ANOTHER VOICE
If Mr Major can persuade people to count their
blessings, this Tory Government might be re-elected
CHARLES MOORE
Gathered together in the country to celebrate the festival of PhONEday — for- merly known as Easter — my family and I found our talk turning naturally to the sub- ject commemorated by this sacred season. We agreed that telephones have got better and better.
When my wife and I bought our first house in 1981, I asked for a telephone to be installed, and was told by the then nation- alised British Telecom that it would take at least six months. When I protested, they explained that it was physically impossible to do the job in a shorter time because they needed to dig new cables up the entire street. Then a leader writer on the Daily Telegraph, I told my benign editor, W.F. Deedes, of my plight. He wrote to the chairman of British Telecom, whom he knew, saying that I had to have a telephone for my work, and it was duly installed about ten days later.
When we sold our first house in 1990 and moved into our second, I asked the now privatised British Telecom to put in new telephones, which they did within a week, and this time, instead of the solitary instru- ment inextricably wired to a lumpy black box in the wall, there were discreet white plugs in every room and telephones which we could take out and carry round the house. And I could have had any amount of mobile, memory, redial, transfer, answering, paging etc. devices, if I had happened to want that sort of thing. Even my family, all of whom on the Moore side, except for me, are almost pathologically anti-Tory, had to admit that better telephones are the result of privatisa- tion and a good feature of 16 Conservative years, although not, some conservative spirits suggested, so momentous that they should supplant the Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord in the calendar.
Were there any other benefits? Mr Major will have to ask for an election with- in two years, and to win it he will need to persuade people to count their blessings. So it seemed a worthwhile Easter exercise to find out if a highly unsympathetic audi- ence (my family) could think of any. I print the results below.
The rules of the game were that you had to think of something that had got better in Britain since 1979. The panel were not asked to consider whether it had improved b. ecause of the Tories, nor whether the mprovement, though good in itself, had bad side effects (e.g. higher standards of health meaning more old people moulder- ing in homes). All they had to do was to list any public goods which they thought had got better.
My father, who makes Cassandra sound like Anthea Turner of the National Lottery, could not really get the hang of the thing and kept wandering in from the scullery to inter- ject: 'Hideous new housing estates in villages' or 'No good foreign news except in the Financial Times', but everyone else played by the rules. I tried not to bias the panel one way or the other. I only asked, like Miss Rosa Dartle, because I wished to know.
There are no strikes, said everyone. On the whole, when you have dealings with a business or even a public service, they are quicker than they were. My sister and her husband had been waiting a week for a new part for their broken boiler. They reckoned such a long wait was exceptional nowadays and would have been commonplace in the 1970s. It now occasionally happens that public officials actually return one's calls.
Almost every form of service was thought to be better. People in shops and offices were said to be politer (though one of the panel disputed this), but the main point was that one had become less dependent on direct dealing with people in shops and offices because one could buy and order so many things by telephone, using credit cards and computers. Things which in the Seventies took weeks of waiting and corre- spondence were now settled instantly. A related benefit was that there were far fewer queues e.g. at banks, and that, even where they still existed, one needed to be in them less often. The idea of the sacredness of working hours, which used to mean that one could not buy or order anything at all from lunch-time on Satur- day until nine o'clock on Monday morn- ing, had gone, and this was a good thing. In this sense, it was not true that rural life had become more isolated. You could buy things at farm shops and garages and whatnot far more easily than 20 years ago.
Even my father had to concede that you can get freshly squeezed orange juice in bottles and it tastes fine. Food, in fact, was better in almost every respect. In the coun- try, let alone large towns, you can find fresh fruit and vegetables from all over the world at all times of year, instead of that bleak period of late winter when there was noth- ing but elderly turnips and withered car- rots. You can buy something pleasant to eat almost everywhere, and you can get a decent meal in a restaurant in any fair-sized town in southern England. When you go to a 'function' of some voluntary or business organisation, the food will nowadays be edible, although not positively nice: in the 1970s it was inedible. There is plenty of good, fairly cheap wine and you will gener- ally be offered this even in houses that do not care about wine. In such houses 20 years ago, you were offered sherry that had sat around openedNfor Weeks and cider that had gone flat.
Some social change was welcomed by the liberal-minded panel. Women have better jobs. People are nicer to homosexuals. Racial minorities are represented in the House of Commons (although my father pointed out that this first happened in the 1890s). If you want to borrow money banks and building societies no longer decide to sit in judgment on your respectability, but simply try to work out whether you can pay the interest. It was good, said my family, that corporal punishment had been abol- ished in state schools and more or less died out in private ones.
Some of the public services were judged to be in better shape than people tend to think. The National Health Service is bet- ter than it was and so is the London Under- ground and so are roads. The City Airport is good, and so is Stansted, and so is the Channel Tunnel.
After that, the suggestions became more miscellaneous. It was said that people are less frightened that the world will be blown up, and the fact that almost no one is being killed by the IRA at present was applaud- ed. The end of the pretence that Britain did not have intelligence services was wel- comed. My brother-in-law said that the drag coefficient on cars is lower and this means that they are faster and better-look- ing. He also strongly approved of dustbin liners. My father .said that Enoch Powell had got older. It is cheaper to fly, particu- larly long-distance. When you go to a pub- lic sporting event, the facilities are much more comfortable than they used to be. Some welcomed the growth of television channels and radio stations, but my father very much did not. The parents of young children welcomed videos and disposable nappies. Is there the basis for a fifth Con- servative election victory in any of the above?
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