Another voice
Thoughts on the Circumcision
Auberon Waugh
Is it my imagination, or is champagne tasting more and more delicious with every year that passes? As a rich young bachelor, I would regularly drink an Imperial pint of Krug for breakfast in my rooms in Clarges Street, now pulled down to make way for Reed International. As an elegant young married couple, my wife and I frequently used to serve it at the end of an evening, when we had had guests to dinner in Chester Row. But it is only now, when the occasional bottle of non-vintage Moet turns up at Christmas time, that we fall on it like Arab boys on a cigarette.
That is the first cheerful reflection I can summon to greet the new year. On my last crossing from France I sat up late with a group of British lorry drivers who were buying each other champagne by the bucket; I pensively sipped my Harp lager and reflected that their pleasure would soon pall. When! asked one of the merrymakers whether he did not find his champagne a trifle acid when drunk in such large quantities and so late at night, he cheerfully agreed that he would as soon drink horsepiss; but he indicated that he had a certain social position to keep up, and he saw no point in flouting convention unnecessarily.
No doubt the lower classes have frightful headaches today, as I write on a brilliant sunny new year's morning, cut off by snow from all contact with the outside world except by telephone. But I think it would be wrong to draw too much comfort from that reflection. Frustrated conservative idealism can all too easily be mistaken for vulgar misanthropy. In fact it is hard to think of a single reason why any sane Englishman should welcome the new year. Of all major holidays in the Church's calendar, the Feast of the Circumcision has always struck me as the gloomiest. Medical opinion nowadays is by no means unanimous that the practice is desirable. Should Christians really rejoice on such an occasion? I can seldom find it in my heart to do so.
The purpose of this discussion is not to revive any of those ancient, bitter prepschool feuds between Roundheads and Cavaliers. Moreover, it might be imprudent, as I forget which side of the barricades was graced by the present proprietor of the Spectator, although I am reasonably sure that his brother was one of the Roundhead leaders. Time was, I would happily have laid down my life in the Roundhead cause but these ancient and apparently irreconcilable loyalties have faded, just as one hopes that religious partisanship in Ulster may one day subside. Tempora mutant et nos in illis mutamur. Only the deprivation remains, but it would be as absurd to go into mourn ing for one's lost prepuce after all these years as it would be to use the Feast of the Circumcision as a pretext for triumphalist Roundhead demonstrations, with pipes, tapers and banging drums: 'Still stands thine ancient sacrifice . . . Lord God of Hosts be with us yet, Lest we forget, lest we forget!'
No, the relevance of the Circumcision to our present times, and most particularly to the year 1979— or so it seems to me, as I sit meditating on the subject at home on the first day of the Gregorian Calendar—is that the ancient, unnecessary and rather barbaric Jewish ritual survives among many Christian families not for reasons of hygiene or aesthetics but in response to an imponderable instinct of conservatism. Tradition, family and class loyalty, superstition and even some buried streak of cruelty may play their part, but above all the Circumcision should be seen as a Feast of Irrational Conservatism. On this day we celebrate the instinctive resistance to change which keeps society sane and forms as large a part of human instinct, I would say, as the forces of avarice, envy and sex-drive combined. Some individuals, it is true, are born almost without this healthy instinct, just as some are born almost without sex-drive. Our attitude to such as Mr Benn, on this great Feast, should surely be one of compassion and tender concern, not hostility. It is possible that his idiot enthusiasm for change may yet produce a degree of political and economic torpor such as will gladden the hearts of the most extreme Circumcisionists in our midst.
Conservatives reacted unfavourably to the Labour Party's proposal that, after abolition of the Lords, the Commons might be able to prolong its own life by a two-thirds majority. They supposed that this must result in a socialist tyranny on the Eastern European model, but they ignored the very human propensity to resist change. Many MPs are reluctant to be voted out of their jobs at an election, not just socialists. The voting on such an issue would need to be at least 423 'Ayes' 211 'Noes', with a Government majority of 212. One does not need to be an expert to see that such figures could only be achieved by a coalition between the two major parties. This is not a formula for dynamic tyranny but for general political inactivity which, I maintain, is the very best we can hope for. True con servatism should seize upon the idea rather than welcoming a general election with all its attendant risks and uncertainties.
At the moment it seems more likely than not that Mrs Thatcher will win it. When I say that such a result will be disastrous for the Conservative cause, I do not mean to imply that Mrs Thatcher is a foolish woman or that her policies are the wrong ones — merely that the measures necessary to preserve the country cannot successfully be introduced through the parliamentary system. Her failure to check the irreversible processes of state expansion, trade union power, currency inflation and national bankruptcy will be seen as discrediting the remedies she unsuccessfully tries to apply. A Conservative victory this year will make a socialist tyranny in the near future more, not less, likely. This is sad and practically nobody wants it. No sane or intelligent person can still believe in socialism as a workable model for society, but a combination of vested interests and personal ambitions would seem to make it inevitable.
Those of us with an over-developed awareness of the border between East and West Germany, with its miles of barbed wire, observation posts, ploughed zones and minefields to keep the East Germans in their socialist paradise can only hope that the British will find some way of expressing their profound revulsion from change before it is too late.
Because it is no good pretending that this sentiment finds adequate expression in the Conservative Party. To establish the point one does not need to look once again at the last Conservative government under its terrible plastic humanoid, the Action Man Heath, whose presence in removable rubber trousers and perspex space helmet still peers over Mrs Thatcher's shoulder. The simple fact, which others have observed before, is that, through force of circumstances, the Conservatives have become the party of change, Labour the party of resistance to change.
If, as I believe, the pressures of state expansionism and trade union power are irreversible, and hatred of profit is the dominant ethos of our time, then the best and only policy is to let them run their course — through increasing inflation to government bankruptcy as a result of its inability to raise loans. Then it will be socialism which is blamed. Mrs Thatcher's Conservative Party is no more than a peev ish irrelevance in the context of this great historical catastrophe, but once the state economy has been destroyed, the prospects will be very good, I should say, for small businesses to build on the ruins. Then at last, the British will have come to their senses.
Which may seem a gloomy forecast, but is intended in the opposite sense. There are obvious and immediate consolations to be found in a Conservative victory — in a pause to all the foul things Labour is doing in education, in personal taxation, in mental health and local bus services. My point is that there are consolations to be found in a Labour victory, too.
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