Another Spectator's t Notebook
Hugh Scanlon showed himself in a curiously divided mood at lunch on Wednesday. He was anxious to do a deal on pay with the Government, but seemed still to think that the operation of the Industrial Relations Act represented a step towards the creation of a corporate state. Asked whether he thought the Labour Party should send delegates to the European Parliament at Strasbourg Scanlon replied that one had always to deal with the reality: Britain was now in the Common Market, and he would do the best he could for his members within that context. It seemed clear from his somewhat gnomic utterances that Scanlon and the AUEW are groping their way towards a deal with Mr Heath and his ministers. Hugh Scanlon used to be in favour of the total repeal of the Industrial Relations Act; and, if it could not be repealed, he wanted to put it on ice. Now, it appears, he is willing to reform it; particularly by the introduction of a provision which dictates that no action will be brought before the NIRC without the consent of the Minister. This means, in effect, that if Messrs Heaton wishes to take action against recalcitrant employees, they would not be able to do so before Mr Macmillan had a quiet chat with Mr Jones, or Mr Scanlon, or some equivalent. It all sounds very cosy. It makes Hugh Scanlon sound clubbable. And it has all the outlines of the corporate state which Scanlon rejects.
Anti-abortion
I was delighted to see — even on television — the enormous success of the anti-abortion mass rally organised in Manchester over the weekend by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children. Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 people turned up, and the minicounter-demonstrations by the female chauvinist sows of Women's Liberation were quite dwarfed. The dreary chant of these self-indulgent pathetics was "Woman must decide her fate" — one of those progressive 'formulae which, translated, means, "Woman must do whatever she pleases, even at the expense of another life." It is time that all the twaddle about when a foetus becomes a human being was disposed of: a life is a life is a life, and the deliberate destruction of it for selfish reasons is murder, even if a deluded parliament failed to recognise that fact. That, moreover, there is no contradiction between a progressive — even permissive — attitude to modern sexual mores and a strong stand against the murder of unborn children was demonstrated by Leo Abse's splendidly vigorous speech at the rally, which included this telling comparison: "No distinction can be made between the violence of the professional Harley Street abortionist, wresting his tax-free cash payments out of women in difficulties, and the mugger on the street. The one uses the scalpel and needle, the other the brick and the boot. Both are near psychopathic and both are releasing their aggression on the innocent: the one releases it on an unborn child and a bewildered mother, the other on the helpless aged. Both are prepared, without remorse, to kill for money."
Ex-glamour boy
The take-over of the Irish Independent group of newspapers by ex-Rugby glamour boy Tony O'Reilly, now American vice-president of Heinz International, is, I hear, causing a certain amount of trepidation in southern Irish journalistic and political circles. Hitherto the Irish national press has been balanced in the sense that the Irish Press (owned largely by the de Valera family) has been proFianna Fail; the Irish Independent proFine Gael, and the Irish Times hovering in a semi-neutral way in the middle — though it has more often than not backed Fianna Fail in general elections. O'Reilly has declared that he has no " immediate " political ambitions, but he is known to be more than ordinarily close to Charles Haughey, the Fianna Fail Finance minister dismissed by Jack Lynch because of allegations about gunrunning to Ulster, who has since made a ,spectacular public come-back to politics. The supposition is that Fianna Fail — as Haughey recently observed in private — can be expected to stay in opposition for about ten years; that by the end of that period Haughey will be its leader; and that the Independent, its present editor Aidan Pender having departed, will be Haughey's paper.
Previous page
