Another voice
The Alternative Strategy
Auberon Waugh
Montmaur, Aude, France Over all M. Mitterrand's deliberations in these first heady days of power — whether or not to introduce a wealth tax, by how much to improve the lot of the worst paid — there hangs a grisly spectre. It would be Poetic to describe it as the spectre of Mr Ken Livingstone, the GLC chairman whose activities have provided so much simple Pleasure over the summer weeks to those of US scattered with our airmail copies of the Daily Telegraph in exile over the three corners of the world, but the truth is that few Frenchmen have heard of Mr Livingstone. My impassioned speeches in his praise are Met with puzzlement and incomprehension. No, the spectre haunting M. Mitterrand — who seems an intelligent, moderate man, despite the terror and loathing he inspires almost uniformly among the better class of Frenchmen outside Paris — is the spectre of Modern Britain, now reduced by overemphasis on social welfare and 'workers' rights' to a nation of unemployable, semiimbecile football hooligans.
I could bore on for hours with anecdotes about the extraordinary superiority of the French working man over his English Counterpart. Like many, if not most, English families of the middle class we have always preferred French motor cars, reckoning that even if British cars worked, Which they are widely believed not to do, everything about the British car industry is SO profoundly offensive to reason and good taste that one might as well give one's Money straight to the Labour Party. Last Sunday the engine of my magnificent Peugeot 504, after carrying us for nearly 110,000 miles, often at enormous speeds, quietly died.
A passing farmer rescued me and took me to Montmaur, where the village Mechanic devoted the rest of his Sunday and most of the night to stripping an old engine off an abandoned car in one of those Picturesque scrapheaps which dot the French countryside and refitting it to my OW n slightly shaky limousine.
Eighteen years ago, as an elegant and rich Young married couple, we decided to imPort our own solution to the servant problem, capturing a wild young Catalan peasant girl in this region. She was a small hairy thing, in appearance something betWeen a monkey and a very large spider, called Lolita. We grew very fond of her, of Course. As soon as we had brought her to our agreeable London home in Chester Row and let her out of the cardboard box With holes punched in the side she started working and never seemed to stop. After a few days it grew harder and harder to think of things for her to do, and after a week she exclaimed incredulously to my wife: `Mais, Madame, vous avez peur de me commander'. So it proved. After three years she was as lazy, as overpaid and as discontented as any English girl, with many of the airs and graces of a Norland nanny, and had to be sent home.
Which illustrates as well as anything else why Britain is in such a terrible mess. If I am right, the main reason why a large part of the British working class is unemployable is that an equally large part of the British professional and managerial class is unfit to employ anybody. We cringe and prostrate ourselves in front of our employees. We smirk and touch our forelocks and lose no opportunity to ingratiate ourselves, but we are simply not competent to impose the conditions which would make employment worthwhile.
Just supposing I am right in this and it is the wetness (or social guilt) of the middle classes rather than the inherent laziness or bloody-mindedness of the lower classes which has led us into this impasse, we might care to subject next week's deliberations of the TUC conference in Blackpool to class analysis along these lines. Left to themselves, the lower classes have produced what they call 'an alternative economic strategy' of such overwhelming and selfevident fatuousness that one has to be a very wicked man — like Tony Benn or Len Murray — or a very foolish one indeed, like Michael Foot, even to pretend to take it seriously. Everything about the TUC programme is either blatantly dishonest or blatantly moronic, most being a mixture of both elements. Invest North Sea Oil revenues in industry and vastly increase welfare spending? What on earth do they think happens to North Sea revenues now? Every single element in the programme — from defence and foreign affairs to domestic fiscal policy — is a recipe for more or less instant disaster: hyper-inflation, economic collapse, mass unemployment, civil war and national subjection. Yet it is plainly the best these oafs can do.
Next week's conference, even more than the Notting Hill Carnival, may be seen as a festival of all that is most fatuous and infantile in contemporary Britain. Equally, it may be seen as a monument to the failure of Mrs Thatcher's Government to reduce the unions — and with them the major forces of anarchy and despair — to their proper role in the nature of things. Mrs Thatcher's failure to recognise and channel the enormous tide of popular resentment against the unions which brought her to power in May 1979 will probably be judged the worst of all the failures of post-war British governments — certainly far worse than her failure to honour Mr Worsthorne, for which she may incur the greater odium in her own lifetime.
There are those who argue that the unions are no longer the major problem, that she hal effectively defeated them by allowing a proportion of their existing mischief to run its course. Certainly there are very few strikes, and if the effectiveness of industrial policy is measured by days lost in industrial disputes, she has done magnificently. I have even heard rumours of a Japanese-owned car factory in Wales where productivity is higher than in Japan, although I would like to see it before believing in it. Until I have seen it I will stick to my prejudice that although modern Britain can excel in a few things — banking, insurance, even medical and scientific research — it can survive only in those things requiring least assistance for the sour and spoiled section of the community we still call 'the workers'.
There may be exceptions to the rule here and there, but I insist that the prevailing philosophy of the British working class is to be found in the attitudes enshrined — not created — by the TUC. That these attitudes would change with a change of attitude by employers can scarcely be doubted — a large part of the unions' success in keeping the loyalty of their members despite the disastrous results of their leadership may well be due to the fact that they alone represent the forces of discipline and order on the industrial scene. That these attitudes have not changed, and will not change under the present leadership, can scarcely be doubted either. I would advance two episodes from last week's news (courtesy of the Daily Telegraph and a single, odd issue of the Standard) to prove my point.
First, we noticed that Mr Reginald Brady, the Natsopa machine room troublemaker who helped bring the Sunday Times to its knees, has been appointed industrial relations officer by the group at a salary over £20,000 a year, plus enormous expenses. Any comment on this appointment seems perilous, except that I am surprised the itchy-bottomed pornographer Murdoch did not show sufficient courage in his convictions to appoint Brady editor of The Times, like everyone else.
Finally, we heard a wail from Mr Jack Ashley, the Labour MP who interests himself most especially in the Disabled, because sums invested by the Public Trustee on behalf of thalidomide victims had not appreciated much in the past decade. Never mind that scarcely a single portfolio in the United Kingdom has appreciated (in real terms) at all, and many have even lost paper value. Perhaps the thalidomide experience might convince these tired, sour half-witted faces in Blackpool of what they are doing to the national economy. But the new call is for the Government to reimburse the thalidomide victims by the amount they would have received if the Stock Market had been different, the economy healthier. Oh yes, of course. That is the Alternative Strategy.
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