Not bread but stones
Wicker, Brian
Report from Britain NOT BREAD BUT STONES THE U.K.'s BANKRUPT PARTIES NOBODY IS LIKELY to deny that, in common with most of the Western democracies, Britain is in a mess. But it is not just, or...
...It is certainly not designed to make the world more equitable, the British less insular, the pile-up of mass-destruction weapons less awesome...
...The light we are promised at the end of this particular tunnel is pretty dim and smoky: if we are lucky, we shall emerge into a misty world of material sufficiency (one could not call it prosperity or even plenty) based on replacing steel and steam engines with micro-processors and plastics...
...Living in Birmingham, I have talked to a good many people involved in the recent exercise in brinkmanship during the potentially disastrous confrontation at the state-owned British Leyland automobile manufacturing company...
...However far from the present reality this vision may have been, Mr...
...For the awkward fact is that Remembrance days-and here I am treading on some very sensitive ground-are full of national hypocrisies...
...A misnamed appeal to "security" is a sure sign of the bankruptcy of the society which makes it...
...This is precisely what "leadership" means: understanding the symbolic, as well as the cash, value of behavior...
...But if this is so, the new "Alliance" seems to me no better: it is simply the obverse of Bennism...
...The government clearly has no answer to the mess, except that we must go on with it simply because having got this far we can't turn back...
...It is this combination which needs to be harnessed politically in Britain at the present time...
...On the contrary, the mess is to be seen in the primacy that everyone is giving to the economic blight, and not to the despair that underlies it...
...The rhetoric of Thatcherism, the medium in which the message is broadcast, the voice itself (arrogant, monotonous, and sarcastic) all point in this direction...
...And quite right too...
...But if Thatcherism is morally bankrupt, it seems to me that the other options are not much better...
...John Stevas has at least understood that some kind of imagination, some appeal to the better instincts of people, is required if policies of retrenchment and suffering are to succeed...
...Overwhelmingly, I think, we are asking for bread and being given stones-some of which are of flint and others ruby, but all useless for the purposes of nourishment...
...BRIAN wicker...
...It is an amazing thought that the nearest thing we have to a genuine political leader-that is, someone with both a touch of vision and the practical understanding of power-is the former Conservative prime minister Ted Heath...
...The one-minute silences that I recall in my childhood were moments of impressive unity: it is typical of our present discontents that nobody has thought to reintroduce them, or replace them with anything better...
...A woolly adherence to the EEC for mostly commercial reasons, combined with an equal adherence to another outdated concept: NATO as eternal...
...One of the crucial elements in any such vision must be the readiness of those with money and influence to take their share, which must be a lion's share, of the sacrifices...
...Disraeli, after all, was the man who coined the phrase "the two nations"-i.e., the rich and the poor in the eighteen forties, and saw himself as the prophet of a Toryism with a "vision" of a single nation...
...Benn's brand of leadership is more interesting, but not (to my mind) any more acceptable...
...The Labor party, or rather that part of it which is loyal to the leader Michael Foot, is made up of able but hardly impressive people- Foot himself is too decent a man to be a great party leader...
...It is also because his own 'vision' is as narrowly nationalist as Enoch Powell's with a conception of national sovereignty which makes change almost impossible...
...Thatcher, apart from the remarkable doggedness that characterizes it (and it is precisely doggedness: one cannot properly call it courage or even resolution) is its lack of any spark of vision...
...It is characteristic of our present condition, that the guts of the old Remembrance day, namely the one-minute (later two-minute) silence in which the whole nation simultaneously took part, has been cut out, so that only the empty shell of a parade is left...
...For practical purposes, he is now a transcendent non-party figure...
...It is this truth that Thatcherism has quite failed to grasp...
...What this is all for, what this interlude of poverty and misery is all aiming at, is hardly ever spelled out, except negatively...
...Bennism is essentially a parochial affair, and its unilateralism as well as its anti-marketeering are of this sort...
...Benn has at least grasped that the ordinary political activist is no longer prepared to slog his guts out in his local constituency if the moment his party gets into power the ideas he has worked for are discarded...
...What is wrong with the Common Market, apparently, is simply that it infringes the eternal right of the British Parliament to have the final say on everything...
...The most notable thing about the leadership of Mrs...
...This was the fact that Michael Edwardes, the man appointed to run British Leyland because of his tough "leadership," had taken a very hefty pay increase himself at the very time when the workers were being asked to accept 3.8 percent during an inflation of at least 11 percent...
...But it is not just, or even primarily, the economic mess that matters...
...They have become occasions for unctuous self-congratulation...
...The essence of the former's rebellion, and the prime cause of his being sacked from the cabinet, was his appeal to the values he sees enshrined in the Tory tradition of Disraeli and Lord Ashley...
...This is not just because he would make members of Parliament into mere vote-fodder...
...It is not a more friendly, warm-hearted or generous society that we are invited to join, but on the contrary one which is more selfish, harsh, and self-seeking...
...Syrupy commentators on the television describe the gorgeous get-ups of the chaps in uniform as they parade past the cenotaph in Whitehall, but they never mention what some of these people are actually doing the rest of the time-for example prowling round, with their nuclear tubes at the ready, to do their genocidal "duty" if told...
...No amount of explaining had any effect...
...Nobody on the current scene looks like achieving it...
...But it is no answer to this problem to work people up, as the SDP has done, into a frenzy of enthusiasm for a set of policies that add up to nothing at all...
...It is being said in some circles that, with the forging of the alliance between the Liberal party and the new Social Democratic party, a new era of political hope is dawning...
...Michael Foot's clumsy attempt at puncturing some of this unctuousness, and appearing in public as a human being, had the effect (whether intentionally or accidentally I don't know) of upsetting the balance of truth and falsehood on which this particular institution rests...
...standing for the anti-Thatcherite proposition that there are always alternatives to choose from and that therefore it is up to people to choose the direction they want to go in...
...The old, half-blind emotional loyalty is no longer there...
...That is the measure of the mess we are in...
...The recent incident when he went to a " Remembrance" ceremony, in honor of the dead of recent wars, in a duffle-coat instead of the usual black outfit (he wore a black suit under it, however) is characteristic...
...This is that he does not actively connect the two ends of the one string which holds together the vital forces of hope and change: I mean, on the one hand what may be called the Brandt Report transnational view of the world, and on the other the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament vision of a mankind decisively repudiating the strategy of mass suicide...
...But Heath has one major disadvantage, given the current mood of those who are looking for something different from what we have now...
...Moderates" and "militants" on the trade union side all seem agreed on one thing, which may not have been of crucial economic importance, but was of very great psychological significance...
...Resort to the renewal of the cold war, and to the so-called modernization of the mass-destruction weapons that goes with it, is the most significant symptom of this despair...
...recognizing that there are powerful, even determining factors at work in a society other than the bonus scheme and the length of tea breaks...
...John Stevas and Ian Gilmour...
...You don't have to be an uncritical admirer of either the Labor party or the Conservatives to see that this hope is a mirage...
...The possibility that this form of nationalism might need modification in the interests of a larger unity seems to be ruled out...
...This is the significance of the protests of the "wets" like Messrs...
Vol. 109 • February 1982 • No. 3
