Of all the buzz-phrases which New Labour invented, ‘the many, not the few’ remains the most effective.
Of all the buzz-phrases which New Labour invented, ‘the many, not the few’ remains the most effective. Labour may, in fact, have failed the many, but they retain their rhetorical advantage over the Conservatives. Now the government wants to make inequality actually illegal, through its Equality Bill, and the Tories are frightened of being on the wrong side of this argument. Yet surely common experience shows that the many need the few. This is true in the straightforward sense that the few pay a vastly disproportionate part of income tax (the top 1 per cent produce over 20 per cent of the total take), but also in the sense that almost all of us learn more from exceptional people than from the ordinary run of which we are a part. A world of equal ability, equal wealth, equal talent, is unimaginable. When Churchill, in 1940, spoke of what the many owed to the few, it resonated. The idea needs to re-enter political argument.
The ten-yearly national census is due in 2011. For 200 years, it has been an admired feature of this country. It is a mark of civilisation for nations to gather accurate information about themselves. But I realise, with a slight shock, that I no longer trust our government to make proper use of this information, to preserve its confidentiality or to collect it competently enough for the information itself to be relied on. The last census, in 2001, tried to make us all report our own ethnicity. Since I do not want to live in a society defined, like apartheid South Africa, by race, I wrote, so far as I remember, ‘I am British’ all over it, which may well have been an offence. If the Equality Bill is enacted, I imagine that any data the census collects which proves inequality will be used against my county, village, or even myself. I cannot think of a good reason to fill it in. The authorities, it seems, are realising that the game is nearly up, and the next census is spoken of as the last in this form. But if its death is officially foretold, it is dead already.
The Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy has been justly praised. It counters the pseudo-romantic view of the artist as lunatic — though Van Gogh certainly suffered fits of mental illness — and proves him to have been thoughtful, learned, multilingual and articulate. Above all, by relating the work so closely to his letters to his brother, Theo, it shows his sense of purpose. It is as if the original, evangelical Protestantism that sent him as a missionary among the miners of the borinage in Belgium transmuted into art. I do not mean that his art was religious exactly, but that it shared the preoccupations of religion — especially the dignity of the poor, and the quest for truth. Vincent wrote to Theo that ‘I’d like to paint men or women, with that je ne sais quoi of the eternal, of which the halo used to be the symbol, and which we try to achieve through the radiance itself, through the colorations.’ His art could beatify the world, though his spirit was troubled. My friend and colleague, the cartoonist Nick Garland, is a lifelong fan of Van Gogh. He tells me that his own father-in-law, Peter Medawar, taught the DNA discoverers, Crick and Watson. Medawar was often asked whether they were cleverer than anyone else he taught. ‘No cleverer,’ he would reply, ‘but they had something to be clever about.’ Nick says the same applies to Van Gogh.
I am looking at an internal briefing for ‘stakeholders’ by the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism. In a section trying to explain that the official attitude to Muslims is not defined by terrorism, the document states that ‘We have led the way in Europe in establishing the UK as a centre for Islamic finance’. Imagine that the word ‘Islamic’ were replaced by the word ‘Jewish’, and you will see what an odd idea it is that different religions should have government help to set up their own ways of lending money. Jews are important and successful in our financial system today, but not by practising something defined as ‘Jewish banking’. We all know the dire consequences, historically, of getting them to do financial work which was viewed as unchristian. They were ghettoised, and misrepresented as thieves, cheats, misers etc, whom it was considered righteous to persecute. Islamic banking is something which Muslims in the West have happily done without until recently. It is being promoted by Muslim zealots today precisely because it helps separate Muslims from wider society. Why should our authorities want to encourage this?
A recent court case in Dorset has established rather an important point about evidence. Christopher Leadbetter is a former employee of the South Dorset Hunt. The Crown Prosecution Service spent £250,000 trying to get him on a charge under the Badgers Act. But it had to drop its case because the League Against Cruel Sports, which had furnished the alleged evidence, used the testimony of an ‘expert’ that Mr Leadbetter had been disturbing an active badger sett. The expert turned out to be a former hunt saboteur and current LACS activist. It also emerged that the League had set up hidden cameras on private property to try to film the supposed misdeeds. Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, you are not allowed to get up to such tricks. The CPS acted as if the League were an organ of public authority, instead of a group of fanatics with an axe to grind. This is not a solitary example. Pressure groups such as the RSPCA now have a quasi-police role. My own dear TV Licensing, which has no legal authority, enters people’s homes by bluffing everyone that it has some right to do so. How did evidence-collection come to be privatised in this way?
Although it was outrageous that a vindictive campaign caused the dismissal of Andrea Charman, the primary school headmistress from Lydd who arranged for the school’s pet sheep to be sent to the abattoir and tried to have his meat raffled in aid of the school, she surely did make a big mistake. It is true that children should learn that lovable farm animals need to be killed and eaten, but it is asking the impossible of the very young to see their pets objectively. You cannot invite them to adopt an individual animal and then sell it in front of them for someone’s lunch. In Alice Through the Looking Glass, Alice is introduced to the leg of mutton on the table — ‘Alice — mutton; mutton — Alice’. Poor Alice wonders whether she should now cut it up with her knife and fork. ‘Certainly not,’ shouts the Red Queen: ‘it isn’t etiquette to cut anyone you’ve been introduced to.’ Much has changed in our manners, but that rule still stands.
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