It was rude and impolitic of David Cameron not to sit in on the parliamentary debate on the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. The whole thing was his idea and would not have come to Parliament without his insistence. Of all his measures so far, it is the one that has caused greatest grief to his backbenchers. Yet he did not come to hear their views. His absence has a symbolic significance. It embodies the fact that social conservatism is felt by somewhere between 30 and 70 per cent of the population on most subjects, and yet has no representatives among the leaderships of any of the three main parties. I don’t think this has ever happened before in our history (unless it be in the Heath/Wilson era). It is a momentous disfranchisement.
If homosexual marriage becomes law, what will come next? I would guess polygamy. The only moral obstacle to polygamy in the eyes of the zealots for same-sex marriage is that it offends against their obsession with equality. Muslims, the most important believers in polygamy, hold that a man may have up to four wives, but not the other way round. Surely there is room for compromise here. If the marriage law were amended so that women and men could take equal numbers of husbands or wives (and, of course, for we must be equal in all things, that gay people could also marry polygamously), Muslims would not like this permission to women, but they could safely ignore it. Their men could take their four wives, their women would not dare take four husbands and what the infidels got up would be no concern of theirs. A very modern deal would have been struck between the ultra-liberals and the ethnic-minority reactionaries, with only stodgy old monogamists failing to ‘move on’.
The same-sexers express old-fashioned disgust at their opponents’ suggestion that their arguments could justify incest, but I do not see why. The gay marriage case is that marriage is good if people love one another very much. Why, by their argument, should this not apply to siblings who feel that way about each other or parents and their (adult) children? Are they saying that certain sex acts are disgusting? If so, on what grounds? Besides, gay incestuous marriages could not possibly pose any genetic risk, since they can produce no offspring. What taboo from the dark ages is holding the reformers back?
Occasionally, my wife and I give tea parties at our house for old people, organised by a local charity. Until now, they have been exclusively female guests (though there is no rule which dictates this), but this year, we had our first ever man, Jim Smith. You can get a sense of how old he is by the fact that he used to do bits of building work for Rudyard Kipling, who lived in the next-door village, Burwash, and died in 1936. Mr Smith remembers being shouted at by the irascible Mrs Kipling because she considered the cement with which he was repointing the chimneys of Bateman’s was ‘too white’. He is, in fact, 104 next month, and he presented me with his charming and brief autobiography. It is called Jack of All Trades, because Mr Smith is a craftsman who can turn his hand to anything — woodcarving, glass-engraving, oil-painting, metalwork, running a garage. In ‘Puck’s Song’, Kipling speaks of the mill at Bateman’s: ‘See you that little mill that clacks,/ so busy by the brook?/ She has ground her corn and paid her tax/ Ever since Domesday Book’. But in fact one of Kipling’s first acts when he bought the place in 1903 was to stop the mill and convert it to a turbine. In the 1970s, the National Trust decided to restore the mill. It was Jim Smith who did the work himself, building the new hursting, cutting the 200 teeth, and making the bearings for the shaft. So the mill clacked once more. Only nine Jim Smiths, laid end to end, if you see what I mean, and you get back to Domesday Book. Dairycrest is, it says on its homepage, ‘the UK’s leading dairy foods company’, and is ‘proud of our links to the countryside’. So neighbours of ours were disappointed, during recent cold weather, that the Dairycrest milkman refused to brave the ice in their village high street, though other services did. They decided to organise a system of emergency collection from the village shop. This required Dairycrest’s help, which in turn required ringing its call-centre. Some friendly words were offered, but no actual, practical co-operation was forthcoming. Dairycrest’s proud link to the countryside turned out to be in Singapore. Globalisation can be a very clever thing, but it does not seem a great advance for civilisation when the delivery of a few pints of milk has to be arranged nearly 7,000 miles distant, and then does not work.
Admittedly, it could equally well have failed even if organised five minutes away. Once the ordinary hazards of life are seen as reasons for not doing things, there is no end to it. A friend with a new flat in London had a man from Sky in to wire up a new telephone. Some of this required that the engineer traverse a solid flat roof at the back. He refused, because he was ‘not trained to walk on flat surfaces’. Use this excuse next time anyone tries to send you down the street on an errand.
Gerald Scarfe, CBE, is the victim of uproar over his ‘anti-Semitic’ cartoon in the Sunday Times, which showed Benjamin Netanyahu bricking Palestinians into a wall with mortar made of blood. As I tried to explain a week before all this happened [Notes, 19 January], the poor man has to show world leaders dripping with, shedding or otherwise playing with blood, because he has never really learnt any other trade over the past 50 years. True, he does have a profitable sideline in farting and excrement, but otherwise, blood it has to be. Statesmen should recognise that being so depicted by Scarfe has no meaning except to show that you have arrived on the world stage. They should write to him and ask to buy the originals.
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