ANOTHER VOICE
The one little luxury which we can none of us afford
AUBERON WAUGH
In my old age I shall probably spend most of my time denying that I have said, written or done anything attributed to me. One can well understand the temptation. It is a good way for old people to keep the young on their toes. Lord Stockton, I have read, now denies that he ever said 'You have never had it so good,' and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations supports him up to a point, recording him as having said at Bedford on 20 July 1957: 'Let's be frank about it. Most of our people have never had it so good.'
But the most important thing about this remark, whether he made it or not, was that everybody at the time thought he had made it. For many of them, it summed up everything that was most callous and cynic- al about the party which had recently, with almost unbelievable wickedness, invaded Port Said and tried to reoccupy the Suez Canal Zone by force. Yet the effect of this assurance on the country as a whole was quite different. Mr Macmillan, as he then was, and his Conservative team were re- turned in the election of October 1959 with a vastly increased majority to complete the 13 wasted years of socialising the economy, abandoning the Empire, punishing initia- tive, robbing widows and orphans, etc etc. It was as if the whole country — or at any rate 49.6 per cent of voters — had collec- tively doffed its cloth cap and said 'Thank you very much, Squire.'
One might also point out that in 1959 Mr Gaitskell's Labour Party, even with fun- loving Nye Bevan in the wings, was a much less terrifying prospect than the present crowd led by Glenys Kinnock and the fiend Hattersley, with Scargill and the left-wing unions, Benn and his prancing polytechnic- als in the wings.
So, before Lord Young, our enterprising Employment Secretary, starts denying that he said what we all heard him say to Jonathan Dimbleby on TVam, that 'the country has never had as good a time as it has today', it might seem in order to congratulate him on his astuteness. In the next breath he revealed that his remark was directed towards the General Election in 1988: 'There is one opinion poll and we are some way away from it,' he said. 'Let that judge.'
• The first thing to be said about Lord Young's original observation, after the ritual noises of disgust at such flagrant materialism, is that it is demonstrably true. There may be three million apparently unemployed but there are twenty-three million people in legitimate employment, and these people, with very few exceptions indeed, have never had it so good — even if, with the fallibility of human memory, they may suppose they had a better time when they were younger, more agile, more sexually active, when the weather was better and Big Ben was the size of a pocket watch. Half the world is miserable what- ever its economic condition, and bitter and nasty with it, but so far as material consid- erations have any bearing on human happi- ness it is perfectly true that the working population has never had as good a time as it is having today, and there are very few luxuries which it has to deny itself. On the normal arithmetic of democracy, the haves outnumber the have-nots in a ratio of more than seven to one. Any political platform which relies, like Mr Hattersley's, on stirring up the resentment and anger of the `have-nots' against the callousness of the `haves' would seem to be doomed.
But this analysis ignores two important forces in human affairs, particularly in the psychology of the 'haves'. The first — guilt — may be dismissed as a luxury, as was proved in 1959, but the second — insecur- ity — should be recognised as a powerful mass neurosis. Democrats ignore the op- eration of these forces at their peril. And the psephological map has entirely changed since 1959 with the emergence of an almost credible third choice. In 1959 the Liberals could look back to having re- ceived only 2.7 per cent of the total vote in 1955 and 2.5 per cent in 1951. Now the Liberal-SDP Alliance looks like offering an alternative to the Conservatives whose policies cause such guilt and anxiety among the insecure.
Insecurity expresses itself at some re- move as a terror of revolution or riot which might bring about the collapse of our settled order, more immediately as an instinctive revulsion from the politics of divisiveness and a fear that the `uncom- `It goes the whole Hogg.' promising' stance of Mrs Thatcher will play into the hands of left-wing socialists. Its most acceptable manifestation, shared by all sections of the country to such an extent that it has almost become a symbol of national unity, is a professed hatred for Mrs Thatcher. This, it seems to me, is the one luxury which we can least afford. Mrs Thatcher may be an embarrassment and a pain, but the alternatives to her are much worse, and if we concentrate on the horror of Mrs Thatcher rather than the horror of any likely replacement we shall all end up in the soup. Mr David Mudd, Tory MP for Fal- mouth, spoke for every bloody fool in the country when he answered Lord Young's point by saying: 'Some might argue we have never had it so bad.' But there are an awful lot of bloody fools. Mrs Thatcher, in one way or another, has antagonised them all. Even the law and order issue is now a vote-loser; the police in London, Manches- ter, Newcastle, and Liverpool are general- ly seen to be out of control as they career around in groups of eight. Now Mrs Thatcher proposes that police should be able to seize the assets of anyone convicted not only of drug dealing but also all major offences and keep the money themselves — to help them 'combat crime'. This, when British Telecom is seen to be a disaster, is privatisation gone mad. In fact British Telecom is threatening to become a seriously unpleasant feature in the lives of us all — not just because of its `Accurist' time-keeping but also because of its approach to its customers. A friend who found she had an obviously wrong bill --- five times the normal rate — was told that nothing could be done about it, the compu- ter was infallible, she would have to pay Then, in desperation, she told them she was a friend of a friend of Mr Donald Trelford, and would see to it that the Observer exposed these practices. Tele- com's attitude changed immediately • • • There is much to detest about Mrs Thatcher and her government. Watching her kneel in front of the Holocaust Monu- ment at Yad Vashem many of us might have decided that a vote for nice Dr Owen and the SDP was one of those little luxuries we have earned for ourselves, after life- time's service to the community, or what- ever. We must fight against this temptation whenever it confronts us, shut our eyes and think of Shirley Wiliams.
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