Another voice
The great confidence trick
Auberon Waugh
Mrs Thatcher was unusually fulsome in her praise of the police last week at Question Time in the House of Commons. She assured the House that an 'overwhelm- ing number of people, except perhaps the Labour Party, are behind the police in the excellent work they are doing.'
Well, I suppose it is excellent work of a sort that at one moment police protection managed to keep 35 collieries out of 175 working normally, although the number has since shrunk. We have not been given — or at any rate I have not seen — an exact breakdown of the number of collieries which voted to continue working normally, but on the rough reckoning that all the col- lieries of Yorkshire, South Wales and Kent wish to strike, while those of Nottingham, Leicestershire, North and South Derby and even Lancashire do not, it would not seem to be a particularly high score. Moreover, one suspects that a number of those col- lieries still working have simply not been troubled by flying pickets of militants, or at any rate not in the numbers which would ef- fectively deter local miners from crossing an alien' picket! line. One has read of several occasions on which roving bands of Yorkshire miners, turned back from enter- ing the Nottingham coalfield, have descended on some other target where picketing has previously been low-key and promptly closed it down.
In other words, I do not think the police have been particularly effective. That great self-publicist the Chief Constable of Not- tingham, Mr Charles 'Campaign Charlie' McLachlan — he of the Christmas terror campaign against motorists, whose policewomen dress up as prostitutes in order to humiliate respectable and law- abiding citizens — has called in an extra 3,000 policemen at prodigious cost (theatening to reduce Nottingham to the plight of Liverpool) in order to prevent these roaming gangs of louts from entering his patch. In fact he sends them off to devastate other areas, like the National Coal Board headquarters in Doncaster, where women secretarial staff were kicked and spat upon before all 1,000 employees were sent home and the place closed down.
Presumably it was Campaign Charlie whom Mrs Thatcher had in mind when she spoke of the 'excellent work' which the police were doing, because there is no other area where they appear to have had any ef- fect at all in the prevention of illegal picketing. The Government, no doubt, takes comfort from the fact that it has suffi- cient stocks of coal to keep the power sta- tions open, and that therefore the NUM is going, eventually, to lose the strike. But I should have thought that in the judgment of the overwhelming number of people, who see the police unable or unwilling to do anything against these illegal gangs of thugs who terrorise the citizenry, the Government is effectively losing the strike. Whatever the final result — and nobody can seriously doubt that uneconomic pits, or those with no coal in them, must eventually close the chief memory of this episode will be that the Goverr ment, relying upon a timorous or timidly led police force, was unable or unwilling to prevent these itinerant gangs from terrorising the popula- tion. People who want to go on earning money have been forcibly prevented from doing so. And since nobody likes to cast himself in the role of coward, the mythology will prevail which holds that miners were inhibited from crossing frater- nal picket lines by feelings of working-class solidarity.
The truth of the matter would appear to be that the Conservative Party has still to learn the lesson of the Battle of Saltley Coke Depot in 1972. On that occasion, it will be remembered, the Chief Constable simply said that he was unable to keep the depot open against Mr Scargill's flying pickets, so it closed. The proper response, as I wrote at the time, was to hang (or at any rate sack) the Chief Constable and send in troops armed with pick handles. But Bri- tain was groaning at that time under the Heath Horror, and it was not until eight years later that Mr Tebbit's pussyfooting Employment Act created the new offence of secondary picketing.
In fact secondary picketing was already illegal under the common law, as, indeed, was any form of mass intimidation. But politicians could probably not survive in their occupation if they did not believe that the passing of a law, on the creation of a new offence, is all that is required to govern a country. Mr Tebbit's ridiculous Act like Mr Carr's before it — was produced with a great fanfare of trumpets and tough noises in response to an overwhelming public demand for something to curb the power of the unions. In fact it changed nothing in the context of a police force which was manned by rather petulant seal pups, but at least it established that these secondary pickets have none of the privileges attaching to people engaged in an industrial dispute.
More than anything else, of course, governments are terrified of revolution, and I suppose I see their point. The politician's art, like the journalist's, lies in the nicest judgment of what he can get away with. But when the government of a country is unable or unwilling to do anything to prevent roaming bands of outlaws from terrorising
the population with the express and public- ly proclaimed intention of preventing them from earning their livelihood, then the government has collapsed and it is time to shoot the politicians. In fact the threat of these roaming gangs of brigands has always existed in society; in Britain it is adequately met by the common law on rout, riot and unlawful assembly. The law is so elementary and so fundamen- tal to the protection of civilised society that lawyers and politicians would both, for dif- ferent reasons, prefer to forget it: lawyers, because it requires no particular expertise and therefore cannot command the fat fees of a Chancery suit; politicians because they are so terrified of any challenge to their authority that their automatic reaction is to deal, compromise, shed a little power and share its enjoyment. On top of this, of course, the Conser- vatives are terrified of the working class, and half-convinced by Marx's asinine pro- position that organised labour must even- tually prevail in an ineluctable class strug- gle. Add to this an understandable reluc- tance to preside over a series of Peterloos, and you have nearly the whole explanation for the Government's present abject posture. But the requirements of just and efficient government simply cannot take ac- count of such dainty feelings; the public has no sympathy whatever for a loser, and if the Governement is not prepared to get out its pick handles and vanquish these hooligans it will conclude that Scargill has more bat- talions than the Government. In those cir- cumstances, all the admirable British characteristics of malleability and deference to authority which have made us such a governable country for so long will transfer their allegiance from the impotent Thatcher to the powerful Scargill. It is as simple as that. We are engaged in a crude test of machismo and Mr Scargill is winning. The Government will not survive unless it not only defeats the Yorkshire miners but also humiliates them. Having said which, and in light of the fact that traditional wisdom in favour of placating the brutes will almost certainly prevail, I feel we may allow ourselves the luxury of a little indignation against the political system under which we live. I have long since given up moaning in public about the taxes I pay, having noticed a certain mean and foxy look in the eyes of those who pay less. This weekend I picked up the payslip of a person who earns £5,750 a Year. On the £479.17 monthly earning, she pays £99 income tax and £43.11 National In- surance. So in order to receive £337.06 monthly she has to pay, personally, f142.11 to the government. How on earth have the British allowed this preposterous situation to develop? I suggest that employers, Jr; future, should print their employees payslips with tax deduction in huge red let- ters, until the country's remaining workers wake up to the gigantic confidence trick which politicians of both parties are playing on them.
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