Centrepiece
Restrictive practices
Colin Welch
T don't have the advantage as I write of 'knowing the result of the Chesterfield by- election. But I am saddened by the thought that, if Mr Leon Brittan has his way, it will be the last to offer us such a rich profusion of choice. Reading down the list fills me with nostalgia, like the vast menu of Prunier's or some other great restaurant vanished or doomed. Where shall we go now, those of us who attached a proper importance to keeping death off the roads, freight on rail, yoga and meditation, four- wheel drive and hatchbacks. buying chesterfields in Thame, classifying the Sun as a comic, peace, Welshmen, no dental charges, a Bennless Labour Party, names not numbers for prisoners, ecology, research into acne, Elvis Presley, raving loonies and other great 'ishoos'? Few of us can afford a deposit of £1,000. We are in effect disfranchised.
The New Statesman also wants to keep deposits low, for reasons which seem at first glance both perverse and false. Low deposits, in its view, reflect 'a hope that politics should become more accessible to more ordinary individuals' Do ordinary individuals want access to politics? Do ordinary individuals want to be governed by other ordinary individuals? If so, perhaps we already are. Looking round the House of Commons today, do we not see a vast preponderance of very ordinary indivi- duals? It is the selection machinery of the great established parties which weeds out the extraordinary, or rather which picks people who are extraordinary in only one way — that they are extraordinarily ambiti- ous and prepared to suppress or sacrifice all individuality in pursuit of preferment. Is it unfamiliarity alone which prevents me and others from distinguishing one member of the vast new Tory intake from another? Or is it, as I suspect, that they are terribly alike, as if produced by some political cloning process or reared in batteries like hens? The effect of higher deposits, if any, could only be to reinforce this tendency towards sameness and ordinariness. The more it costs to stand, the fewer chances you can presumably afford to take, the more depen- dent you are on organised and cautious money.
Mr Alan Beith, Liberal MP for Berwick- upon-Tweed, laments that enormous deposits 'will do nothing to deter wealthy eccentric candidates' — news which should cheer Mr Benn in the unlikely event of his being unsuccessful this time. But Mr Beith further laments that enormous deposits will cripple the Alliance, not to mention Labour, which lost no fewer than 119 deposits last time. The Alliance lost only ten. A party fighting a general election on a national scale would have to deposit more than £600,000. It might get nearly all of it back after the poll, but would be deprived of it for the whole campaign. The unions may find this vast sum for Labour. Who on earth will find it for the Alliance'.
High deposits will certainly prevent extre- mists, fascists, communists and the like, who have no wide support, from standing under their own colours. A good thing? Surely not. Even more frenzied and dis- honest will be their efforts to infiltrate the mainstream parties. They will not give up the struggle, but will be forced to carry it on under other people's flags and at other people's expense. Certainly we might thus get more extraordinary people into Parlia- ment, but crypto-extraordinaries and these not of an edifying sort.
Some of the Marxists and National Front- ers already jostling and elbowing their way up the Labour and Tory parties are said to have undergone some sort of genuine con- version. Others are confidently expected to see the light when exposed to the irresistible charms and moderating influences of our parliamentary institutions. Should we swallow all this? To deny the possibility of genuine conversion would be ridiculous. We must all know people who were, say, communists and are so no longer. Indeed, reformed fanatics often have a peculiar and precious insight, denied to the rest of us, into their former creed. How little we would know about the God that failed if it were not for the testimony of its one-time worshippers!
Yet many never throw off the infection. They just learn how to hide or disguise its more obvious and repulsive symptoms while its rages continue unchecked within. Of apparent repentants, moreover, we are entitled to require much higher standards than we would demand of folk who never strayed from the straight and narrow path. To have flirted, still more to have lived long in sin, with Marxism or Fascism must be a sign of defective intellect or character. It is not a minor, forgettable and easily remediable lapse of taste, like wearing brown shoes with a blue suit. It indicates that something is or was badly wrong, a major warp, fault or flaw somewhere. We are right to be suspicious of it, if not unreasonably or obsessively so. Coleridge warned us to beware of barking too close to the heels of an error lest we get our brains kicked out. True; but that didn't stop him, and shouldn't stop us, from barking at all in warning.
T read with astonishment in the Daily I Telegraph of a threat by Sir Keith Joseph to strike a Jewish school off the register, thus in effect to close it. At this school 250 boys spend at least four hours every morn- ing reading the first five books of the Bible and the Talmud. Lessons are in Yiddish. Only four hours a week are devoted to secular general education. Not an education I would have chosen for my own children, I confess, though I would greatly have preferred it to peace studies, ethnic awareness, what passes for sociologY and, other modish twaddle: better the Tabun!! than Talcott Parsons. Nor would I think it proper for such an education to be provided at public expense. But it isn't: the school is independent, and presumably provides what its fee-paying parents want. It also keeps tenuously alive a language and tradi; in mortalowrhtaicihdwanegsehrould all value and which is How can such a liberal-minded man as Sir Keith behave in such an illiberal waY; Or is some civil servant pulling the strings?
The New Zealand fast bowler Richard Hadlee was recently ticked of: for bowling' bouncers at 'non-recognised batsmen'. What on earth is a 'non- recognised batsman'? Surely anYone' however inept, who pads up and marches out with a bat to the crease runs a grave risk of being 'recognised' as a batsman. He nt,_aY, even want to be recognised as one. Number eleven batsmen have in the past scored, memorable centuries. Kenneth Fames °I Essex was one. Every number eleven can
i hope if not expect to be another. Bishen Bedi, as captain of India, did not
"' recognise the last three in his batting or as batsmen. On a vicious pitch, with the ball rearing and flying about all over .the place, he therefore declared his innings closed at 80-odd for 8, far behind his opponents. He prevented his tailenders from being recognised as batsmen in the on- ly way which can be absolutely logical, Ply- per and unanswerable: he prevented Meta from going to the crease. Another course might be for non- recognised batsmen to wear a placard to that effect. They would be allowed to bat' but not to score any runs. If, having touch ed the ball, it reached or went over the boundary, they would be given out at oncde as having forfeited their non-recognise status. Like batsmen, some boxers and writers are not as good as others. Nonetheless, by entering the ring or appearing in Print' they risk being knocked flat or harshly criticisee or ridiculed. They can't reasonably whinke that, being non-recognised, they should uri exempt from the blows which fall others. Of course there may be far to : many bouncers in modern cricket. If s0' this should be controlled or eliminated rli't matter who is batting, recognised or no is s not lawful to hit only 'recognised' boxers below the belt. It is not lawful at all
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