Another voice
As the tea-leaves settle
Auberon Waugh
The exciting news about Mr Wilson focuses attention once again on our decrepit party system. I wonder how many English people thrilled to the cliff-hanging drama of Mr Wilson's Public Expenditure White Paper and vote of confidence last week. Travelling to London by train in the middle of the crisis I saw few obvious signs of nervous tension. Of course, the British have always been a phlegmatic race, and it needs a real emergency to bring out those qualities of level-headedness and courage which won the day at Agincourt and built the bridge on the River Kwai. Nobody in the train from Taunton even mentioned the drama which was to unfold that very night in the House of Commons. We looked at each other briefly with our level blue eyes, we made some joke about the weather and smiled Politely, sympathetically, fellow victims of social convention and shyness. The storm clouds over Westminster . . .
Ezra Pound, as I remember, wrote some disgusting, lines about storm clouds over Westminster in his Cantos. I haven't looked at them for twenty-one years and certainly don't intend to look them up again now. Ever since I was fifteen when I first read Pound's boring filth, the thought of storm Clouds over Westminster has filled me with nausea and gloom. Possibly the memory Influenced my attitude to the House of Commons during my years as the political correspondent of this newspaper, although 1 date my lonely, slightly obsessive hatred Of the place from a Division after a foreign affairs debate on the Nigerian civil war Which was held on 9 December 1969.
Hatred, I always maintain, focuses the mind wonderfully. Others, hearing parliamentarians assert that the British people love the House of Commons above every Other British institution, see it as the guarantee of their freedom, the instrument of their collective will, their Gate of Heaven, Tower of Ivory, House of Gold ... other people, as I say, may be tempted to believe the brutes. Yet it is an extraordinary fact that I have never met a single Englishman, Ulsterman, Scotsman or Welshman outside the House of Commons (and its corps of press toadies) who has anything but contempt for MPs as a group.
Conventional wisdom has it that this must be a Bad Thing: any change will be for the worse, and the public must be re-educated to respect and love its House of Commons, the only alternative is totalitarian and thoroughly nasty. We ignore the fact that France, West Germany, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Sweden all have fairly respectable, democratic constitutions which do not require destroying the country's economy for electoral purposes at least every five years and offer MPs greater scope, through multi-party alliances, for influencing proposals which emerge from the administrative machine.
Partly, no doubt, because press opinions on Parliament are determined to a large extent by the specially-picked corps of press toadies who eat and drink there, one simply never sees the opinion expressed that the House of Commons is now a totally futile body which has become, by default, a menace to the survival of our prosperity and freedom. Nor—this time by the newspapers' default—is it an opinion which is widely held. Popular resentment is concentrated on the politicians themselves rather than on the system under which they operate.
Obviously, I do not wish to suggest for a moment that this resentment is unjustified, but I feel it might usefully be extended. In case I have not made my position clear, it seems to me no Bad Thing that the public regards Parliament with indifference and mild distaste. The fault is not with the public, nor with the way Parliament is presented, but with the House of Commons itself, The problem is to break through this indifference and through the half-thoughtout protectiveness of newspaper editors.
Oddly enough, I think last week's dramatic non-event, blazoned across every newspaper's front page, may have helped a little. Seldom can our newspaper editors have demonstrated so clearly that they have no idea what interests the public. A few readers, stupider or even less interested than most, might have concluded that there was a faint hope of the Government being defeated by a revolt of its left wing, although, to do them justice, I think every newspaper pointed out that there was no such possibility. Yet huge banner headlines and column after column of newsprint which might usefully have been taken up with Mr Thorpe's Amazing Denials or Mr Wilson's twin granddaughters were devoted instead to an event of no importance in which nobody was faintly interested. To say that it was all got up by the press would only be partly true. It was got up by the Tribune group for the benefit of the press, and the press jumped obediently. If I had been a newspaper editor, I would have ignored the incident entirely or relegated it to a downcolumn slot in the parliamentary news on an inside page; but on reflection I think I would have been wrong. My calculation would have been that if one ignored MPs' efforts to draw attention to themselves by staging non-events they might eventually be goaded into staging a real event and defeating the Government.
Now that I have had time to think about it, I can see that however strong their desire to publicise themselves and their fatuous, unpleasant opinions may be, their desire to preserve the existing arrangements is even stronger. A far better way of demonstrating the ineptitude of the House of Commons is to take it at its own valuation, and .by showing people in the plainest terms exactly what passes for a major political event at Westminster leave them to draw their own conclusions.
A few months ago, that most august of men in the brilliant circle of senior journalists known as the Parliamentary Press Lobby—Sir David Wood of the Times— wrote a piece drawing attention to the empty benches in the House of Commons during the second reading of Mr Varley's momentous Bill nationalising the aviation and ship-building industries: 'Why did the backbenchers appear to act, in choosing absence, as though the simple publication of a Government Bill accomplishes a statute and brings to an end all serious hope that opinion or votes may be changed by argument ?', he asked. He thought those empty benches a scandalous thing—I can see it must be galling for distinguished journalists like himself to have to attend debates which MPs can't be bothered to attend—and suggested that television cameras inside the Chamber might fill it. No doubt he is right that vanity is as powerful an inducement as boredom is a discouragement, but even a free distribution of lollipops, which might pack the benches, would do nothing to answer Sir David's question. The reason that MPs don't attend debates unless they are hoping for a mention in the press by speaking themselves is precisely because the debates are an irrelevance. The Whips will always prevail and everybody knows it.
Which didn't matter in the least in the days when government did nothing. Now that it is trying to restructure our whole society, on a 'mandate' from 28 per cent of the electorate, it matters very much indeed. But I thought I detected a new element in the massive indifference which greeted last week's drama in the House of Commons. Most of those who followed the storm in a teacup, as I say, were under no illusions that the Government's token defeat on a White Paper would be followed by a vote of no confidence and a general election. The new dimension was that nobody cared even if it did.
I do not know whether this awareness is the result of Mrs Thatcher's craven new policy of 'co-operation' with the unions or whether it is the result of despair after Mr Heath's humiliating failure, but I can't help seeing it as a welcome development. In fact, as I look at the tea-leaves now the storm has settled, I see that last week's bit of nonsense in the Commons has made me very hopeful for the future, very, very optimistic. Let's have plenty more of this tomfoolery, and, more important, let's read all about it.
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