Personal column
Brian Inglis
The new liquor code issued by the Advertising Standards Authority is best desoribed simply by removing the 'e', Irish fashion: it is cod. The ASA's difficulty, clearly, is that they are being assailed from two flanks: by the Consumers' Association lobby, primarily concerned to prevent false claims being, made; and by the anti-alcohol lobby, which would prefer no claims to be allowed at all. In theory, the Which-style critics could be satisfied by the clause which says that all claims in advertisements must be supported by valid evidence; compelling Smirnoff, Courvoisier and the rest of the sexual fantasy brigade to set up a new Kinsey inquiry, to prove that their products really are the road to ecstasy. But to soothe the critics of alcohol, beginning to recover after the devastating setback which the collapse of Prohibition gave to their cause, another clause in the code lays down that advertisements "should not emphasise the stimulant, sedative or tranquillising effects of any drink." As most of us who drink do so for one (or more) of those reasons, this is tantamount to saying that liquor advertisements must not tell the truth, even when supported by valid evidence: an eccentric proposition.
Smokescreens
At the same time, the Government has decided to lop 75 per cent off the budget for the anti-smoking campaign. I do not know whether this is simply part of the economy drive, or a recognition that the campaign has been an abject failure; but either way it is sensible. Scare propaganda of the kind that was used never has and never will work, as experience has endlessly shown; but even if it had been more sensibly planned it would still have stood no chance of success, for a reason a cousin of mine, a former Hooghly pilot, committed to my mind the first time I was taken sailing. He issued a variety of directives, of which I can remember only the pithiest: always pee to leeward. The notion that this puny effort could succeed against the full blast of the tobacco companies' propaganda wind machine, assuring us that smoking is manly (and womanly), healthy, and socially desirable, was grotesque. But then, the Treasury never wanted it to succeed; the revenue is far too valuable. I see from Elisabeth Dunn's 'Us and Them' column in the Sunday Telegraph that the French government's tobacco monopoly, whose function is supposed to be to curb smoking, is to spend £150,000 promoting its wares in Britain. Man proposes, as Dumas observed in The Count of Monte Christo: money disposes.
Bolt from the blue
It is because money disposes, that the decision to bring Concord into service early next year is depressing. How many of you, I wonder, have actually heard a sonic boom? I used to think I had heard it many times, from listening to the noise made when aircraft broke the sound barrier out to sea; nothing to get worked up about. But then, I began to spend time in the Ardeche, which lies between Provence and the Massif Central; where — presumably because it is relatively free from other kinds of air traffic — French air pilots are allowed to practise going through the barrier. The impression to anybody down below is, almost literally, of a bolt from the blue; loud enough to make you jump, if you are not expecting it. And the trouble is that you never are expecting it. Each time, it is a slightly death-enhancing experience. As nobody now pretends that Concord can make a profit, the British and French governments are going to be under pressure to let that boom sound over land, regardless of people's feelings below; and also to allow the noise levels on and around airports to be stretched, to accommodate the svelte monster.
Shop affront
Professions behave just as badly as governments, given the power to do so; which is why .I trust that the National Union of Journalists, of which 1 am a member, will never secure a closed ;hop. Following the publicity in connection with Michael Foot's Bill, admittedly, there has been a withdrawal from the extremist position, which was that the closed shop should apply pre-entry: that is to say, nobody would be allowed to write for a national newspaper unless he had undergone a protracted apprenticeship in the provinces (a rule which, were it to be retrospectively applied, would exclude most of Fleet Street's best-known writers, including Michael Foot). But with a closed shop, in times of financial stringency, it will be all too tempting for office 'chapels' to protect their members by refusing entry, and space, to newcomers; echoing the Mirror chapel's notorious decision to stop Clive Jenkins writing a column, not on the very reasonable grounds that it could be expected to send Mirror readers scurrying off to the Sun, but because "we believe that only trained full time and committed journalists are qualified to write for the newspapers."
When that greatest of manipulative surgeons, Herbert Barker, was told by the medical profession that it could not recognise him unless he underwent the full apprenticeship, Bernard Shaw likened it to uppish village organists telling Brahms he ought to qualify in some school of music by doing exercises in obsolete counterpoint: roughly the equivalent of the Mirror chapel's attitude.
Domino school
I see that some of the members of the "falling dominoes" school of international punditry have been emerging from the burrows on which they took refuge after Watergate. In their interpretation of what is happening, they are probably right; but not for the right reasons. As anybody who has played that amiably exasperating game will know, the dominoes fall (knocking each other over) because they have been propped in an upright position, contrary to their natural horizontal inclination; and because in the upright position, they are extremely unstable, the least jog sending them reeling. The original mistake the Americans made was to back men who were 'safe', in that they were anti-Communist; thugs like Syngman Rhee: Thieu, with his marvellously corrupt family network; and now, the wretched Lon Nol. The British, by contrast, displayed such ineptitude in getting out of their imperial commitments that they almost always had to hand over power to men whose politics they feared or loathed; not, as events have shown, an infallible prescription for future stability, but a much more effective antidote to communism than shoring-up some puppet with cash.
Why, incidentally is it those same people who used to support the American role in Vietnam, who can now be heard saying that whatever about Watergate, it must be conceded that Nixon did a good job on the international front? Surely they should be denouncing him, as the man who pulled the rug out from under Thieu and No!?
Brian Inglis, Who was editor of The Spectator' 1959:62, has most recently written The Forbidden Game: a Social History of Drugs (Hodder and Stoughton £4.95)
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