as threatening equality before they move, and equality, as I keep saying, is a bad dream, the product of an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. Do they seriously imagine that many of us will fight for a fragment of underdone potato?
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