Another voice
A journalist stands up
Auberon Waugh
In sixteen years' full membership of the National Union of Journalists I have never had occasion to attend a union meeting and never once read its newspaper which usually goes into the wastepaper basket unopened, along with VAT News, seed catalogues and offers of various bargains from Readers Digest. But I have always used my vote conscientiously judging the candidates purely on the literature supplied and voting for whichever had the least repulsive face, the least absurd name or wrote the least offensively illiterate manifesto.
Sometimes, I admit, it has occurred to me to wonder whether the candidates for union office really represented the cream of their profession. In my experience, journalists are rather pleasant people —even provincial journalists are usually better company than the general run of people who live in the provinces. They are convivial, indiscreet, sometimes quite witty folk, not too much burdened by the world's problems, who enjoy the absurdity of having to inform it on matters of which they often have less than half an hour's acquaintance.
But every profession or trade has its failures and I suppose it is inevitable that such people are drawn into union activity. What is sad in the present trend is that these people should now be in a position to exert power over the rest of us.
Probably our case is not particular. Nobody can suppose that most, or even any, coalminers are as nasty as Mr Mick McGahey, vice president of the National Union of Mineworkers, who recently published an article in the Russian trade union paper, Trud, under the heading 'We are proud for the land of the Soviets' in which he described victims of the KGB as 'renegades in Soviet society' and claimed that 'the Soviet Union is a beacon which lights the road into the future for the world working class and Communist movement'. Yet while other coalminers get on with digging their coal, Mr McGahey has somehow manoeuvred his way into being their spokesman.
The same, of course, is true of agricultural workers. Of the 400,000 agricultural workers in this country, only 85,000 belong to the union. They are the steadiest and least political workers in the land with a strike record of something approaching nil. Yet somehow, through their union, they have produced the hideous and sinister form of Ms Joan Maynard, Labour MP for Sheffield Brightside, as their spokesman. Last week, the union's ninety-two delegates elected overwhelmingly to press the government to nationalise farm land within the next parliamentary session. If all the country's farmworkers were canvassed, I should be surprised if more than ten per cent voted for the nationalisation of farm land.
The union believes there might be a way of nationalising farm land without nationalising the farming process and urges an act of parliament to achieve what, in Russia, required two revolutions, a civil war and some twenty million deaths to establish the least efficient agricultural system with the worst paid agricultural workers in the developed world. Most of the delegates who were not, like Ms Maynard, dedicated Marxists and friends of Ian Mikardo, appeared as religious maniacs with a confused and partial understanding of the Bible's social relevance. Mr Roy Edlington, a branch secretary from Humberside, argued: 'God created the land for all to live in peace. I do not believe the meek shall inherit the earth without government legislation.' Another, Mr Douglas Oswick, from Norfolk, averred: 'The Lord made the heaven and earth, but he never said anything about it belonging to the Lords, and, one thing and another, that's what we have in East Anglia.'
It might be useful to know exactly what proportion of the union's 85,000 membership voted for these ninety-two 'delegates'. By taking that number as a percentage of the 400,000 workers actually employed on the land, we might work out how much weight to give their deliberations. But even that figure would be misleading. As I say I have conscientiously registered my union vote on every occasion I have been asked to, but none of the candidates on offer has ever appealed to me in the least. In fact none has ever declared himself on any point of interest. My sad conclusion is that only the stupid, the inarticulate and the deeply boring are attracted into union activity when they could be engaged in journalism. Union democracy is another name for government by the dullest, nastiest and laziest or least talented in every profession. Mr Levin's heroic struggle to save the soul of the NUJ's London Freelance Branch convinces me of the general rule, that good men will only exert themselves when the fools and pigs are poised to conquer the world. •
Last week the NUJ canvassed all its members about to leave for the World Cup in Argentina, urging them to report unfavourably on conditions in that country. Some will be shocked by this. It has become a sort of slogan that politics should be kept out of sport, but as one of the few people in this country who finds sport even more boring than politics I can't feel indignant. If the Argentinian authorities are maltreating journalists, it seems to me an excellent joke to equip English sports writers with a phrase-book teaching them how to converse with policemen in their host country: `Cuantos periodistas han masacrado este ano?' (How many journalists have you murdered this year?); Dejen de torturarme, por favor' (Please stop torturing me); periodico les pagara bien si me dejan ir' (MY newspaper will pay you well if you let me go).
These suggestions, as I say, strike me as excellent expressions of free trade unionist], — the sort of thing which makes me proud to be a trade unionist. But when the union's Press Officer, Mr 'Ron' Knowles (I'm sure I never voted for him) was asked whether similar advice would be given to sports correspondents going to Moscow for the 1980 Olympics, he replied that this was unlikely. The union would choose to be selective, just as journalists who reported the Orlov case and ignored events in Argentina were choosing to be selective, he said. How dare these lumpish brutes claim t° speak for British journalists? The only control we have over them is a postal vote based on a short, usually meaningless pet' sonal statement. I have no idea how to set, 'about standing for election in the National Union of Journalists, and nobody has ever told me, but I have my manifesto ready. LI comes from Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Parts — Enivrez-vous trans: A. Waugh) and is entirely non-political:
'You must always be drunk. That's ail there is to it; it is the one point to bear to mind. To escape the horrid burden of Titre which lies on your shoulders and drives you into the ground you must be permanentlY drunk.
'But on what? On wine, poetry or virtue, as you will. But get drunk. 'And if from time to time, on the steps Of ,a palace, in the green grass of a ditch, in the gloomy solitude of your bedroom, you wake up and find your drunkenness going away or gone you must address yourself to the wind. to the waves, to the stars, to the birds, to the clock — to anything which runs away or, moans or turns or sings or speaks — flU demand to know what time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird or the clock will reply: "It is time to get drunk! Get drunk to escape the slavery of Timc; get drunk and stay drunk. On wine or poetry or virtue or what you will".'
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