SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
J. W. M. THOMPSON
Recent political history is littered with attempts to form new parties. They have never come to anything, and there doesn't seem any overpowering reason why Mr Desmond Donnelly's new party of Demo- crats should prove the exception. It's true that it starts with an unusual advantage, namely an MP already in situ and a cheer- fully combative one at that. But it is not exceptional in possessing a ripe assortment of ideas (one good one is that the number of MPS should be greatly reduced); break- away or fringe parties are seldom short of these. Where they have always failed is in matching the main parties' overwhelming organisations. This is why most people of unorthodox views choose to work within whichever main party least repels them. Big parties are in a near-permanent condition of being strong on organisation but weak on ideas.
Nevertheless, the catalogue of new parties is astonishingly long, from Mosley's New Party itself to the Greenshirts, the late Duke of Bedford's British People's Party, or such forgotten ephemera as Common Wealth (with which Mr Tom Driberg was associ- ated) and the Heritage Party. All expressed frustration with the existing party set-up and all fell victim to it in the end. Orthodox party men are inclined to resent their intru- sion, but I can't see that they are anything but a healthy safety valve. We would pro- bably hear more of them at elections but for the unfair law requiring a candidate to forfeit his £150 deposit unless he polls an eighth of the votes. In this respect I sym- pathise with Sir Alan Herbert, whose in- dependent address to the electors of East Harrow in 1958 demanded: 'Why on earth should I, or anyone else, be fined £150 for failure? . . . It is like the umpire saying to a cricketer: "You are out, Sir. May I add that you are out for a duck? And now you will be hit on the head with a bat".'
But I don't expect the big parties will ever agree to abolish this deposit rule. What they might do, though, is agree that an eighth of the votes is an unreasonably high proportion. Something like 2 per cent would make more sense.
The dragon's tongue
I'm reliably informed that Prince Charles produced a very convincing accent when he read his speech in Welsh at the weekend. It certainly sounded authentically Welsh to my English ears, over the radio. But it is a curious and sad thing that the Welsh langu- age, although it still exists as a living tongue in a not very inaccessible part of this island, is a wholly unknown quantity to most English people. We tend to regard it, when we think of it at all, as simply a joke and an impenetrably difficult one at that; which is thoroughly parochial and unimaginative of us.
And the Whitehall attitude to the Welsh language is at times disgraceful. There is nothing in the world except bureau- cratic arrogance to justify the refusal. for example, to permit some official business to be conducted in Welsh as well as English; if people want official forms or car licences in Welsh why shouldn't they have them? I'm not surprised there is a good deal of fury about this, or that those who are pre-
pared to protest are by no means confined to the young and hotheaded.
In fact Welsh is not an impossibly diffi- cult language, so I'm told: far from it. Even its orthography, with its accumulation of seemingly incompatible consonants, can quickly be mastered. (John Wells, elsewhere in this issue, shows how easy it really is.) So all my sympathies are with the Welshmen who are determined to keep their language alive. Whatever the politico-eco- nomic case for Welsh separatism may be (incidentally, who now remembers that the young David Lloyd George was one of that movement's founder members?), the loss of the language and its culture would be a heavy blow to such diversity as still survives in Great Britain. Alas, at the last census only one quarter of the population returned themselves as Welsh-speaking. I hope this year's rather rum jamboree centring upon the Prince of Wales may stiffen the resist- ance to its further decline.
Go west
Even if it doesn't do that it is clearly going to do a lot for the Welsh tourist business. This is going to be Wales's summer for the limelight, and I've been examining one early swallow in the form of the newly-published Shell Guide to Wales. a good two guineas' worth. Like others in the series, it contains both general introductory matter and a good, detailed gazetteer. It has even supple- mented my dim knowledge of the language with a simple explanation of how to pro- nounce that difficult `II' sound (with the extra and intriguing information that two- thirds of the population pronounce it through the right side of the mouth: how the rest manage it is not explained).
However, this guide doesn't go into the question of hotels and restaurants, which on my (invariably enjoyable) visits to the country have seemed at times to fall some- what short of the gastronomic ideal. Any- one who has read that odd and captivating book, George Borrow's Wild Wales. may feel that things have not altogether im- proved in the last hundred years or so. At any rate Borrow seemed to be for ever turning up unannounced at remote inns and being made welcome with cheerful turf fires and excellent dinners. And not only dinners. This was the breakfast he faced at one mountain inn where he appears to have been the only guest: 'pot of hare; ditto of trout; pot of prepared shrimps; dish of plain shrimps; tin of sardines; beautiful beef-steak: eggs, muffin; large loaf, and but- ter, not forgetting capital tea.' As Borrow gratefully added, 'There's a breakfast for you!' But I wouldn't advise visitors in 1969 to take it as the norm.
We can hardly wait
'When are we hard-squeezed taxpayers on this island to be given the chance of cheer- ing Britain's Concorde sub-sonically over our awn cities?'—Sunday Telegraph, 1 June.
'Concorde 001 blew off part of the roof of a building near Le Bourget airport while performing at the air show there today.'— The Times, 2 June.
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