From Free Life, Issue 23, August 1995
ISSN: 0260 5112

Speaking My Mind: The Autobiography of Rhodes Boyson

Peter Owen, London, 1994, 210 pp., £24.50 (hbk)

(ISBN 0-7206-0901-1)

No - the book does not consist of two hundred blank pages. Sir Rhodes Boyson is certainly a man who speaks his mind - so I hope he won't mind if I speak mine! He is not, I must admit, one of my favourite people. While he's a pleasant enough person to talk to and does at least possess a sense of humour, his beliefs are simply too authoritarian. He appears to want Britain as a whole to be basically a grand scale version of Highbury Grove school. It's ironic that this outspoken denouncer of collectivism is himself one of the biggest collectivists I've ever come across on non-economic issues!

Since I'm an outspoken supporter of children's rights, and he in many ways epitomised the kind of Head I campaign against, the fact that our views on education differ will hardly be a revelation. While I generally share his beliefs in traditional teaching methods and curricula, some kind of testing, and lowering the school leaving age, I certainly do not share his beliefs in corporal punishment, school uniform - surely one of the most collectivist ideas of all? - compulsory religion, and general outlook on how schools should be run. I have always been sceptical of his accounts of life at Highbury Grove, and other schools where he was the Head - on the principle that the last person one can expect an objective account of a school from is the Head!).

He also contradicts himself more than once - admitting that his first pupils in 1950 were his worst is surely an odd statement from someone who frequently talks of declining standards of discipline. He claims that boys are "naturally tribal animals". I wasn't - nor was he! As for his claim on page 245 that "Vigorous team games... decline in schools... young create... more brutal games to fill the vacuum" - I would advise him to turn back to page 14, where he describes his childhood sport of purring, boys kicking each other on the legs with iron-tipped clogs. Personally, my favourite childhood game was "British Bulldog"! And his support for the educational voucher, the assisted places scheme, and allowing "groups of parents... Christian fundamentalists and Muslims - to opt in to grant-maintained status" is surely nothing but a sneaky way of demanding taxpayers' money for private education.

His life story itself is that of the working-class boy made good, moving from Labour to Tory and from Councillor (originally Labour - he was a Labour Party member until pushing forty) to Minister of State. He claims to have been converted to Conservatism by studying the nineteenth century liberal free marketeers, and that "By 1968 I also noticed that socialist governments made decisions to bolster their short-term popularity and not the long-term industrial improvement of their countries" - to which I would only dissent by replacing the word "socialist" with "all" and by enquiring which planet he'd been living on before 1968!

The strongest influence on him appears to have been his father, an old-fashioned socialist trade unionist of courage, principle and integrity. Some of his son's ideas are, however, both collectivist and downright nasty - for instance:

I believe freedom comes from the acceptance of necessary restraints and inhibitions... if need be, compulsory.... I opposed... easy abortion and the homosexual reforms. [p.78]

So I assume that he'd have kept both state persecution of adult homosexuals and the backstreet abortionist!

On page 232, he informs us that "Anybody not prepared to carry... an identity card is up to no good or is suffering from advanced libertarianism" - what does he mean - suffering?

However, to give credit where it's due, he gives us all a tip on page 52 - "Be nice to officials, listen to them and nod wisely but ignore their advice and do what you think is right" - and voices the truth that dare not speak its name:

A National Health Service would never work, since demand would always exceed supply even if 105% of the GNP were spent on health all males between the ages of twelve and eighteen had to belong to a local uniformed organisation which meets together at least one evening a week, one weekend a month and one week a year. [p.130]

But then he goes and spoils it:

There should be established in each local area a 12-to-18-year-old general service unit run by ex-servicemen on the lines of a cross between the Outward Bound schools and Dad's Army. [ibid.]

Would Sir Rhodes care to look at the history of Germany in the 1930s - or of all totalitarian regimes, for that matter? Would he also care to glance over the manifesto of the British National Party?

Incidentally - I'd also like this member of the Mont Pelerin Society to address it on his view that economics is "an easy or even a non-subject.... Economists muddy the waters so that the rest of society cannot see how shallow they are."

However, I'd like to close by saying that he's never been a great Euro-enthusiast and is becoming more and more Euro-sceptic as the years go by; he regrets never having been a Cabinet Minister - may I say that we could have done worse than make him Foreign Secretary? Come to think of it - we have!

Mark Taha