THE VIEW FROM HEREI’VE just heard a clip of a 1967 BBC interview with transport minister Barbara Castle and it may take me some time to recover.
Children sometimes imagine how their world will be changed in the next 50 years and, in 1967, they were probably forecasting cities on the moon and food replaced by super-nutrition pills.
Very few of them would have thought the approach of Mrs Castle’s questioner worthy of any notion that some radical rethinking might be in order.
Mrs Castle was about to introduce the breathalyser and her interviewer clearly regarded this as highly impertinent. "This is a rotten idea. You’re really spoiling my fun as a motorist," he told her.
Mrs Castle’s response is fascinating. "It’s to save your life. It’s not to save mine. I don’t drive," she said. "If you drink when you drive you have a multiple chance of being killed or seriously injured."
Perhaps the Department of Transport hadn’t worked out that non-drivers could be knocked down by drunken BBC presenters.
"You’re going to stop me having a lot of fun," persisted this pillar of broadcasting morality. Mrs Castle did her best but he was ready to finish her off with his final brilliant rationale.
"You’re only a woman. You don’t drive. What do you know about it?" he asked, with no indication this was anything other than a perfectly reasonable stance.
I don’t suppose this elicited any significant reaction in the nation. That was how things were and yet it was less than 50 years ago.
Nowadays, the fall-out from such an interview would keep the media happy for weeks and the presenter would certainly be fired and probably brought to court and sent off to some institution for the criminally insane.
If such a social upheaval can take place in under half a century, what on earth will happen in the next 50 years?
Answers on a postcard, please, to Harriet Harman, who, I suspect, might have been one of the few kids who, back in 1967, had her sights trained on that interviewer.
That just about sums it all up
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| Cllr Jerry White. |
IF you think cricket’s slow, you should play the game of waiting for the moment when our Island representatives say their first words in full council. Some of those elected last June took over six months to contribute anything whatsoever and, until last week, it looked as if Cllr Jerry White would never manage it at all.
But the last man left sitting finally opened his mouth and showed us what he was made of. His utterance came after four hours of impassioned debate on the implications of the council’s budget.
Whatever the necessities of financial pruning, there is no doubt the Island is in a sorry mess, with those least able to withstand the latest strictures left deeply unhappy and worried about their future.
Cllr White had nothing to say during this important debate. He voted, obediently, in support of the Tory apparatchik. By the end, the atmosphere in the chamber was as of a battlefield at the cessation of conflict, with casualties everywhere and a sense of deep foreboding.
But Cllr White had one last question with which to bring down the curtain on this meeting. It may well have been occupying his thoughts throughout the evening. "Are we getting rid of dog bins?" he inquired.
Now, for all I know (and I know very little of this taciturn man) Cllr White may be the closest thing to Mother Theresa ever witnessed at County Hall. He may spend his days washing old ladies’ feet and reading the scriptures to the dispossessed.
But, as a metaphor for what is wrong, his question seemed to sum up everything the Island needs to know about the council.
Four hours of wrangling about humanity and what do we end up with? One man and his dog bins.