WHY A CRASH WON'T HURT US

We spoil our children and ourselves,

says Andrew Gimson. The coming

recession need not be a disaster

IT is always sad to see a fine old game undermined by rampant materialism, but I never thought I would live to see the debasement of 'pass the parcel'. In its simple form — many layers of paper torn off to reveal one prize of modest value — it seems to have died out, There are now many layers of paper, each containing sweets or some other prize, while at the heart of the parcel is some yet more sumptuous trophy.

In the old version, every child lost at this game, except for the lucky winner. Now there are no absolute losers: all shall have prizes — a message reminiscent of a politician trying to buy our votes, and one that is reinforced when each child receives, on going home, a party bag containing further goodies. 'Party bags are awful, and they shoot up the cost,' one of my fellow Hampstead parents said to me. 'But the thing I don't like — but I don't know how you deal with it — is that it does seem like a huge pile of presents for whoever's birthday it is. It does seem disgusting.'

The cost of the whole affair can be considerable. The number of guests at a sixyear-old's birthday party can reach 25 or 30, if the whole class is invited. Even if only ten children are asked, the total cost of the presents they bring can easily exceed £100. An American friend tells me that this 'progressive exchange of more and more elaborate gifts that are then destroyed' is reminiscent of potlatch, a feast among certain North American Indians, at which, according to Brewer, 'gifts are distributed lavishly to the guests while the hosts sometimes destroy some of their own valuable possessions. It is a social barbarity to refuse an invitation to a potlatch, or not to give one in return.'

The word potlatch, or potlach, is Chinook. The reader may already have observed that I am seeking, in these cursory notes, to suggest avenues for further research which energetic young doctoral students may wish to pursue. I am 43, an age at which the attractions of the broader brush become overwhelming, especially when one has two small children. To elucidate the origins of the party bag, which to me are lost in the mists of bachelorhood,

could be the start of a promising academic career.

I would also like to know whether the Chinook, when holding a potlatch, felt obliged to hire an entertainer. In London, this is a very common proceeding among parents, and again can cost well over £100. The motive is often fear. As my fellow Hampstead parent said, 'At the age of four or five, the children start getting left at the party by their parents. That terrified me. That completely freaked me out. We had about 15 children, including some of the rowdier element from my daughter's school, so I had all these boys, a wildish kind of kid, running around, and I was frightened for their safety as well as our house. If you don't organise something, they just destroy the place. We spent about £200 on a kind of actressy person who told the kids a story and got them to act in it. Thank God I had her. She had the children eating out of the palm of her hand.'

Not every entertainer is so skilful. At an Outer Space party in a church hall in Islington, the father of the birthday boy had built a rocket out of plywood, while the mother had painted a 15-foot-wide representation of the solar system. But the crucial role of master of ceremonies, responsible for animating the space theme, had been awarded to a professional entertainer. According to the father, 'She started them with three minutes of games. Then we had 20 minutes of eating: boys are very quick eaters. She then hoped to entertain these 20 sevenyear-old boys with things like face-painting. Within four minutes, they had completely wrecked the room. The poor woman was so traumatised that she just left without even taking her tape-recorder.'

The most expensive troupe of performers I have heard of will come to your house with exotic animals — a snake, a huge owl, a spider, a lizard — which sounds like fun, but costs about £500. In my own childhood, which admittedly was spent in the depths of the provinces, I remember the occasional conjuror, but usually we played games — perhaps extending to a treasure hunt devised by one of the fathers — ate some jelly and some cake, and that was that. The parents did the entertaining. They were less exhausted than the present generation, and certainly they were less fearful of exercising authority. They had grown up during the war, when you could not get new toys and were expected to hand on those you outgrew to other children. The mothers seemed overwhelmingly strong; I remember how once, to my intense mortification, they defeated the fathers in a tug-of-war.

By the standards of any previous age, we spend ridiculous sums of money on clothes, toys, entertainers and other fripperies for our children. Almost every child has more toys, and many children of the middle classes also have more books, than they can possibly enjoy. Nobody can imagine that they are any the happier for this glut, which must also make the deprivations still endured by some children even harder for them and their parents to bear. Impoverished parents often feel under great pressure to work insanely long hours or to contract unsustainable debts — or both — to buy superfluous luxuries for their children. We have lost any idea that austerity — not unremitting poverty, but a decent restraint — might actually be of benefit to children. It is very difficult, without running into meanness or crankiness, to deny your children the parties and so forth that their friends take for granted. The monied classes may still send their children to boarding school, but those schools are almost unbelievably luxurious compared with what they were only 40 years ago.

All this is by way of support for my main contention: that we are in the midst of a frenzied spending spree, and will in many ways be much better off when it is over. The boom in high-tech stocks has already bust, but most of the experts are uncertain whether the boom is busting more generally. The other day, I thought I had detected evidence on my own doorstep that the bubble had burst. An absurd shop called the House of Cigars shut down. (I do not mean that smoking cigars is absurd, but simply that most cigar-smokers have long-established suppliers who made this trendy newcomer superfluous.) But the premises vacated by the House of Cigars have now been taken over by a shop selling incredibly expensive children's shoes, or chaussures as they are called on the sign outside, so I am obliged to recognise that the boom may have one or two last spurts in it.

When the recession comes, it will be reported as if it is an unmitigated disaster. I do not deny that it will be a disaster for many people, and particularly for some of those who lose their jobs. We shall certainly see rising unemployment and endless pictures on our television screens of anxious men in the City gazing at their screens and saying inaudible things into telephones.

But the slump will be a great boon for people who have modest savings and want to buy a house. It will make it easier to recruit police officers, teachers, soldiers, nurses and other persons who are said to be in short supply. It may also liberate some people from the careerist fever that can seize even quite shy, retiring, but conscientious types, who take it into their heads that their whole duty in life is to earn the maximum possible amount of money by pursuing some line of work that they hate. It may also enable some parents to spend more time with their children, and to discover that bringing up children, hard though it is, can be more interesting than going to an office and employing someone else to look after the kids. Not that one would wish the middle classes to become even more manically devoted to 'educating' their children, a mania which often degenerates into force-feeding, designed to boost future earning-power. But it would be pleasant if parents felt less embarrassed at not buying designer clothes for their offspring, and if the offspring as well as the parents learnt the value of money.

Much of the coverage of the slump will be predicated on the illusion that it is an avoidable disaster. Yet so much of the present boom is bogus that the sooner it comes to an end, the less damage it will do. The prices now paid not just for shares but also for property would, only a few years ago, have seemed the purest fantasy. This period of supposed stability has also been one of roaring inflation. Many an estate agent will tell you that he 'never thought he would see the day when a onebed flat in this area would cost more than L100,000', yet in the next breath he will assure you that prices are still rising, or at the very worst levelling off now before rising again in the autumn. One is reminded of Dean Inge on the Gadarene swine: 'No doubt they thought the going was good for the first half of the way.'

Millions of home-owners are happy to collude in this wishful thinking, which contributes mightily to the so-called 'feel-good factor', which in turn leads many of us to go out and spend money we don't actually have but can obtain on our credit cards. Money-lenders are pushing loans at us with an eagerness not seen since the last days of the Lawson boom. That mountain of debt will create a potent 'feel-bad factor' once people realise they are going to have to hand over the title deeds of their homes to the moneylenders.

The other day I was in Coventry for the Daily Telegraph, asking people what they thought of the local MP. Geoffrey Robinson. Many of them have nothing much to say about Mr Robinson, whom they seldom see and of whose business affairs they know little, but a lot to say about the modern Labour party. For them it is far too keen on money, ignores its traditional supporters, and has severed its institutional connections with the working class with indecent haste. They yearn for the oldfashioned Labour party, which did not appear so enchanted by the rich, and which thought that there was some point in the trade unions. Dave Nellist, the former Coventry MP chucked out of the Labour party for being too left-wing, still commands a following in the city, and his Socialist Alliance intends to put up 100 candidates in the forthcoming general election. I do not suppose these candidates will poll very many votes, but quite substantial numbers of traditional Labour voters are likely to abstain altogether from voting, or else will back the Liberal Democrats.

They will not, for the most part, turn to the Conservatives, a party which is considered just as biased towards the rich. The pity of this is that many traditional Conservatives are every bit as repelled as Mr Nellist's friends by a world in which disinterested public service is treated as stupidity, while the newly-rich are accorded a respect not all of them deserve. Tony Blair, who recently expressed his amazement at how rich his friends from school and university have become, has caught the enrichissez-vous spirit of the age, but he has already lost a large part of the Labour party.

The further pity is that, during the slump, the free-market system will need resolute defenders but will not find very effective ones among the massed ranks of those on either the Labour or the Conservative benches who were until recently idolising it as something close to perfection, instead of as a mechanism that is both extremely useful and favourable to liberty.

It is now more than 20 years since I read, at Norman Stone's suggestion, The Great Depression, by Lionel Robbins. A sentence that has stuck in my mind runs: 'As if the fact that a man had five telephones on his desk and a menagerie of tame statisticians in the cellar was a circumstance which justified the suspension of all the maxims of Victorian prudence!'

Prudence is certainly a great thing, but whether it can, even in Gordon Brown's hands, abolish the business cycle seems unlikely. The Great Depression was published in 1934, and is out of print. One hopes some enterprising publisher is preparing to bring out a new edition.

Andrew Gimson is foreign editor of The Spectator.