When the Kissing Had to Stop

"This is by Constantine FitzGibbon, about whom I know very little. He lived a rather rackety life and is, alas, no longer with us. The title comes from a haunting Browning poem called ‘A Tocatta of Galuppi’s’, which contains the words ‘Venice spent what Venice earned’, and these lines: ‘As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop, Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop: What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?’. I read it at an impressionable age, 13 or 14, and again it’s a fantasy about an England that never happened. It’s a classic right-wing fantasy novel about how a Labour government comes to power and is taken over – much as the Greater London Council was taken over by Ken Livingston – and turns the country into a Soviet puppet state. All this is now terrifically outdated, but what remains good about it is the characterisation of so many of the fairly thinly disguised people in British politics and the way they behave. Amongst other things there’s a policeman called Prendergast, who is a completely unprincipled worshipper of authority and is prepared to pervert his office and his oath simply so that he can stay on the right side of power. This is actually quite telling and believable and I think there are a lot of people like that. It was difficult in those days to think of an English policeman behaving in that way. It’s not so difficult now. Oh, lots and lots of them actually. I think the old stout-hearted English yeoman view of not giving in to foreign domination has by and large vanished. Nobody much believes in anything any more and you find an awful lot of people in authority who, it seems to me, would cooperate with anybody who could demonstrate that they were in power. Oh. I don’t know really. This was the background to so much of my life that I think that those who didn’t go through these experiences should read about them. I always used to think that the proper solution for East Germany was that it should be taken over by the Disney Corporation and maintained in its state indefinitely so that people could go and see what it was really like, because it becomes increasingly unbelievable that all this actually happened. But it did. No. Even the most remote places are enormously better than they used to be. I haven’t had that experience. What I see is that people’s lives are, in many significant ways, better. The state has ceased to be interested in what people think. It’s interested in what they do but not in what they think. In some ways thought and speech are probably freer in Russia than they were in the Soviet Union, even freer than they are here. There is an almost complete absence of political correctness, which we take for granted here. I don’t know if it’s a good or a bad thing but it’s the case. He has, but provided you say what you say in small think-tanks or minor circulation newspapers nobody will bother you, whereas in the old days any dissent from the line would have been visited with persecution, however obscure. It’s not an ideological state so as long as people don’t do anything to challenge it… People ought to realise that this didn’t all vanish like a puff of smoke. When the Berlin wall came down a huge number of damaging ideas escaped across it and started to propagate themselves in the West because they were no longer discredited by their practical expression in the evil empire. The right, which never bothered to argue very hard about its principles, before the wall came down could simply point eastwards and say: Look that’s what you’ll get if you follow left-wing ideas. So the left was handicapped at election time, but now it is much freer than it ever was. The left was liberated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which in any case was an aberration as far as the cleverer thinkers of the left are concerned."