ANOTHER VOICE
Not a suitable moment for painting ourselves green
AUBERON WAUGH
Nobody who has ever handled firearms can feel anything but sympathy for the policeman who accidentally shot a five-year-old boy as he lay in bed in his parents' council flat in King's Norton, Birmingham this week, although I suppose that if there are many more such accidents we may start asking ourselves if it is really necessary for quite so many policemen to be issued with these dangerous and more or less useless weapons. However, we should think how many small mistakes we all make in the normal course of our working lives — errors of punctuation, grammar, usage, even, occasionally, errors of fact — most of which can be passed over easily enough: 'Oops, sorry!' or 'Did I really say that? Oh dear, I suppose I must have been drunk.'
No such excuse is available to this unfortunate policeman who, while search- ing the boy's bedroom with cocked revol- ver in hand in the normal course of his duties, found it suddenly went off with a loud report into the apparently empty bed. No doubt the grieving parents will be generously compensated, but there will be no compensation for the police officer whose life has suddenly been plunged into nightmare as the result of one tragic slip of the finger. I have had several mishaps with firearms, once shooting a boy called Greg- ory in the leg with an air pistol at my prep school, once shooting myself with a 9mm Browning medium machine gun in Cyprus, and I know how easily these things can happen.
I was trying to make this point two weeks ago, rather late at night, in con- versation with a neighbour in France who happens to be an admiral in the French navy. I was condoling with him over the Greenpeace boat fiasco saying that of course all France's friends in Europe understood. How could the French secret servicemen have known that there was a Portuguese photographer on board? How could any of us have guessed such a thing? I was sure they were acting for the best.
At this stage it was not generally known exactly why the French had decided to blow up the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand. How, asked my friend, did I suppose the French were acting for the best?
`Whales,' I replied. I had a theory the boat was trying to stop people catching whales. In fact, I was just trying to be polite and save the Frenchman's feelings. Was I very much opposed to whales? he asked. It is a terrible thing about conversa- tions in the French language that if one cannot always think of the French for what one wants to say, one tends to say some- thing quite different which is not always completely true. Yes, I said, I detested whales. Why? he asked. Becoming reck- less, I said they left the most enormous turds which were a menace to swimmers. One of my best friends, I said, had suffered terrible injuries as the result of encounter- ing a whale turd. It was by no means certain, sniff, that he would ever swim again. The conversation degenerated into an argument about the excretory habits of whales, about which neither of us, I sus- pect, was really expert.
I could more truthfully have pointed out that the flesh of the white whale is highly toxic: there is no known antidote to the poison it contains, which has never been identified. This undoubtedly poses a threat to any child who might find a beached white whale on the sea shore and decide to eat it. Similarly, the liver of the ordinary whales (balaenoptera borealis) is poison- ous, causing acute headache, neck pain, flushing of the face, photophobia and desquamation (peeling in scales). The anti- dote to this is anti-hystamine but how many British kiddies, finding a whale on the beach and munching their way through to the liver, are likely to know about the antidote?
What I wanted to say was that the `greens' have become a pesky nuisance, whether infiltrated by the extreme Left (as they undoubtedly have been in Germany) or not, and it was high time somebody put up some principled resistance to them although it was a great pity, of course, about the Portuguese photographer. The cause of conservation is undoubtedly a good one, and it is quite right to resist the greed of farmers, developers and other `job creators' wherever possible, just as it is only commonsense to have laws against over-fishing or over-shooting a particular species if there is pleasure or profit to be had from fishing or shooting it in the first place. I suppose I am sorry that I shall never see a Dodo, although it is a sorrow I can live with. But the conservation lobby has now been taken over by lunatics and extremists, and it is high time there was some organised resistance to it, if only from the French secret service. The mon- strous 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act, which I complained about at the time, was last week interpreted by Devizes magis- trates to mean not only that it is a criminal offence to disturb, annoy or frighten bats where they live, but that it is also a criminal offence to carry out elementary repairs to your roof if bats roost there, even though there are none present at the time.
I wonder which household pest will be next on the Nature Conservancy Council's list for preservation — mice or cock- roaches? Yet now we hear little voices from the Bow Group threatening that the Tories will lose the next election unless they adopt some sort of Green Manifesto in competition with the Alliance.
The Tories may well lose the next election, but it will not be because they are insufficiently 'green'. Only a small minor- ity of the voters interests itself in environ- mental matters generally — as opposed to specific local issues where rival candidates are free to take their own positions — and this minority is probably matched in num- bers by the minority which detests every- thing to do with the environmental lobby- In country areas, the environmentalists are not only bitterly unpopular but also easily outnumbered. Such people would natural- ly vote for the Alliance unless there hap- pened to be an Ecology Party candidate standing. A 'green' ticket at this late stage would prove nothing but one more gra- tuitous affront to the Tories' traditional supporters, whether farmers, shopkeepers or those on the dicier fringes of wealth creation.
In the weeks ahead I hope to give my reasons for believing that the Tories will indeed lose the next general election, and also my reasons for believing that the Alliance will prove a greater threat in the south of England than Tories are at present disposed to imagine. But where the en- vironmental lobby is concerned, I feel that the best thing the Tories could do would be to give large sums of money, secretly, to the Ecology Party. Ecologists might easily be able to steal votes on this issue from the Alliance. The Tories have no such hope. Now let us go back to that poor Birming- han policeman and brood about the people who put the gun in his hand.
Previous page
