Dialogue: Stick your social laws and just let me get on with it

By JOE BENNETT

When I drink I don't hurt anyone. When I drink I laugh a lot. These seem to me to be all the reasons needed to object to the proposed increase to the tax on booze.

But I have another reason. That reason is revolutionary Ron. Ronald is one of those names that have stopped. In 20 years of classrooms I never taught a Ron. Nor a Bert, nor a Reg and only once, though memorably, a Norman.

Ron, Bert, Reg and Norman went out with the half-g and the black bicycle.

I can think of only two famous Rons. One was a far better President than he let on or than perhaps he realised. The other is Ronald Biggs.

Ronald Biggs was born on the wrong side of the tracks but close enough to them to see the bullion trains chugging past on their way from somewhere he wasn't to somewhere he also wasn't.

He fancied a bit of that and gathered some Berts and Norms around him and they went a-robbing. In the process they coshed a chap on the train, a chap who was probably also born on the wrong side of the tracks but who chose to make a living from them rather than taking one.

That man didn't work again and then he died. I've forgotten his name and so have you. But we all know Ron.

When he slipped from the nick Ron ran to Brazil and became bizarre. To his former neighbours in the drizzle of the East End of London Ron would have seemed to have fetched up in paradise.

He had the booze and the birds and the beaches and the notoriety. But of course it wasn't like that.

When a stroke reduced Ron to a second infancy he felt the tug of his native squalor and he went home to keel over. Scotland Yard duly sent 15 cops to meet his wheelchair and make sure it didn't scoot off to the nearest pub.

Then, for the sake of public safety, they parked his witheredness back in the nick.

Ronnie Biggs is a hero to some and a villain to others. But essentially he is neither. Ronnie's a revolutionary.

His was a minor revolution but it was a revolution nevertheless. All revolutions have the same cause. People at the bottom resent the people at the top sufficiently to overcome their fear of challenging them.

Ron was an alley cat who wanted to be a fat cat, so he staged a revolution on behalf of a proletariat of one.

It didn't work but he didn't really want it to anyway. As his pathetic return testifies, a return sponsored by a newspaper with the moral backbone of a handkerchief, Ron never truly wished to rise above his station. He pined for the pub on the corner.

Revolutions are staged all the time. Anyone who rises from Mangere to the boardroom has revolted. Such a person differs from Ron only in that he has revolted within the law.

He has battled social gravity and won. His children will inherit his status and probably consolidate it. His grandchildren will definitely fritter it.

The ascent from Mangere to prominence is a good thing. A society that allows it is a good thing. Each one of us wants to be proud of what he or she has done alone. Each one of us has to fight his own demons of fear or indolence.

If we succeed according to our private lights, we are thrilled. To carve our own path is to carve a good path and we have the chance to do it if we want.

By and large and barring accidents we all get what we want. We just don't always acknowledge that we want it. Most of us are not revolutionaries.

But there's another form of revolution and history bristles with examples of it. It is the revolution staged in our name. Such revolutions never work.

They don't work because they are dishonest. Robespierre or Lenin arise in the name of the people but they're only really doing a Ron.

They promise to put the people in power but they put themselves in power. And then, unfailingly, they legislate. They legislate like crazy. They legislate in the name of the people. But it doesn't work. It produces tyranny.

And it does so for a simple reason. It does so because the masses don't exist.

There is, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it, no such thing as society. There are only Rons and Berts and Norms who want to be themselves.

So I distrust all social legislation. I resent it emotionally because it trammels me. And I resent it intellectually because it just doesn't work.

That is why I decry the proposed tax boost on booze.

Enforce the laws as they stand and let me be. Like revolutionary Ron, I like the pub.