ANOTHER VOICE
The terrible threat of oranges growing in the garden
AUBERON WAUGH
Expert meteorologists as we have all become in recent weeks, those of us with a mind to it now in a position to decide that a campaign of deliberate lies and distortion has been launched, seeking to persuade us that we must spend billions and billions of pounds and change our habits in large areas of our lives in order to forestall a global calamity of over-heating in fifty or a hundred years' time. I say 'those with a mind to it' advisedly because, of course, those of contrary mind are also in a position to decide that the world is indeed heading for such a calamity, that oranges are about to start growing in our gardens, the epidemics of malaria and leprosy (yes, leprosy according to the Sun) are advanc- ing on southern England and that unless we all cut our carbon dioxide emissions by 60 per cent, our forests will start marching north like Burnham Wood to Dunsinane, and (the danger which most impresses our Prime Minister) the British Common- wealth will lose a member as the Maldive Islands disappear under the waves. In fact, new islands are constantly popping out of the sea, or so I have read. We can't weep too much for the Maldives, but Norfolk would, I suppose, be a loss.
In the first instance it may be a matter of temperament whether one is more drawn to the arguments on one side or another. As wise Lord Goodman said, quoted by W. F. Deedes in Monday's Telegraph, `Most young men and women decide whether, broadly, the world is an OK place, or whether it is in radical need of overhaul.' Neither decision is governed by anything except temperament. Since it has been painfully demonstrated that Marx was more or less wrong in everything he decided, the radical overhaulers have needed some fresh justification for their inner need to make a nuisance of them- selves. Apocalyptic ecology offers exactly such an opportunity.
For my own part, being persuaded broadly, as Lord Deedes puts it, that the world is an OK place despite the horrible sights and smells of proletarian affluence on every hand, I follow Sydney Smith's advice, 'Take short views, hope for the best and trust in god.'
But there is a huge difference between hoping that Adrian Berry is right when he quotes various experts as explaining the present, minute degree of global warming by cyclical activity of the sun, and accusing those who take the opposite view of deliberately spreading lies. Perhaps I had better explain myself.
The deliberate lie which is being spread does not concern the dangers of carbon dioxide gas. For all I know, there may be some truth in what is said. I have often thought it amazing, as I watched the wonderful traffic jams in my favourite city of Bangkok, that human life can continue to support itself among all those exhaust fumes pumped out by tens of thousands of stationary cars 12 hours a day. There seems nothing absurd in the possibility that they and smoking factories and power stations combine to change the world's atmos- phere, although respectable scientific opin- ion doubts this, and when .one reflects on what a small part of the world's surface is producing this pollution in proportion to the global atmosphere available to absorb it . . . .
No, the lie does not reside in expressing a preference for one theory or the other. The truth is that nobody knows what causes the weather, what causes sun spots, or why average temperatures can change from one decade and one century to the next, sometimes up, sometimes down. The lie resides in the pretence of certainty, the pretence that one interpretation has been established as true when it has not. To that extent, the lie is no more than part of the normal process of rhetoric and debate. Similarly, activists and lobbyists the world over feel free to push their lies and partial truths in order to urge governments to- wards their way of thinking which they see as the greater good. That is an inevitable, if rather unpleasant part of the democratic process. One sees it in the conduct of all the scare campaigns, from Aids to passive smoking, brilliantly caught by Peter Sim- ple's passive drinking scare in the Sunday Telegraph. I wish I had thought of that. But when governments start swallowing one or other of these postural hyperboles hook, line and sinker, the time has surely come to start worrying. What on earth does Mrs Thatcher think she is doing?
It is true that the large and growing membership of Friends of the Earth is almost exclusively middle-class, as its new director, Mr David Gee, has complained, and it might be thought to represent part of her natural constituency. Even so its mem- bership of 180,000 is minuscule when com- pared to a total Conservative vote at the last election of 13.75 million, nearly all of whom are going to be seriously annoyed when she starts legislating to save the country from oranges in the garden, lep- rosy, marching forests, etc.
The motives of Aids lobbyists in ex- aggerating their case are easy to see. They want more money, more resources, more attention paid to them. Similarly, those concerned to spread lies about the dangers of passive smoking are merely using a handy device to advance their main cause, which is to stop everyone smoking, by hook or by crook. But what possible motive can Mrs Thatcher have for uncriti- cally adopting all this Bookerite rubbish? She can say that the balance of scientific advice she has received is in favour of an interventionist approach, but as anyone who read Berry, or the excellent leader in this week's Sunday Times 'Greenhouse- mongers', will know; it all depends where you choose to go for your advice. Nobody least of all Mrs Thatcher — has ever paid any attention to a UN report before. Almost by definition they are tendentious documents seeking to make some wrong- headed point which is inimicable to our interests as one of the better favoured nations. In the same week there appeared another UN report (over which we all had a good laugh) naming Japan and Sweden as the two nations with the highest quality of life.
The best explanation is that having burned her fingers on initiatives to break up the Common Market, to execute IRA suspects without trial and to reintroduce poll tax after 610 years, she now sees greenhousemongering as the next vehicle and palliative for her own hyper-activity. As Leo Abse pointed out in his study of Margaret Thatcher, her driving force is an awareness that if ever she stops bossing and radically overhauling, she will disinte- grate. I am afraid that from having been the Conservatives' chief liability, she has now become a menace to the nation. The tragedy is that so few Conservative MPs seem to have read Churchill's Their Finest Hour (1949, page 15) or have the courage to act on it: 'The loyalties which centre upon number one are enormous. If he trips, he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes, they must be covered. If he sleeps, he must not wantonly be disturbed. If he is no good, he must be pole-axed.'
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