Another voice
Arts in the class war
Auberon Waugh
Mr Enoch Powell, in a recent article in the Daily Telegraph, drew attention to an important influence in human affairs which he called the 'time-lag'. This is the delay between intelligent appreciation of any given predicament and administrative response to it: 'I believe that normally, if not invariably, societies are to be found implementing in practice ideas and attitudes of mind which have already been outgrown, and sometimes long outgrown,' he wrote, giving as one of his reasons 'the sheer length of time for ideas to be sufficiently distilled and debased into common opinion that political actions, especially in a democracy, can be based on them'.
If, at the end of the day, I can persuade conservatives of the existence of a class war, persuade them to hear and use the word 'class' without a polite shudder, I shall have served my purpose. At present, the war between the classes is being lost simply because conservatives refuse to acknowledge its existence.
Yet I am convinced that with a little applied intelligence the forces of bourgeois civilisation could still win it. The important point is that society has changed. Bluecollar workers no longer swamp the white collars. Moreover, a large part of the uneducated workforce is now easily replaceAle, if not already redundant or parasitic. That is why the traditional working class — whom Labour like to call 'our people' — has to organise itself in its own defence, and why most people of goodwill wish it luck. But it provides the reason why this same blue-collar workforce, or its leaders, should be in a position to call the tune in legislative and administrative matters or impose its base proletarian tastes on our existing culture. Only the ineptitude and intellectual torpor of the Conservative Party will explain that.
If I turn to examine the state of battle in the arts this week, it is not, of course, because I regard the arts as the most important battlefield. Nothing can equal in importance or wickedness Labour's destruction of secondary education. I look at the arts partly because they provide another opportunity to declaim about the class war, partly because the proletarian culture is at its most obviously ridiculous in the arts and partly because they seem to offer the opening for an effective counter-attack which I shall explain presently — its basis being that the Conservatives could use general indifference towards the arts in Britain as the smokescreen for a major social counterrevolution without many people noticing.
Last month a Labour Party background policy paper: The Arts and the People (Labour Party Literature Sales 45p) slipped out of Transport House while my back was turned. It is a deliciously silly document, unless one chooses to regard it as sinister, with its opening assertion: 'The arts are politically important', its constantly repeated threats of 'democratic scrutiny' against middle-class domination, its promise to release the theatre and music from being thp preserve of the 'selected few', its threat to make libraries 'more attractive to working-class users', its 'socialist policy for literature' which requires a 'state publishing house for novels'.
But its real character is revealed in such exhortations as this one: 'We should encourage greater participation in literature as a community art form'. Communal writers of the future will be found in regional community arts centres, jealously protected from any contact with the middle class; 'Arts Centres should not be places which are seen as middle-class "temples of culture" which discourage the general public from entering'. Such centres will be under the 'democratic control of the community. .Great care, however, should be taken to see that the provision of such facilities is not merely determined by well organised middle-class pressure groups.'
The new heroes of the cultural scene, they would have us know, are mysterious people called community artists whose function is 'almost impossible to define'. But, 'the transformation which the community artist has brought about in the life and environment of those living in monstrous housing estate g or drab city slums has only been achieved by the single-minded dedication of the type of artist who believes in putting his skill and qualifications at the service of the community — usually working for a pittance in deplorable conditions.'
The most interesting thing about all this drivel — I wonder what Lord Donaldson makes of it, whom I knew as a rosy-checked farmer in Gloucestershire so many years ago — is that it shows the sort of pressures which the hapless Roy Shaw, Secretary General of the Arts Council, has to accommodate. They might explain his curious doctrine (in this month's Encounter) that criticisms of a contradictory nature from different quarters 'cancel each other out'. But Shaw, to do him justice, at least pays lip-service to the idea of excellence in the arts, even if excellence, in his use, depends on the advice of such 'experts' as the Australian Charles Osborne, his director of literature. Osborne regards the highest purpose of his department as being 'to identify and assist the next James Joyce" and finds the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins 'cringingly irrelevant', 'really abhorrent' .2 But my purpose in drawing attention to this document is not to speculate about the likely effect on the arts — or what we laughingly call the arts — if implemented. One of its solid recommendations is for a position to be made in the Cabinet for a Minister of Arts, Entertainments and Communications. I unhesitatingly recommend Mr Denis Howell for this job now that Peter Simple's Alderman Foodbottom, chairman of Bradford's Tramways and Fine Arts Committee, has been gathered to his eternal rest (1 notice, 'however, that the nevy Chairman of the Arts Council, a Mr K. Robinson, comes there straight from his chairmanship of London Transport). But fear such a Department would prove abortive, with even less access to funds than it enjoys now as a tiny part of the Education vote.
Now I come to my plan for a Quiet Counter-Revolution. I would propose a new Department of Culture (rather as they have in France) incorporating the arts, education and tourism. With education under its belt, this would already be a major spending department, and tourism (unlike steel, or shopping, or motorcars) is a thriving industry, capable of almost unlimited expansion, which now earns us nearly £2,000 million a year. From the education vote, having closed down most of the new universities, I would start a huge programme of de-industrial training which would equip idle, incompetent and unhapPY steel-worker, shipbuilders and car workers to be profitably employed gamekeepers and, yes, domestic servants for our Arab visitors and others. Englishmen may not be much good at making steel or cars, but the can be the most magnificent servants, II properly trained and supervised. Having stopped all school building and re-equipment programmes, I would spend the money on restoring old buildings for tourism until eventually I was in a position to start pulling down the atrocities put up bY Sir Basil Spence and Colonel Seifert since the war, rebuilding our town centres as tbeY were in the 1850s.
Men now uselessly and unpleasantlY employed in moribund heavy industry, at enormous cost to the state, would make ingenious straw Muppets and other souvenirs for the tourist trade. O.Lir theatres, bars, massage parlours, art exhlb: itions, concerts, brothels, Church music and other leisure activities, all heavily sub' sidised, would be the wonder of the world,; and novels satirising the scene would se° like hot cakes in the new, austere America of President Jerry Brown. That, at any rate, is my vision. All it needst to bring it about is a few lines in the nex Conservative manifesto on the subject of,1 Tory policy for the Arts, which nobody WD read.
1 Interview with Matthew Hoffman in TUN Out. 2 Fifty works of English Literature we cotild Do Without. Rapp and Carroll 1967.
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