Another voice

Nothing needs doing

Auberon Waugh

Afull-page advertisement, paid for by the Department of Health and Social Security, appeared in many newspapers on Sunday. It shows four teenagers, presum- ably supposed to be typical, staring at the camera with angry, stupid, resentful eyes, under the heading: 'AS A PARENT, CAN YOU TELL WHICH ONE IS ON DRUGS?'

At. a guess, one might suppose that all four were victims of Geoffrey Wheatcroft's permissive doctrines, although they might equally well be victims of Mrs Shirley Williams's educational theories, or of fluoride in the water. Something certainly seems to be wrong with them, unless they are simply agreeing with St Peregrine's argument that Mrs Thatcher fails to recog- nise their aristocratical aspirations and take account of the natural, incurable laziness of the English. Two are grossly overweight, all look unhappy as well as disagreeable, but it is hard to pick out one who is obviously nastier, stupider or iller than the rest.

The teasing caption reads: 'Not easy, is it? . . . So how can you tell if your child is on drugs? It's doubly difficult because so many of the symptoms of a hard drug like heroin are actually very similar to normal growing pains. Moodiness, for example, or sudden irritability or aggression.'

Perhaps these normal growing pains explain the outbreaks of pupil violence which have accompanied the teachers' pay strike. Even in God's own county of Somerset there have been scenes which are reminiscent of Germany after the war, when marauding gangs of displaced per- sons released from the concentration camps roamed the countryside. In Frome, not far from where Mr Christopher Booker has his country retreat, rampaging children ran through a housing estate ripping up plants and urinating in the garden of an old age pensioner. When a young mother remonstrated with them, saying that their language was atrocious, one of them drop- ped his trousers.

In Oldham, Lancashire, police dogs have been set on rioting schoolchildren; in Hampshire, 12 teenage pupils were arrested near Portsmouth after pelting teachers with eggs; Berkshire reports simi- lar events, while the centre of Bradford was given over to rioting, with a car being damaged and a shop-window smashed. In Sheffield, a vicar was hit by a brick when he tried to restore order. He said: 'Some- thing must be done before someone is killed.'

Something must be done, something must be done. In Jamaica, 'something' is pronounced 'summer-ring'. It would make a splendid refrain for one of those inconse- quential, semi-satirical calypso groups whose main burden is the hopelessness of the negro's condition, his laziness, lustful- ness, drunkenness, physical unattractive- ness, crowned by an inability to do any- thing but chase after the simplest of plea- sures. Summer-ting must be done. Appoint a Commission of Inquiry, to report in eight years' time? Award the teachers more pay? Print more money and scatter it all over the land, from Yorkshire to Somerset?

Professor Neville Butler, of Bristol Uni- versity, who is not, so far as I know, of Jamaican origins but is described as an expert on child behaviour, speaks of a 'teenage time-bomb' on which, he be- lieves, we are all sitting:

If their disruptions spread they could become as dangerous as soccer hooliganism. These children lack hope and they lack expectation of jobs. They have little incentive to good behaviour. If they had jobs to go to they might be easier in their minds. But they don't . . . and some of them will hit out. There is a teenage time bomb, and we are sitting on it.

Personally, I doubt very much indeed whether it is the prospect of eventual unemployment which explains the violence of schoolchildren. Most of them in any case will be employed. Some of them have been demonstrating explicitly against the threat to their employment prospects represented by the teachers' strike. The Mail on Sun- day discovered two who had been disci- plined by their teachers for speaking out against the teachers' strike. One, a 16- year-old fifth-former from Bedworth, War- wickshire, was the spokesman for 300 fourth- and fifth-formers who demon- strated against the strike with banners saying: 'No exams — no jobs — teachers don't care'. Now he has been suspended, and will be able to sit his exams only if a parent accompanies him to school. Another, 16-year-old Debbie Wheaton of Windsor Girls' School, was made to write a letter to her teachers apologising for hav- ing criticised the closure of her school in a newspaper.

That Britain has become a more violent country than any other in Europe — at any rate, so far as the random violence of over-excited working-class crowds is con- cerned — is witnessed by the reputation our soccer fans have won all over the continent.

The most significant thing about this wave of British violence, as I see it, is that it only breaks out when otherwise non- criminal, law-abiding Britons of the work- ing class are together in groups. It occurs among people who are not notably articu- late in themselves, but who have come to see violence as a means of group express- ion. What are they trying to express?

Socialists and Old Fashioned Tories are united in believing that they wish to protest against Thatcherism: against an apparent repudiation of the idea that the world owes them a living. I doubt this myself, because I do not believe that any but a tiny proportion of them has the faintest idea what Thatcherism is or what it stands for. It exists, in any case, only as an idea. Nothing has been done to implement it: there have been no cuts in government expenditure, but a steady increase in real terms; nobody's welfare payments have been significantly reduced and the Health Service has continued to provide a poorer service, year by year, as more and more money is lavished on it. Nothing, in fact, has changed dramatically, although the deterioration in manufacturing industry and government services may have speeded up. Thatcherism is simply not the dominant philosophy of our times; it is held bnly by a few cowboys and cowgirls in the South of England who have never suc- ceeded in communicating their enthu- siasm to anyone else.

The prevailing philosophy in Britain remains the philosophy of Lord Swann, Mrs Shirley Williams, Dr Runcie, Monsig- nor Warlock and, to a lesser extent, Ian Gilmour, Peregrine Worsthorne and Mr Heath (since his humiliation). It is paterna- listic, philanthropic, scared of the workers, vaguely patronising, anything-for-an-easy- life, but its most important characteristic is that it no longer works, it is in the process of being proved wrong. Mrs Thatcher was probably right to blame soccer violence on the collapse of discipline in homes and schools, but she did not ask the next question: why has discipline collapsed in homes and schools? My own explanation is that the country lacks a sustainable choice of unifying myths, philosophies or systems of ethics to show. Socialism is wrong because it does not work, old-fashioned Toryism is wrong for the same reason. Thatcherism (by which I mean the economic liberalism of the Manchester school) cannot be applied for fear it causes pain. There is nothing to be done.

Drugs are one reaction to the dilemma, violence is another. Oddly enough, one of the few identifiable points of consensus in modern Britain is its abhorrence of both drugs and violence. Neither, I fancy, will reach cataclysmic proportions before pub- lic abhorrence asserts itself, and in the expression of that abhorrence a new and viable choice of unifying myths should emerge. Perhaps the country simply needs to choose between the Princess of Wales and Princess Anne. Nothing needs to be done, and it will be no great tragedy, in the context of history, if one or two Yorkshire vicars are killed by schoolchildren throw- ing bricks at them. Their deaths will be symbolic, and in a good cause.