Another voice
Pink flag flying
Auberon Waugh
The whisper reached me that Anthony Crosland — plump, sensitive fifty-seven-year-old Secretary of State for the Environment — is thinking that the price of commuter railway tickets might be used as an instrument of social Justice. Many commuters are wealthy people, he has decided, and it is iniquitous that they should profit from the enormous subsidy paid to British Rail every year to help it in its overmanning. As I shiver on the platform of Taunton station in the dark of a winter's morning, waiting for the 7.02 a.m. train to Paddington, I can picture the scene. Lovely, gifted Susan Crosland tiptoes around the house in Notting Hill where the great man sits alone in his dressing gown, sunk in a Byronic reverie. He is thinking about railway tickets: how will the City react? Will his good friend Lord Drogheda take offence? What about the mass of Labour suPPorters who have never quite taken Tony Crosland to their hearts, despite the undoubted goodwill he feels towards them, the fools. Can he hear a murmuring in the street outside: "bat man Crosland, him plenty good man. Hirn help de poor ones like us coloured folks." "Oi think we should of 'ad Towny Crosland for Pee Em, down't you Albert?" Above all, what effect will it have on the good opinion of the only man whose intelligence, sensitivity and historical destiny rnake his good opinion of value, Anthony Crosland himself? When he goes upstairs to t,ake off his dressing gown and pyjamas, will ne be more delighted than ever by what he sees there? The doctrine that those who earn more should pay more tax undoubtedly has a certain crude logic behind it. So, if one sees taxation as !I. means of imposing social equality rather Irian just raising revenue, does the doctrine that those who earn more should pay a higher Pr°Portion of their earnings. But the Crosland Idea that inequalities of income should be allowed to continue subject to the rich paying more for whatever they buy strikes me as the .,rl_lost infantile of all revisionist wriggles away 'cm the harsh requirements of socialist doctrine. Both Healey and Crosland, to judge by their recent speeches, have come to the conclusion that further increases in direct taxation will raise practically no revenue from the middle classes and might prove counter-productive in annoying the working class. But while Mr realeY busies himself with raising the huge clans necessary to keep public expenditure at its Present level, Mr Crosland appears to be in a quandary. What is he to do with his left-wing conscience, the little pink banner with which, in happier times, he wowed the Sixth Form Debating Society at Highgate School and electrified the officers' mess of the Royal Welch Fusiliers? Is nothing left but railway tickets? :The argument that commuters are not, for the most pa rt., :The argument that commuters are not, for the most pa rt., Labour supporters and can therefore be penalized is one that has been taPPlied to practically every field of consump wine, yachts, motoring. Perhaps Mr 'rosland should think twice before using it. Those who refuse to believe in a just and avenging God should study what has happened to the price of the two ingredients of fish and chips in the lifetime of this present government. But the main evidence of God's influence in the class war would appear to go back to the arrangements He made at the time of the Creation. Let us first examine the Post Office. There, the Government plainly decided that workers, as a class, don't write many letters, and on the rare occasions when they do commit their thoughts to paper, don't particularly care how long it takes the letters to arrive. As a result, the price of an ordinary letter — now called "First Class" — has gone up from three old pence on May 16th 1965 to 81/2 new pees now — a factor of about seven times in slightly over ten years. As a congenital letter writer, I have always accepted that I must not only pay for my own letters to be delivered but also for the Post Office's magnificent system of over-manning and the enormous tonnage of HMSO or official mail which it delivers free, counting any government subvention as a "subsidy". I also accept that every rise in the price of postage should be accompanied by a deterioration in the service provided, but that was before I had isolated the element of spite and class animosity in Post Office pricing. Then I was delighted to learn that the last price rise resulted in such a large drop in business that, outside the Christmas period, the Post Office now loses more money than it did before. The obvious reaction to this, according to Waugh's Law, must be to raise postal charges and cut down on services still further. That is the conditioned or Pavlovian response to losing money in any enterprise which is publicly administered. Sure enough, a few weeks after Christmas, one of the 'quality' Sundays announced that the post Office planned to charge 101/2p for first class letters and cut out Sunday collections altogether. This alarmed me. Although I write an average of thirty letters a week — from West Somerset, it is my only means of contact with the outside world — I would be happy to pay 25p a letter, if necessary. But the ending of Sunday collections would make a profound difference to my life, as I rely on them to get my week-end work to London by Monday morning. So I instituted enquiries and was delighted to be informed by a Post Office spokesman that the whole story in the Sunday newspaper was a pack of lies. This raised the interesting question of which one mistrusted less, the Post Office or the Sunday newspaper, which had better remain anonymous. it was a difficult point. The newspaper concerned, although originally a middle-class organ, has for some reason made it a point of policy to staff itself with people of humbler origins than its readers. As soon as the readership fell away dramatically, in obedience to Waugh's Law, its response was to proletarianise itself still further and raise its price — an exact model for the pattern it wished to project on the Post Office. Possibly it was all a case of ego-substitution on the part of the newspapermen concerned, or penis-envy, or whatever. On balance, I doubted whether this newspaper had the collective imagination to invent such a story, and decided that the Post Office was lying: that the story had been deliberately floated and then withdrawn. In other words, economic realities had intruded and once again, if I might be allowed to subject the matter to historical class analysis, the government has been brought face to face with the fact that no mixed economy can survive without the acquiescence of a social, economic and educational middle class. In fact, of course, it can't survive anyway, and if Mr Crosland would stop waving his little pink banner around he might realise that mixed economy welfarism has now reduced itself to the long-threatened absurdity. Since the end of "wage-stop" we have been used to a situation where the unskilled worker with five children was better off on welfare than working. Fortunately, not many 'workers' of this sort were prepared to take the trouble to breed five children. We have now reached the point, according to recent figures, where a man whose wages go up from £29 to £38 a week finds himself 16p worse off, and a £6 rise for a £48 earner leaves him 9p worse off. This is not so much the result of higher income tax and insurance rates as of losing various rent or rate rebates, school meal subsidies, family incomes supplement and ()flier goodies attaching to a man with only three children. If, as I believe, liberal welfarism is doomed, we must either progress towards the socialist system with its penalties for social parasitism, or retreat towards the soup kitchen and workhouse systems which have worked so well in the past — reviving, perhaps, the much-maligned Poor Law of 1834, passed in exactly such circumstances as these. In neither case, as I see it, will Mr Crosland's ruminations about commuter railway tickets have much relevance.
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