ANOTHER VOICE
The political hazard represented by special interest pressure groups
AUBERON WAUGH
0 nly last week I commended a young minister in the Government, called Mr Peter Bottomley. He is not someone I have ever met and I have it only on the authority of the Daily Telegraph that he exists, since he seems to have been dropped from the 1985 edition of Who's Who. He was re- ported as having rebuked an impertinent and hysterical official of the organisation called Rospa — Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents — by pointing out that whatever one's personal views on road safety, the plain truth was that our road casualty rate was lower than that in almost all other developed countries.
The Rospa official concerned was called Mr Geoffrey Large, a former police patrol car driver, now the society's assistant director of road safety, who had declared that standards of driving in Britain were abysmal and getting worse, and that for some motorists their driving licence was ' a licence to kill'.
How proud I was of Mr Bottomley then, and how I hoped Mr Large had the grace to blush when he was put in his place. It seems an extraordinary thing that a volun- tary association of busybodies like Rospa dares appoint someone to the grandilo- quent post of director (or assistant direc- tor) of road safety. There is no earthly reason why any of us should pay a blind bit of notice to anything the society says or does, and it would surely be a good idea if newspapers ignored these self-important pressure groups. The idea that their Ruritanian officials are somehow in a position to direct us on matters of road safety is exquisitely absurd.
Douglas Hurd made exactly this point in a speech in Durham last Saturday. (It is funny to see the places these politicians have to go to find an audience during the parliamentary recess.) Ministers and MPs, he said, were in danger of being strangled by pressure groups. He urged those in- terested in public administration to study `the growth of these groups, their increased dominance of the media and the deference with which politicians regard them' at the same time as urging MPs and ministers to shake themselves free from the embrace of such dreadful people on the grounds that even though most of them were pursuing legitimate causes, the demands of these groups 'do not necessarily add up to the general good' — and added to the difficulty of reaching ministerial decisions. One can see that Mr Hurd is absolutely right. The main concern of these groups is to exaggerate the importance of their special area of concern, like the ludicrous Mr Large with his claims about road safety. Time and again I have seen the most blatantly false information being bandied about, whether on the incidence of rape, or cruelty to animals or children, or the risks of drink, or food additives, or tobacco. One can nearly always trace this informa- tion back to a pressure group, whose influence is all the more sinister because so many idle journalists treat it as if it were the expert body in the field, an indepen- dent authority. If the Tobacco Council or Brewers' Society issues a statement or funds a research project it is liable to be taken with a pinch of salt, but Ash or Action Against Alcohol — let alone the RSPCA, the NSPCC or the BMA — can make any self-aggrandising claim and be treated as a disinterested party.
One asks oneself why politicians listen to these people, and I am afraid the answer must be: because they are the only people who wish to talk to politicians. It might even be true that they are the only people prepared to listen to politicians as part of some unspoken quid pro quo. A politician without an audience to listen to him and feed his self-importance is like a fish out of water, a swan in an oil slick. Nothing else can explain Mr Norman Fowler's speech earlier this month to a 'conference of personnel managers, safety officers and doctors' in which he urged a war on drinking at lunch time. 'Does the expense account lunch need to include a bottle of wine?' he asked, trotting out the meaning- less statistic that alcohol abuse costs the country £1.6 billion a year in production.
Any other gathering would have answered him in no uncertain terms: Yes, it bloody well does, you pasty-faced fool. The Japanese, greatest models of industrial efficiency the world has ever known, spend a tenth of their gross national product buying each other drinks on expenses in hostess bars. They are easily the drunkest people I have ever seen. If anybody offered me mineral water with an expense account luncheon I would seize him by the beard, spit in his face and call him horse. But of course the personnel officers, safety officers and doctors present all clapped politely, and Mr Fowler went home think- ing he had had a good time. An even worse example of this tendency appeared on the front page of the Daily Telegraph this week around an alleged photograph of this self-same Mr Peter Bottomley whom I had praised a few days before. Mr Bottomley had found the annual meeting of the charity Alcohol Concern to listen to him. Now Alcohol Concern is a comparatively well- intentioned body, catering for those who are genuinely involved in the undeniable evil of alcoholism. It recently sent me a booklet on the subject of women and drinking, with articles devoted to black women — 'Racism in agencies is discourag- ing black women from finding treatment' — Asian women — 'A hidden problem?'
— and the feminist viewpoint — 'For 3,000 years women have been morally con- demned for drinking. Little has changed.....'
My point is that it is an excellent thing for good, kind people with minority con- cerns of this sort to draw attention to them in this way. What we do not expect or need is for government ministers to take their cue from them and direct our lives accord- ing to their demands. Yet in order to win his round of clapping, Mr Peter Bottomley was prepared to urge that 'drunken' drivers — that is to say those unfortunates who are caught driving over the limit — should be required to humiliate themselves, in addi- tion to their fines and suspensions, by placing public notices saying 'people like me killed over 1,000 people last year'.
Mr Bottomley is mad if he supposes that public opinion will allow him to single out convivial motorists in this way, while mug- gers, thieves and rapists do not have to make any such gesture. But his idiocy on this occasion illustrates a major political hazard. Labour, I would judge, has come pretty close to scuppering its chances of being accepted again as a national party by its deference to militant homosexual and fanatically anti-racist pressure groups. The Social Democrats may have done the same by paying too much heed to the flat earthers of the poverty lobby, and Liberals may have gone the same way with the green pygmies of the anti-nuclear move- ment. It really is quite important for political parties to keep these zealots and loonies at bay. Other parties may need their enthusiasm, the Conservatives do not. All they get in exchange is polite applause after a teetotal luncheon.
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