Another voice
Right Reverend Pilgers
Auberon Waugh
perhaps it was only when Mr Scargill 1 started appealing to Church leaders to take his side that most people realised he was beaten. The appeal to Tripoli might have shown good fighting spirit; the appeal to Moscow showed no more than a com- mendable determination to win; for a proud working-class man to appeal to Canterbury must mean only one thing: Scargt11 is desperate. Soon, bishops will be the only people in the country prepared to take him seriously outside the blinkered ranks of his own troops. After eight months of marvelling at the stupidity of miners who were prepared to be bam- boozled into a hopeless strike, we must now learn to marvel at the stupidity of bishops, still prepared to believe there might be a little room for them to cause mischief and obscure any true understand- ing of the issues involved by incompetent attempts to mediate and inappropriate little clicks of sympathy for the wrong- doers.
One now sees one was quite wrong to criticise the appointment of Dr Jenkins as Bishop of Durham. He is the ideal man for the job, an embodiment of the northern spirit and well on his way to establishing himself as an important comic figure on the national scene. It was a brilliant piece of pilgering to claim that he knew of a miner's family in Durham which possessed only one pair of shoes, although at the time of writing he has not produced so much as a photograph of this model family for us to weep over as John would undoubtedly have done. No doubt he will learn. As Dr Runcie prepares the ground for a Service of Reconciliation between the NUM and the NCB, perhaps Dr Jenkins will be able to find something else to keep us amused. One would be happy to send all one's old shoes to the north for redistribution except for a lingering fear that the people up there might eat them and add acute indigestion to their other sufferings.
When Lord Stockton, in the course of his Tiresias knock-about, spoke of the wicked hatred between north and south, I presume he was referring to the ugly scenes we have all watched on television. It is true that the miners' strike, like any application of heat in human affairs, has tended to bring the scum to the surface. But I do not believe there is any hatred for the ailing north in the prosperous south. Instead, I fancy I perceive a genial tolerance for its failings, coupled with a certain wariness and a growing determination to avoid the northern sickness.
Bishops cannot really be expected to move very fast in these matters. Orthodox thinking has just about caught up with the social conditions of the 1930s, while the vanguard trembles on the brink of dis- covering the Sixties with their instant atheism, their revolutionary chic and false promise of joy through sexual liberation. Perhaps the charismatic movement will yet resolve itself in euphoriant drugs, which achieve much the same effect rather more easily. But in such company as this — and the House of Lords is little more than an imperfect reflection of its bench of bishops — Lord Stockton, at 90, emerges as something like a Young Turk.
A neglected passage of his Old Father William routine referred to the situation in
America, so much happier than our own: Let us look somewhere else — at the country of my dear mother, the United States. Ah, that is a very different thing. I rejoice at what Reagan is doing. He has broken all the rules, and all the economists are furious. He has a completely unbalanced budget. What does he do? Of course, according to the rules . . . he ought to have increased taxa- tion. He did not do it — not at all; he has reduced it.
Harold Macmillan, as he then was, used to confide to all who would listen that the secret of his success in politics was to pursue left-wing policies abroad. Eventual- ly, he was blown off course by the winds of change in Africa; in any case such a policy would never work with the new breed of Conservatives, which is more interested in home affairs than foreign. I suppose this fulsome praise for Reagan's America, while decrying exactly the same policies in Britain, may be an extension of his earlier tendency:
But what has happened? What has happened has been that unemployment [in America] has fallen from one in 10 to one in 17, whereas here it is one in eight and next year it will be one in seven. Five million new jobs . . . have been created in the new in- dustries, and at the same time inflation has been kept quite low. It is a miracle . . . . I quote his lordship at such length
merely to contrast his picture of the United States with that of its indigenous rag-tag of left-wing intellectuals and bishops. The 'official', i.e. non-Pilger but Welfare- 'I've never heard of a Cheshire worm.'
authenticated, figure for those living below the poverty line in the United States is 35 million. Never mind that the majority of these are living at a standard which is considerably above that of most fully em- ployed dentists or even High Court judges in India and the Third World. On top of these, the official poor, you have a much smaller but growing population of bums, drop-outs, alcoholics and mentally un- stable people who really are poor, in some cases starving. Perhaps there are half a million such people. I do not know. What is certainly true is that they are more in evidence — as beggars and vagrants — in the big American cities than they are in Europe. One sometimes suspects that Americans like to see these people around as a cautionary example to everyone else. But theirs is a welfare problem rather than a problem which will be solved by anY programme for the forced redistribution of wealth, and it requires a conscious element of pilgering, in anybody of higher intelli- gence than a Yorkshire miner, a Daily Star reader or a Christian bishop, to confuse the plight of the 'official' poor with that of the actual poor. A classic case of such pilgerisation was provided by an article in this week's Observer from Robert Chesshyre, Washington. After a long description of the Hogarthian scenes in a drop-outs shelter less than a mile from Capitol Hill: he proceeds to discuss a 'moral clarion call from the nation's Roman Catholic bishops published a few days after Reagan s triumph at the polls: In the first draft of a pastoral letter the described the 'massive and ugly' failures of American society to cater for the poor as a 'disgrace'. Pulling no punches, the bishops added: The distribution of income and wealth in the United States is so unequal that it violates the minimum standard of distnbu- five justice. Never mind that nobody — least of all Jesus — has ever defined a standard of distributive justice. Needless to say, the bishops' solution to the problem — WI/ creation, more welfare, reduction in arms expenditure and increased foreign aid — IS a precise restatement of the programme on which Jimmy Carter brought the country to its knees and created the massive unem- ployment which Reagan inherited. Chesshyre ends his peace with some. conventional drivel from the New Republic about how Reagan's increase in the nation- al debt will lead to class war, race war, the collapse of society as we know it. 1-3It.e Scargill's appeal to the bishops, I take flits as a sign that the Left in America Is temporarily beaten. Whoever thought the Left would worry about a national debt? But I do sincerely wish that bishops,havIng lost any confidence in their ability to save our souls, could get on with what was at any rate part of their traditional job .looking after the poor — rather than make fatuous and ignorant suggestions to the government of the day on subjects which they do not begin to understand.
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