Another voice

Free Albert Thorogood

Auberon Waugh

Ladies I meet in London sometimes say What a convenient thing it must be for ine to have as many opportunities for airing my social conscience and simply Doing Good. Sometimes I detect a note of rebuke in these approaches. There are so many evils in our society, are there not, so many injustices, so many things which need Putting right ? Like the case of George Davis, now languishing in prison for one armed robbery he plainly did not commit.

Yet the more I look into the case of George Davis, the more it seems to me that Of all the innocent men languishing in British jails at the present time he is Probably the least worthy of being let out.

reached this conclusion without the benefit of learned arguments from counsel, for and against, or testimony from our splendid, almost incorruptible police, let alone the fair and scrupulous summing-up of a British Judge, all of which contrived to send him to Prison in the first place. But it is a firm decision, nevertheless. So far as I am Foncerned George Davis can stay where he IS, and I leave his cause to those of his friends in the East End of London with a Pl. ore pedantic concern for the niceties of Judicial procedure.

The case of Albert Thorogood, sent down by Southend magistrates for refusing to Work, strikes me as entirely different. Albert's only crime is that in twenty-five Years he has worked for thirty-three weeks, drawing £12,000 in social security benefits during that time.

A little arithmetic will show that in the ,1,257 weeks he has not been working, he has averaged £9.47p a week, scarcely a princely income, and a great deal less than it would have cost to keep him in Prison. Social security rates may be too

high

at the present time—I do not know—

°Lit they centainly haven't been throughout the twenty-five years of Albert's retirement.

appealing to the Queen to grant this °iameless man a free pardon and state Pension to save him the trouble and Indignity of collecting it every week, I do nm expect her to follow my economic aerguments to the effect that after twentyre years on the dole Albert should be "ailed as a Hero of British Labour and Presented with a gold watch, although I lc, now she tries to follow everything I write. instead, I would simply appeal to her sense Pf British fairness, whether it is right that th°se of her subjects who are of a philos°, Phical or contemplative turn of mind snould be persecuted in this way. The economic case for arguing that they 440 serve who only sit back and draw their 8°cial security entitlements is much more

complicated, and so is the case for suggesting that Albert Thorogood should be held up as an example which large sections of the working class could usefully follow. At this point, in fact, I would advise all housewives and intelligent women of both sexes to switch off and turn to the crosswords on page 31.

Addressing a lunch to celebrate the bicentenary of Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations at the Institute of Economic Affairs last week, I mentioned a few of the political obstacles in the path of any liberal economic system, not least of which are the two great forces which have emerged within the democratic process: the forces of stupidity and idleness. I did not mention the third great force, of envy, since this was a friendly, non-political occasion.

Until recently, liberal economists had to assume that at any rate a majority of human beings were rational and inspired by intelligent, material self-interest. The trouble was always that while this assumption may once have been true, any application of free market principles was liable to produce areas of such depraved and unredeemed squalor—in Harlem, Watts, Glasgow, the East End of London—as were repugnant to the peace of mind or humane consciences of the well-to-do. Liberal welfareism may have blunted the self-help potential of the working class to some extent, but the arrival of one-manone-vote, socialist welfarism and the doctrine of redistribution has plainly directed it into other channels altogether.

If I am right, then it might seem that both Adam Smith and Samuel Smiles are up the creek without a paddle. It is at this point that we turn to the benign form of Mr Albert Thorogood, forty-six, his loyal wife, Kathleen, fifty-five, and her son Jesse, eighteen, all of whom appear to live happily on the dole and only ask that they should continue to be allowed to do so.

Smith lived before the technological revolution and knew nothing of overproduction or work-sharing. He would have been as puzzled by last week's announcement that manufacturing industry in the United Kingdom as a whole ran at a loss in 1974 as he would have been by the Archbishop of Canterbury's asinine remarks, fortuitously published on the same day, about 'obscene' profits in British industry.

I made a reasonably close study of the Inquiry for the purpose of my address, and while it may seem impertinent to speak on behalf of someone clearly unable to do so for himself, I feel it is a reasonable guess

on my part that if Adam Smith were alive today he would agree-with me that, in a technological age, vast sections of the working class have become an economic anachronism. By this, we would not mean that they should be sterilised, murdered, or deported, merely that they should not be encouraged to 'work' if they do not wish to do so.

The average industrial wage is now apparently £70 a week. A new machine may easily enable one man to do the work of five. One does not need to be a very clever mathematician to see that he, his firm and the nation as a whole will be better off if one of the other four moves to a new machine while three retire on £25 a week national assistance than if all five hang around the machine reading comics and cracking dirty jokes on £70 a week each. The problem is to convince enough of those earning £70 a week that redundancy can be Fun, even on £25 a week.

At this stage in the argument, I have always tended to fall back on pleas for the free availability of some cheap, harmless, euphoriant, appetite-reducing drug, possibly a derivative of betel, or cannabis, or qat, which would sort out those who prefer to work and grow rich from those who are happy to cultivate their own gardens, whether interior or out of doors.

But Mr Albert, Thorogood has shown that this unacceptably radical solution is not necessary. Instead of being locked up in some airless dungeon, he should be feted throughout the land, taken to every working men's club in Britain and bought pint after pint of beer by Mr Foot, have a statue put up to him outside the Workers' Educational Association headquarters in Upper Berkeley Street.

I think Mr Thorogood may well be right : many working men on £70 a week do not have a more enjoyable life than he does. Recently, much against my better judgment, I had to buy a new gramophone. The old one had stopped working after twenty years—that is to say, it continued to go round and round, but it no longer made any noise. I was shown machines costing up to £500 and £600, their controls winking and flashing like the cabin of a Concorde airliner, their reproductive systems characterised by a fidelity which puts Queen Penelope herself to shame. This, I was told, is what the working classes spend their money on when times are good.

Are they all mad, or have they just got peculiarly sensitive ears? These same people won't have a bottle of decent wine in their houses from one year's end to another; they allow their wives to cook filthy meals every day, whether from laziness, ineptitude or the fashionable sexist conceit of our times. When I did a nationwide survey of working wives for a down-market women's magazine twelve years ago, I was told time and again that they were working so that they could buy expensive frozen food instead of the fresh stuff. Oh no, the working man's life is horrible, horrible.