Another voice

Harden your hearts

Auberon Waugh

Tring, Hertfordshire Certain great questions of our time are surely best tackled in the serene atmosphere of a Health Resort. A few weeks ago I suggested that the riddle posed by striking hospital cleaners, lavatory attendants and gravediggers — would you be prepared to clean hospitals, attend lavatories or dig graves for £40 a week? — was more or less unanswerable. That is to say an honest answer, if followed through, would seem to reveal degrees of callous arrogance which are unacceptable in polite society nowadays. Let us imagine this dialogue with a striking lavatory attendant, school caretaker or other Lower Paid Person.

LPP: Would you be prepared to clean graves, dig lavatories etc for £40 a week? Waugh: No.

LPP: Would you be prepared to go on strike for more money?

Waugh: Yes.

LPP: Even if this meant that sick children got sicker, old age pensioners had to be wrapped in silver paper, roads were blocked, corpses unsalted, pregnant mothers unburied?

Waugh: Yes, I am afraid so.

LPP: Why then do you treat me as a reprobate because I go on strike for more money?

Waugh: Because I don't particularly like you; because your present behaviour may threaten my immediate comfort; and because if you succeed in your struggle, you will soon destroy my entire way of life. In the first place I am expressing a natural hostility, in the second hoping to shame you into accepting less money than you would otherwise have demanded.

Their wages are not spectacular, but it is no good pretending that they are in danger of death from starvation or of being forced to sell their wives into prostitution, or of eating their babies. In fact they are probably better off than they have ever been. We at Champneys Health Farm are suffering for the most part from what Mr Heath once called the problem of success: obesity, alcoholism, muscular collapse. We pay anything up to £420 a week of our hard-earned money to be starved, steamed, roasted, pummelled and subjected to various and undignified exercises — in pleasant and comfortable surroundings it is true, but scarcely more pleasant or comfortable than our own homes.

On Wednesdays and Fridays we have something called Dance Movement Class, when we are taught Go-Go dancing by a wild, pencil-thin young woman in a leotard. I honestly think it must be one of the funniest sights of our civilisation, if not of all time, to see rows of fat Arab sheiks, Birmingham businessmen, Hampstead housewives with too bright an eye for the pretzels, the mifflichs and the karpfft, all throwing their arms around, kicking their legs and wiggling their bottoms to music in a world where two-thirds, or a third, or anyway quite a lot of people are starving.

No doubt some of the lower paid workers in this country feel they should be entitled to send their revoltingly obese children to Champneys, but I am very glad they can't, as these dull resentful people could scarcely be expected to see the joke. In the evenings we have improving lectures: 'Beauty Hints', 'Healthy Eating', 'Causes and Effects of Stress', an 'Art for Pleasure' demonstration and various musical diversions. Nobody has yet thought to invite a prominent trade unionist to put the union's case by way of entertainment — as the American Chamber of Commerce did on Thursday — but I am sure he would be heard in friendly silence, punctuated only by occasional farts and giggles which are an unfortunate accompaniment to any sudden change of diet.

The American Chamber of Commerce was not so lucky. According to the Daily Telegraph, more than 300 businessmen and their guests, from a company of 600, walked out of lunch at the Savoy when they heard Mr Moss Evans criticise press, television and radio for its handling of the public service workers' strike. Unions were being unfairly lectured about social responsibility and morality; he said: 'Are these lectures addressed to the field marshal or the admiral on £420 a week or the hospital cleaners on £42 a week?'

Pedants will argue that morality — a sense of social responsibility or of simple decency — is not a class preserve, citing many cases from their own experience of working-class folk who have behaved with the greatest decency on occasion. In fact it is part of the great working-class myth, assiduously put around by working-class writers, that only the working classes have any warmth or fellow feeling or generosity. If this article were appearing on television, instead of being furtively distributed to the Spectator's readers, I would receive two million letters making exactly the same point. But of course Mr Evans is right and everybody else is wrong. It is exorbitant, and impertinent too, to expect the lower classes to behave in a moral or socially responsible way. Many may do so — whether as the result of a religious background, or of a good upbringing from reasonably strict parents, or some freak personality — but it is a general rule that if you want the lower classes to do something you must make them do it. You can't expect them to do it spontaneously, or from goodwill.

Many will resent Mr Evans's reference to field marshals and admirals, pointing out that field marshals earn rather less than £420 a week — in fact they earn £378.35p — and that vicious taxation reduces this, in the case of a married field marshal with two children, to a mere £194.86113 a week. These are bad times for field marshals, they will aver: the standard of living for the average field marshal has dropped by a factor of six in the last 20 years, while the standard of living for the average hospital cleaner has risen by a factor of two and a half (Registrar General's Annual Digest). These people are right of course, but Mr Evans is righter. Field marshals are the people to whom these lectures on social responsibility should be addressed. They have gone down in the world, and so, prop ortionately, have all the commissioned ranks, directional and managerial classes in our society. But it sFrves them right, because it is their business to keep the other ranks in order and they have failed to do so. Whatever enormous rises the lower paid workers now secure for their grudging and incompetent services may make very little difference to their own standards of living, but will have the effect of reducing still further the advantage enjoyed by those above them.

That, of course, is all the lower paid workers can hope to achieve but by golly, as Mrs Thatcher might say, they intend to achieve it. We will be wasting our time if we whip ourselves up into a state of moral indignation over their behaviour. The important thing is to work out how they can be defeated and restored to that state of cheerful deference which becomes them so much better. The traditional method of cutting their wages and sacking all who go on strike may seem impracticable now, but not in the context of the next 10 years, when public expenditure will have to be cut by about a fifth.

On Thursday, when 200 geriatric patients in Manchester were wrapped in cooking foil because there were no sheets or blankets, we also learned that District line trains in London could not run because drivers had refused to walk along an icy path to their trains. Strikes, disobedience and vindictive taxation are all part of the same phenome non of collapsing discipline — the officers have let the other ranks run amok. Left alone the other ranks will create misery for themselves which is interesting and quite funny, but also misery for us, which they should not be allowed to do. So let us harden our hearts and rejoice in the few social inequalities that survive — among them that whereas we can afford to come to Tring and have it all steamed off, they just have to remain fat.