WHAT BOTHERS BRECON

Richard West finds the

candidates avoiding the real concerns of the voters

LAST week's Observer had a cartoon of gnomic obscurity, showing a man with a bag marked 'Paul Daniels' leaving 10 Downing Street, while the bobby outside says: 'He's been teaching the PM to make Welfare figures disappear till after Brecon and Radnor.' It was a good guess that Paul Daniels was some sort of television magi- cian, even for people who do not enjoy these things, but what were the Welfare figures, and why should they have an effect on the Brecon and Radnor by-election? Apparently they refer to all those stories that have been figuring in the newspapers on something called `Serps' and the efforts of Norman Fowler, a man even more obscure than Paul Daniels, to tinker with social security payments. The fact is that Serps and Norman Powler and social secur- ity are a subject of no interest whatsoever except to professional politicians at West- minster and the town halls, to trade union bureaucrats and commentators in Fleet Street and television. There is a large class busy milking the social services, but that is another matter.

In Brecon, as everywhere at election time, there is a sharp dichotomy between what exercises professional politicians and what concerns the public. Last week, for example, the Bishop of Durham said that the Government's latest Transport Bill was a work of 'idolatry'. Yet in Brecon and Radnor, a large rural constituency in need of a better bus service, no such outrage is felt. If the kind of private enterprise buses that Mrs Thatcher wants give a better service, fine. If the Bishop of Durham needed to travel at his own expense, he might have noticed that over the last few years there has been a shift from trains to cheap and very popular long-distance buses. Most foreign countries get round the problem of local transport by running minibuses, or even communal taxi services.

Again, in Brecon and Radnor, or even in somewhere like Liverpool, one seldom hears gripes from the unemployed, though many from the self-employed. It is a scandal to politicians, bishops and Fleet Street commentators. Others know that unemployment is largely the fault of trade union strikes and restrictive practices, wages councils, high tax on low incomes, the many who do not want to work, and

still more who are unemployable. At Bre- con this week, the Labour Party

announced a scheme for co-operatives as a way of creating jobs. When I asked if any South Wales coal mines or steel mills would form co-operatives, the question was called 'daft'. Why?

There are some local issues such as a threat to close one of the army camps and, worse, St David's Hospital. Almost every- where I have been in recent months, for example in Salisbury, Rye and Appleby, they are closing local hospitals in the face of intense public annoyance. The hugely expensive new hospitals that replace them are designed to serve the interests not of the sick but of the health bureaucrats and the contracting builders and architects.

The candidates at this by-election, as always in Britain over the last 20 years, try to avoid the subjects which most worry the public, such as immigration, schools, law and order, and what might be called morals. In Brecon the only sizeable ele- ment of another race are the Gurkha troops, who are universally liked. 'I wish our young people were like that . . . . In two years I've never heard a bad word from them or seen a bad gesture.' Brecon dotes on them. The Welsh have too much respect for education to spoil their schools with the half-baked progressive ideas of Shirley Williams, still less with the Trotsky- ism and feminism enforced by the Inner London Education Authority.

Brecon and Radnor have more reason to worry about the breakdown of law and order, the seriousness of which was shown by the recent horror at Brussels. Just to the south, in the coalfields, during the recent strike, two men killed a taxi driver taking a miner to work. They dropped a block of concrete onto him, from a bridge. After- wards, several local Labour MPs de- nounced the sentences of imprisonment and called the murderers victims of injus- tice and of the Tory Government. Others might think that the violent miners' pickets during the strike prepared the way for the bloody charge at Brussels. Brecon is almost free of violence. During last year's jazz festival, there was but one arrest. Brecon has forcibly kept out the hippies who now infest Hay-on-Wye, in another part of the constituency. Those who de-

plored the force that was used to disperse a hippie meeting at Stonehenge probably do not know how vicious these people can be. Two Stonehenge guards have been stabbed in as many years. The hippies are feared and disliked at nearby Salisbury, where they recently had a 'squat' in the council gypsy camp.

The timing of the writ for this by- election was engineered in the House of Commons in order to dash a Private Member's Bill, brought in by Enoch Powell, to stop experiments on human embryos. The Bill had much support in the Commons, plus hundreds of thousands of signatures (the organisers claim two mil- lion) of support from the public, not all of them Roman Catholic. It was denounced in the Times by the bloodcurdling Lady Warnock who had previously chaired a Committee on this subject. The Archbiship of York agreed with Lady Warnock, call- ing it silly to think that 'because there are real and important differences between right and wrong, good and evil . . . then it ought to always be possible to draw sharp dividing lines between them.' (The Archbishop's statement came too late to comfort Dr Joseph Mengele, the pioneer of experiments on human beings, at Au- schwitz, who now appears to have died in Brazil.) The Tory candidate at Brecon said he went along with the Archbishop of York. The Liberal also opposed the Powell Bill.

Since MPs are now called upon to make moral decisions, perhaps we should con- centrate on their own behaviour in this field. Two women I spoke to, one of whom had been reading about the GLC, raised the topic of homosexuality, on which there used to be a tolerant attitude in this country.

Here the Labour candidate, Dr Richard Willey, cannot be faulted. When a South Wales newspaper pointed out that although his election address said he was married he had not in fact wed his long- standing girl friend, `Dr Willey said that it was "a genuine misunderstanding" in the

heat of preparing election material, and that he was a deeply committed family man' (Daily Telegraph, 12 June).

This geniune misunderstanding may counterbalance Dr Willey's claim to fame as son of a Labour Cabinet Minister.

Dimly recalling a Private Eye cover, I asked if Willey pere was the man who was

photographed fast asleep at a military display. No, said my colleague, that was Mulley.

The Liberal, Richard Livsey, seems wet as the Welsh rain. The Conservative, Christopher Butler, who has been dubbed

by the press a 'Young Fogey', for having published articles in Harpers & Queen, is

the least dull of the bunch, but hampered by the rival candidacy of a Tory Wet, an admirer of Pym and Gilmour. A gaffer in the Blue Boar said of the local Conserva- tive Party: 'If s like the Irish dog that ate a bone and then found it had only three legs.'