People are right to worry about the royal wedding. The violence at the TUC anti-cuts demonstration on Saturday showed yet again that all large gatherings are now vulnerable to the malice of a few. Friends of mine walking with the marchers noticed how the people causing trouble were allowed to wear masks, and were unmolested when they attacked shops and banks, sometimes smashing them up for 15 minutes. They were often armed with fireworks loaded with coins which they threw among the police. These activities were all well-planned in advance on the internet. UK Uncut targeted specific businesses online in advance. Why should it be immune from prosecution? When this happens with football hooligans, the police know exactly how to interdict it; but when it comes to protests, a misapplied attitude to human rights prevails, and the officers are frightened off. Tolerance of such behaviour gives hugely disproportionate power to the extremists. This will be doubly so at the royal wedding, which is, if you think about it, a mass, peaceful demonstration of support for the monarchy, young love and good old Britain. It will be unforgiveable if elite timidity prevents the police from making sure that none of these yobs can spoil the day.
By the way, it would be a public service if the Office for National Statistics would find a way of counting crowd numbers properly. Numbers are a huge propaganda tool and they are almost always wildly guessed by march organisers and the media. One paper says that Saturday’s march was attended by 250,000, another by 450,000. No one knows. The only large protest where a proper count was made was the second countryside march, in 2002. Official tellers ticked people off as they crossed a line in Whitehall. Obviously, you might get counted twice, but in practice, it was not easy to turn round against the tide. The figure was just over 400,000, and the march had taken about five hours. It is extremely unlikely that the figure for anti-cuts march, though certainly large, was anything like that. There must be some more scientific means of knowing.
Personally, I should love to organise a march for cuts. Cuts are not only required by the state of the public finances, they also eventually reduce the state oppression under which we in the private sector have to toil. But as Auberon Waugh never tired of saying in the 1980s, ‘There have been no government cuts.’ If you compute what George Osborne is proposing for 2011-12 and compare it with 2010-11, you will see that the total cut amounts to 0.6 per cent. The actual out-turn will probably be no cut at all. The only government since the war that has genuinely cut year on year was the Labour one of Jim Callaghan and Denis Healey after the IMF crisis of 1976. Mr Cameron can beg this column’s ‘head-case’ mob to go and throw fireworks full of coins at public-sector unions in support of his policies until he is blue in the face, but we shall not do so until he truly, madly, deeply cuts.
The late Jeffrey Bernard used to comment on the oddity of the phrase, ‘He choked on his own vomit.’ It was highly unlikely, he pointed out, that one would choke on anybody else’s vomit. I feel a comparable feeling about the phrase that Col Gaddafi is attacking ‘his own people’, as if this made things worse. It is horrible that he is doing so, but surely he has even less right to attack other people. The legal basis for Resolution 1973 is sound, but it is justifiably harder to arraign a ruler for what he does in his own country than for what he does outside it.
The Gospel in church last Sunday was St John’s long account of Christ’s conversation with the woman of Samaria at Jacob’s well. It contains a much-debated passage in which Jesus first tells her to ‘call thy husband’ and then, when she says, ‘I have no husband’, agrees with her: ‘Thou hast well said, I have no husband; For thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband.’ All very puzzling, but I am attracted by the feminist reading of these words: the woman has had five husbands because of ‘levirate’ marriage, by which a widow marries her late husband’s brother. Now she is living with a man to whom she is not married and he is abusing her (hence her appearance at the well alone at noon, instead of at dawn, with many other women). As so often, Jesus is delivering his message to the outcast. In this case, the message is that the water of everlasting life can be drawn by all people, including Samaritans. ‘Salvation is of the Jews’, he tells her, meaning that it comes via the Jews, but is for the whole of mankind. As I listened to this complicated lesson, I found myself thinking about Elizabeth Taylor. She had eight husbands, thanks to the pseudo-levirate traditions of Hollywood by which actresses are compelled to marry a succession of stars. Perhaps her last husband, the lorry-driver Larry Fortensky, played a similar role to that of the woman of Samaria’s final partner. Anyone who marries so often, no matter how rich and famous, gathers a sort of pathos about them. I’m sure Jesus would have a natural sympathy with Elizabeth Taylor, treating her with the compassion he showed the Samaritan woman — and she with him. Miss Taylor herself seems to have felt that ‘salvation is of the Jews’, having converted at the age of 27.
In a publishers’ office last week, I heard a cheerful buzz of talk and noticed a crowd of the staff gathering. My friend explained that the firm had instituted a monthly tea for staff, and it was proving very popular. It is an excellent idea. Until the 1980s, the civil service used to have tea trolleys circulating every day. It is the friendliest and cheapest way of achieving a communal moment of rest, so much better than the atomistic, individualised ‘grabbing a sandwich’ when one can.
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