Writing this column in 90˚F heat on the edge of a normally bleak and chill Yorkshire moor, I reflect on the relationship between political culture and weather. Montesquieu, who attributed great importance to climate and geography in the political spirit of nations, thought that heat contributed to despotism, suppressing the active disposition of a people. But might it not, by the same token, make despots idle? The bureaucrats of oppression are no more likely than ordinary citizens to bestir themselves in the dog days, indeed rather less so. Certainly in Britain the effect of heatwaves is to remove people’s already slight interest in public affairs and in most forms of work entirely. I have often wondered why it does not have a similar effect in hot countries everywhere. Why do they bother to have a war in Lebanon? How can bin Laden’s people muster the energy to blow people up in Saudi Arabia? It is not even as if, in Muslim countries, they have drink to inflame their rage on sweltering nights, which is often a cause of violence in the West. I should have thought that global warming would make people more quiescent, less likely to revolt, but the history of heat and politics would seem to prove me wrong.
Rural Yorkshire offers many more of the elements that compose the ideal village than does most of the south. One is the tendency of a stream to run through the high street. Another is the fact that even quite small villages are built rather like towns, with a sense of the total relationship of the buildings to each other, with a square, and substantial public monuments. A third is that houses tend to be set well back from the road so that there is a common stretch of grass and trees running parallel to the highway. The feeling of unity and amplitude is like the prosperous parts of France. These sights confirm my growing belief that our restrictive planning system, which is supposed to protect rural beauty, actually does the opposite. What you see in Yorkshire is a readiness to use space quite prodigally instead of trying to cram everything in — a readiness that the law nowadays forbids. No one would mind more country being ‘swallowed up’ if the result were places like Masham or Easingwold or Helmsley. They wouldn’t be like that, comes the rejoinder. But how do we know? People build badly nowadays partly because they have no confidence that building can be good, a feeling which is self-fulfilling. We visited Castle Howard as well –— a gigantic, magnificent expression of belief in architecture and its capacity to transform a whole landscape. All conservation bodies would move heaven and earth to save it (if it needed saving), yet all would scream in horror if anyone tried to build anything on that scale today. Surely it is time to recognise that, thanks to the greatly increased wealth of the past 25 years, we have moved out of the period when the task in rural England was simply somehow to preserve lovely things which were falling down. Now it is to build new lovely things as well.
To Whitby Museum which is unreformed in its miscellany. ‘Pair of tongs for removing dogs from church’ is my favourite exhibit.
Private Eye parody often makes its victims sadly self-conscious, so I was delighted to see an unembarrassed poster (in another part of rural England) for a local newspaper’s coverage of the heatwave ‘PHEW, WHAT A SCORCHER –— picture special’.
‘Lord, make me leave the EPP, but not yet,’ seems to be David Cameron’s policy towards fulfilling his own campaign promise to get out of the Euro-fanatical grouping at the European Parliament. This reverses the position of the European factions which applied when it was British government policy to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism ‘when the time is right’. Eurosceptics reluctantly accepted the policy and argued on all occasions that the time was wrong. Now it will be the few remaining Tory euro-enthusiasts who will have to pursue that tactic and prevent their party leaving the EPP by 2009. They have quite a good chance of success, I fear, because maintaining the status quo is always easier than change, and they will be able to argue by then that things have ‘moved on’. Mr Cameron’s cunning (and mistaken) ruse neither to break nor to fulfil his pledge should be a lesson to all those who assume that the Conservatives, if they return to office, will keep their promise to repeal the hunting ban. The precise commitment is to allow a government Bill, in government time but on a free vote (a mirror of what Labour did). Although Mr Cameron is completely in favour of hunting and is, I think, the only Conservative leader in the past 40 years to have hunted, he will want to avoid the subject if he becomes prime minister. It will be too controversial and potentially bitter, he will be advised. This advice is wrong, I suspect, since there is a widespread recognition, even among people who are no friends of hunting, that the law is absurd. But Mr Cameron will be tempted to play along with those who argue that he will have a quieter life if he lets the ban stay, unenforced. Some hunts may even support this, since they find they can operate more or less unimpeded under the ban, and would prefer theoretical illegality to a system of licensing. This is surely a mistake: bad law has bad effects, and if it is there, it can, at any time, be used. Hunting people constitute a very high proportion of Tory activists. They must make sure their MPs insist on repeal, and withdraw their voluntary labour if they are dissatisfied.
A cross wife in a novel by Carol Shields observes that there is an unspoken convention that if a chair on public transport has armrests, men will always use them, forcing women to keep their arms by their sides. I had never noticed this before, but if you look at people near you on a train, you will see that it is true. Is there a physical reason for this, or is it cultural?
A retired Scottish schoolmaster sends me his learned contribution to the debate in this column about the use of ‘may’ and ‘might’. Using the example cited by Philip Pullman of the difference between ‘Napoleon may have had homosexual tendencies’ and ‘Wellington might have avoided the Battle of Waterloo’, he writes that the difference ‘is, in effect what we Classicists call the principal clause (apodosis) of an unfulfilled past conditional sentence, with the omission/ suppression of the If clause (called the protasis)’. I think this should be the last word on the subject.
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