J W Booth AUTOBIOGRAPHY c15

Chapter 15. The Great Big World.-

Looking back over this screed, I see that I have made so little reference to the world at large that it might create the impression that the Customs and Excise is like some enclosed religious order. This is only so in the very limited sense that officers, in common with other civil servants, were not expected to be active in politics, which I never felt to be a hardship.
Given my background, I suppose I should have been strong for Labour, but in fact, I have never had any leaning at all towards the Left. I think this started from my revulsion at the indecent glee with which they ousted Churchill in 1945. Over the years I have realised that political differences are much more between government and opposition than between Tory and Labour. It seems that most government measures are dictated by outside pressures either at home or abroad, and are only marginally affected by the colour of the party in power.
If the Welfare State had been in place in the 1920’s and 1030’s the Booths would have been better off than they were, but I doubt if Labour would have brought it in then had they been in power. I am sure it would have come in about the same time as it did had the Tories been in charge after the war. I expect the Germans would have been governing us all in the 40’s and that really would have been different.
A major feature of the post-war scene was unrestricted immigration, which started under Labour and went on after the Tories took over. In the climate of the time, a lone Tory who only wanted to exclude known criminals and those suffering
from certain diseases, coupled with power to deport those who committed serious crimes over here, was howled down as though he had been n modern cross between Himmler and King Herod.
Since then both sides have had a few goes at the practical problems caused and the need for controls is generally accepted. The point is neatly encapsulated in the present furore about the Hong Kong Chinese, both Tories and Labour agree that we can't take them all, because one or other of them would have to cope with it in 1997 The only one who says, “Let them all come” is Paddy Ashdown, secure in the knowledge that whoever is in power when it comes to the push, it won't he him.
At the risk of being dismissed as yet another old fool grumbling that “Things aren't what they was, and what's more they never were” I must say that post-war changes have generally been made on the principle that all chance is progress. The evident results of this have undermined my faith in many of the things which I was brought up to respect.
Pre-war criminal law may not have been perfect, but at least it was clearly designed to prevent crime or, failing that, to punish it severely. The death penalty was prescribed for murder the definition of which included killings incidental to any
other felony, such as armed robbery or arson. Robbery with violence could be punished with the cat. Thus professional thieves avoided firearms like the plague and bag-snatchers avoided the old and feeble, in case they should unintentionally
ki11 someone and find themselves on the gallows.
Now that we have abolished both corporal and capital punishment and put nothing in their place, the only physical risk to the thug is that his victim may hit back, so the more helpless the latter is, the better. As our First Lieutenant at Southend once
said, 'If you do away with the death penalty the only life that is really sacred is the murderer's'. The measure also leads automatically to the a more widespread arming of the police and despite any thing Ludovic Kennedy may say, the hangman was much less likely to get the wrong man than the armed policeman is.
Despite all the safeguards, we now seem to get more complaints of miscarriages of justice than we did in the past. Perhaps so many guilty parties are acquitted, that equally guilty persons who are convicted regard that as an injustice in itself.
Complainants always demand a full and independent inquiry, regardless of how many have already been held. They have no intention of accepting any report which differs from what they want to hear, even if it was made by the Archangel Gabriel, but the request sounds reasonable if you say it solem1y enough.
Most of these causes are such that it is hard to find any impartial arbiter anyway. It’s about as easy as organising a football match between Jews and Gentiles, where both sides insist on a neutral, referee and reserve the right to question his decisions.
Civil law seems to be even more of a mess but the effects are generally hilarious rather than tragic. Parliament, heavily salted with lawyers, has passed Legal Aid Acts, ostensibly to “Make justice available to all”, but more likely to enable their
brethren, who have priced themselves out of the market, to draw on the public purse. To mount a civil action these days you have to either rich enough to use your own money or poor enough to use the taxpayers. Most of us are neither and are forced to avoid going to law at all cost.
The award of a particularly large sum to one who has been libeled often causes public outrage, while the fact that agang of lawyers have received ten times as much for arguing about it among themselves passes unnoticed. I am convinced that if the Good Samaritan had turned out to be a lawyer, the victim would have done better to stick with the thieves.
Largely as a result of the weakening of the criminal law, and the courts’ obsession with the civil rights of the accused to the exclusion of those of the victim, the effectiveness of the police has been drastically reduced. Attempts to solve the problem by throwing money at it have had little effect. We are continually told that salaries must be raised to attract better recruits. As this argument is applied to every job under the sun, it is difficult to see where all these superior beings
are to come from. In the extreme case of MP's, who had a pre-war salary of £400 a year, a hundred-fold increase in pay and emoluments has patently failed to find them.
I still try to maintain some respect for doctors and priests, but when I see highly—paid specialists rushing to make their fortunes out of abortion clinics and bishops questioning the truth of the gospels while condoning sodomy among the clergy, its not easy.
News coverage has been a growth industry throughout my life, but I doubt if the public is better informed as a result. I realised when I was quite young that the art of journalism lay more in writing convincingly than in really knowing the facts
and giving them. In reports of court action affecting the Customs and excise, for example, they usually got the names wrong, garbled the facts of the case and attributed the whole thing to the Inland revenue, This naturally weakened my faith in their views on all the many subjects which I knew nothing about, and the frequent appearance of discreet little paragraphs on page 17 admitting that last week's scoop was totally false,did nothing to restore my confidence.
On T.V. and radio it is normal to deal with each item by bringing in one or more experts, if the interviewer acted as the uninformed man in the street and sought to bring out the truth it would be most helpful, but he more often acts as some divine arbiter who knows more about the matter than all the experts put together, and winds up with a kind of ruling of his own. I should say his or her own, of course.
This used to irritate me to death, but since I saw Sue Lawley arguing the toss with a naval officer about a wartime incident off Norway, I have treated it as a joke. I doubt if she has ever heard a shot fired in anger either at home or afloat, and
she probably hardly knows one end of a warship from the other but that did not prevent her from pressing, with an air of authority, a point of view that was absurd on the face of it.
BBC radio, in particular, is often accused of being leftist because their interviewers are harder on Government than on opposition speakers. I think it is simply that it is far easier to challenge a minister's account of what he is doing, than his shadow's account of what he would do if only he could get in.
On any controversial issue, those who understand the matter are usually involved on one side or the other and don't even attempt to give a balanced view of it. Other people, always the vast majority, are totally baffled and the endless repetition of conflicting extremist views does nothing to help.
The authorities recently offered a pay rise of 6.5% for on a year to ambulance crews, which they rejected. Their unions as asked for a much higher figure and a new pay mechanism. They gave the impression that their members were not so much drivers as mobile 'paramedics', whatever that means, and said their pay should be fixed like that of firemen, a parallel which I don't profess to understand. They commenced industrial action, refusing routine duties but providing emergency cover and stopping short of an all-out strike.
The employers then offered 9k over 18 months, but the unions said this was no better than 6.5% over 12. Arithmetically, it
seems to be slightly worse. After about six months, during which I suppose most ambulance men did about 10% of their normal duties on full pay, the dispute was settled for some 17.5% over 2 years. The authorities said that this did not breach official guidelines on pay, the unions said it did, and individual members said it was no better than 6.5% over 12 months. How the heck any outsider can make sense of that, I do not know.
Personally, I have no idea who was right, who was wrong or who won.
When it comes to foreign affairs, the media seem to vie witheach other to send squads of reporters to give saturation coverage, even where there is no real British interest in the matter. Am I the only man who doesn’t care a hoot what happens
to the Germans, East or West, as long as the whole boiling lot of then stay in Germany? I don't really need a news flash every time Nelson Mandela blows his nose either. When Mrs. Thatcher presumed to disagree with Mr. Mandela over sanctions, Mr. Kinnoch accused her of arrogance. I wonder he didn't say blasphemy.
As a boy singing the hymn 'So be it, Lord, thy throne shall never, like earth's proud empires, pass away', I always thought of the Roman Empire and mentally exempted the British, but during my lifetime practically all our dependencies have packed us off hone and gone their own way. I can live with that, but I wish they didn't tell us it’s our bounden duty to dig them out each time they run into trouble. And if British rule is so terrible, why have so many of our erstwhile victims come over here?