Rotting Hill (30 page)

    His Yorkshire accent broke rotten most expressively into two autonomous vocables charged with disgust. As he was talking I remembered that we have in a neighbouring flat German-speaking tenants who hammer dully all day. Possibly toy-makers. One of the bedroom industries of Rotting Hill. Another bedroom industry I feel sure is matches: whittling pieces of black-market wood and dipping the tips in some over-inflammable substance. The best brands now are plentiful: but a year ago most Rotting Hill matches exploded in your face. No doubt there are cigarette-makers: and of course there are cabinet-makers. In the distance, perhaps three flats away, we hear some very heavy banging. Mr. Patricks’ “French” toy stock might come from Soho, chopped out and painted in a cellar. But Mr. Patricks sells his “
rotten
” toys like hot cakes. Other people’s therefore cannot be any better.

    The Patricks’ toy shop is thronged with the children of prosperous spivs. The stream of showy-looking kids, with the school-caps of local spiv-schools for the sons of black-market gentry, and big fawn-jacketed blondes of eleven, some decked out to look like miniature Gorgeous Gussies, with Corgies or Wolfhounds on a smart leash, never slackens: side by side with these are the gangs of shuffling ragamuffins, clutching a copper in their filthy little fists.

    All it is my guess like his Yorkshire blarney too. Is there a blarney stone up in Yorkshire I wonder. If so Mr. Patricks has most certainly kissed it—and has skipped away as replete with mischief as a Sartre-faced elf. He treats his customers with the freshness of a high-salaried radio quizzer. But like myself, they seem amused.

    The “Talking Shop”, as the English call their Parliament, is the only place the public may visit where ruling is going on. Londoners have never been so addicted to sightseeing and peep-shows as they are at present. The Zoo is packed, the Tate is packed, and the House of Commons is only a fraction less popular. On a fine summer’s day a dense queue of what George Orwell called “proles” stand, loll, sit, and lie for hours to get in and have a look at the M.P.s spouting. There are no doubt a substantial number of provincials, but it is a working-class crowd, and it is as a
sight
that these people regard the Talking Shop. The English are the most unpolitical of any nation. They regard what is going on in such a place as this with a bland detachment, as if it had nothing to do with
them.

    Going there, as I did, to see a Member, with whom you have an appointment, you do not queue. You pass inside; all you have to do is to say to the policeman standing in the doorway that you have an appointment with such and such an M.P. No papers, no passes, are necessary.

    It is perfectly easy to get into the House of Commons! If you wanted to blow it up, and were an “educated man”, you would walk up to the St. Stephen’s entrance, say to the policeman, “I am lunching with Colonel Jones.” (Pick a Colonel: policemen always like a Colonel, though Lord Winterton would do just as well, policemen like lords—they respect them.) The constable will pass you in at once and if you have mentioned a lord, he will probably touch his helmet. If a proletarian, you cannot do this, of course. The policeman would not believe you—he would know Colonel Jones would not lunch with you. He would begin bullying you and might end up by arresting you and so discover the infernal machine in your pocket. I am afraid if you are a proletarian and want to blow it up you must take your place in the queue.

    But if your accent is good and you are adequately well-heeled, this police constable is the only person to whom you have to address a word. Having negotiated him, the bomb ticking away in your pocket and your heart going pit-a-pat too, you would pass inside the building, enter a long gallery lined with statues—of M.P.s of long ago, in tights (looking like Shakespeare). You march along this in a business-like way and you then emerge in a large and lofty hall, like a railway station, lighted by a circular glass dome. (I think—anyway it is daylight.) Here is where you would have to be careful. A ribboned official, in I suppose police uniform, stands in the centre of the hall. He knows all the Members by sight and by name. He would know you were not a Member, but that would not worry him—there are lots of visitors and other people moving to and fro. Since he is a very busy functionary he would in all likelihood be talking to somebody. He would only notice you if you showed signs of hesitation, and that only if momentarily disengaged.

    If embarked on the deadly though ridiculous errand we have supposed, it is necessary to walk straight across this hall, as quickly and unconcernedly as possible. If stopped, say you are a visitor—do not mention Colonel Jones or Lord Winterton—they might be passing across the hall at that moment, which of course would be fatal as you would be led up to them. On the other side of this hall you enter a busy corridor. Almost immediately you will encounter a convenient lavatory, but there is a better,
less frequented,
one a little further on, down one flight of stairs. You go in, deposit your bomb, and leave by the same route. If the policeman at the St. Stephen’s entrance should recognize you and say for instance, “Wasn’t Colonel Jones there, sir? I saw the Colonel go in, sir,” you just say, “Yes, I saw him, thank you. We are lunching outside.” You can then get your taxi, settle comfortably down in it, and, perhaps, a terrific roar apprising you of the success of your mission, out of the rear window observe your time-bomb rock the Talking Shop, blowing all the M.P.s up into the air—just as you are entering Whitehall, or driving into the little park between the Horseguards and the Palace.

    But let me give you a piece of advice, should it by any chance occur to you to commit this outrage. Spare yourself the pains. If you regard the Parliament as being not only a Talking Shop but a Power House, you are quite mistaken. Put your bomb away, my dear sir. Parliament has altered a great deal since the days of Guy Fawkes and Catesby. You would not be blowing up what you fondly supposed was there: nothing in fact but what amounts to a large theatrical company. The play is called “Crisis”. But there is no crisis. The plot is the conflict in a free democracy between the Lefts and Rights. But there is very little difference in what the Rights want and what the Lefts want—and there is no democracy.

    If a bona fide visitor, as I was this lively June afternoon, upon reaching the large hall (assuming he is not yet acquainted with the M.P. he has come to see) identifies and addresses himself to the uniformed official who stands in the centre, he must tell him which M.P. he desires to see. Comfortable seats are provided: he is directed to take his place on one of these, and when the Member he is waiting for comes into the hall, the official sees him, shouts his name, and looks at the visitor. I know this part of it because I went there myself; as I failed to contact my man’s secretary, I took my place among those awaiting the arrival of some legislator, as friends, relatives, or as clients.

    Were it your first visit, as you watched and waited, no doubt you would experience, not necessarily a thrill, but a lively curiosity. You would wonder where the actual Chamber was situated. If you were moderately innocent, it would be the same sort of sensation as being behind the scenes at a Plaza de Toros.
One
of these openings out of the big hall where the official shouts is where the arena is. It would not provide a kick equivalent to being (as a tourist) in a waiting-room at the Lubianka, say, knowing that
somewhere
in the building men were being tortured. But still it would be a kick. Under the same roof with you is the place where life is weighed out daily in little packets for fifty million people. It is not really the place where the weighing is done, you would not know that. As you sat there you would say to yourself that to take a few steps off there to the left, or to the right, would bring you to a
door.
You would push the door, and you would find yourself between two crowds of glaring M.P.s, rushed at by officials, denounced on all hands as an outrageous intruder. At your first visit,
before
you became privy to the reality and were delivered from the grip of the imagination and its intensified dream-imagery, you would be conscious of an electric and oppressive
nearness
to something that was going forward the other side of the wall.

    The imaginative excitement of the newcomer to this place is at least one hundred years out of date. The moment the visitor is in the presence of this assembly, as a watcher from the gallery, he must, I think, recognize the fool his imagination has made of him. There is nothing
electric
once he reaches the source of his sensations. The English Parliament is a voting-machine, not a talking-machine. Most of it remains sheepishly silent all the time—except at times when all present are allowed to act as an incoherent chorus. Since in the nature of things at present it always votes the same way, the physical presence of all these people sitting there is quite pointless. They are lectured to, or argued at, by the same handful of people hour after hour and day after day. Even when the two sides are technically evenly matched, there is no necessity for more than a half-dozen
vocal
members on either side. The fact that this voting-machine takes a human form is principally a concession to the anthropomorphic tastes of the crowd. They like to come in and see a lot of people sitting there. A few hundred unemployed men would serve the purpose just as well, i.e. to fill up, and would be far more economical. As to the committees they are not seen. The power has left this assembly completely and is elsewhere. This shadow of a Gemot, like the “constitutional monarchy” and numerous other fossil institutions, deceptively preserved, and painted over to simulate life, cannot be denied a talismanic usefulness. But, at the same time, they act as blinds.

    To illustrate the manner in which the voting-machine works, the Lefts very naturally did not like the powers still enjoyed by the Upper House. The House of Lords, as we know, is a non-elective Senate, a thing which at the most should be a phenomenon like the Beefeaters: instead of that it is a fossil institution imperfectly extinct. The Lefts put into the Parliamentary Machine a measure they named “The Parliament Act”. It came out, after a brief delay, duly stamped and ready for the Statute Book. The Commons has become a machine-for-stamping-bills. It is a machine that alters the laws of the country at will and with remarkable velocity.

    Before continuing, let me answer a criticism which I foresee, namely that I am treating the present socialist monopoly of power as if it were always to be with us. It is true that by the time these words are printed there may be a new parliament, the numbers on Left and Right more evenly matched. But anyone is badly mistaken who believes that the eggs can be unscrambled, or that the so-called Tory Party ever would or can act again as anything but one of those fossil relics of which I have spoken—very useful to the Left since it obstructs the formation of an authentic Opposition. Mr. Churchill, landscape-painter and war-historian, too old for active leadership, is the very perfect symbol of this token-Opposition. And even if the English People returned him to power, he would only take power as a stooge of the Left.

    Now to return to the Parliament Act: that measure decrees that after December the eleventh (1949) the Peers can no longer oppose, but must approve, the Steel and Iron Bill—which is the legislative
pièce de résistance
of the Left. Things like the Parliament Act go through as slickly as if the Parliament were made of plastic instead of flesh and blood. The Lords, meanwhile, will not be liquidated. If they
were
it might occur to someone to create a
real
senate, instead of this comic relic. That is the secret of the retention of this medieval waxworks. Also socialists like to end up as a “Lord”. (For there are joys as well as jobs for the boys.) It is the one advantage England will always have over Russia—you end “a noble”.

    I feel sure that if any initiative remained to these latter-day parliament-men their life in this comfortably-appointed club would have the effect of a narcotic. What it was all about would become more and more dreamily uncertain, the facts of life would become more and more remote, everything reduced to a debating point or a wisecrack.

    The accommodation in the new Chamber, in comparison with that which was destroyed by a bomb, is very inferior. Let us suppose that the visitor, after witnessing the Speaker’s Procession, gazing at the Mace (which, in a light-hearted moment, a former Minister, named Beckett, ran away with) he goes up to a gallery seat, gazing down for the first time at the legislators at work. He will see that nothing is done to impress him. Everything is as undramatic as possible. If you think of a caricatural cricket match, with a run or so every half-hour, bowling unlimited, with only token batting to enable the bowler to perpetuate his gentlemanly bombardment—a match in which the majority of the fielders lie down and watch the batsman and the bowler, with a periodic chorus of “Oh, well played, sir!”—or to show we are socialists now, a massive proletarian bellow: such a game as that would approximate to the parliamentary tempo. Like the Members themselves, the visitor will soon grow fatigued by what, in all likelihood, will be the unrelievedly mercenary subject-matter. And the fact that they call each other “honourable”, or “gallant”, or, I think, “honourable and learned”, will help very little after about twenty minutes.

    In my own case I had what I laughingly call business to transact with one of the very many charming gentlemen who have condemned themselves to this waxwork existence. At lunch we discussed the matter which had brought me there, and then went out on to the handsome terrace, the Thames running strong and yellow just beneath its parapet. There is no division, on the terrace, between “the other place”, the term used to indicate the House of Lords, and the Commons, only a gap in the line of chairs and tables. A couple of peers sat where the Lords’ tables were and among the H. of C. tables, on the other side of the gap, a communist M.P. was drinking orangeade with a man and woman friend.