Energy assistance bill

After a flying trip to Scotland – which was like walking into a cool cellar after a month or more of being locked in a furnace, a cellar, I may add, a cellar smelling very pleasantly of malt – I came back into the furnace again this week to hear people already saying, 'Boy, that was a tough one we had two or three weeks ago!' And they were saying this in a present temperature of 95 degrees, which only goes to show that if you condition people long enough to 102, they actually make a point of stopping by church to thank the Lord for his goodness in reducing the heat by seven degrees.

So, after this brief respite from the stew of New York and from the continuing dogfight between Mr Carter and Mr Reagan, they didn't observe the customary pause for prayer and refuelling that usually takes place between the conventions and the official opening of the campaign on Labor Day, which this year falls as early as is possible, since the first Monday in September, Labor Day, falls on the first of the month.

Well, I say that after this respite I thought it would be fun, or wise, to tap friends and say, 'What would you say is the number one topic in the news that most interests Americans at the moment?' I can tell you at once which is the first item on the evening television news, on all three networks but, as you all know, that's not necessarily the same as what everybody's talking about.

One of the shocks, very necessary shocks, for a reporter who's stuck in one place too long is to travel to his home base and notice that everywhere, and always, the big international news, even if it threatens the livelihood, nay even the survival, of the home population, is by no means always the thing that excites or concerns people most.

I've just had a dramatic reminder of this by going through a volume of Punch for 1913 to see how faithfully or how apprehensively people felt the oncoming of the First World War slaughter. Well, quite frankly, they didn't; 1913 looked like a rollicking year – the usual troubles in Ireland, suffragettes making a nuisance of themselves. As for the Kaiser, he was being lampooned as a gaudy monarch got up in swords and medals, with delusions of grandeur but there was Henley, cricket, picnics and the seaside.

To digress, and I think a very interesting digression just now, what I was looking for was a review of a book, a book which has suddenly and surprisingly come into great respect and popularity in the past year, Vera Brittain's 'Testament of Youth'. This has happened, of course, because somebody, maybe just one person – one woman most likely – came on it, found it was a moving and poignant statement of the social and political status of women in 1913 and through the war years and decided to make a television series of it.

A woman friend of mine says that it's a marvellously poignant, feminist plea without the strident overtones of either the suffragettes or our contemporary liberation movement. The book was published in 1933 but it starts in childhood and the television series adaptation starts in 1913. Hence, my interest in seeing what 1913 looked like to Punch at the time and to Vera Brittain 20 years later. The most interesting point, however, when I moved over from the 1913 volume to the bound volume of Punch for 1933, was to see how the book was received when it was published. How did Miss Brittain's humane and un-protesting feminism strike the, almost certainly, male reviewer of the established institution of Punch?

Well, it didn't. I mean, feminism wasn't the point. It's a very acute review but it takes no account, and I'll bet 99 readers in a hundred took no account of it as a feminist tract, however artfully and sympathetically disguised. This is what he had to say, 'The cataclysm of 1914 found Miss Vera Brittain one of a close-knit circle which included a devoted brother and three of his comrades in arms. By 1918, all were gone, except the girl and she, having toiled her heart out at hospital work in England, Malta and France with neither enough faith to sanction exaltation nor doubt enough for effective defiance, went back to her work at Oxford and on via the League of Nations to international socialism. It is impossible to condemn a nursling of 19th century materialism for having failed to improvise a creed which should see her through the shattering of her world. A deeply pathetic book.'

What he's saying, I think, in our terms, is that she didn't have enough belief in the war to be as excited about it as her lost friends and relations or enough religious doubt about the justice of the cause to become a pacifist. Her plight, as nurse and a woman bereft of brother and lovers, a brave castaway in a male world. This never crossed the mind of anyone in 1933. I'll leave you to decide whether we've come a long way in our notions of the place of women in society or whether a political fashion has oversimplified the truth about a human being.

Well, this little bit of research has made me all the more guarded about plumping for one big topic over another, about what's most important happening in America today. Fifty years from now, somebody may take out a scratchy old tape of one of our television or radio pundits and say, 'What a blind fool to see that the election campaign between Carter and Reagan was nothing compared to banks switching over to computers from mental arithmetic', or, 'the Iranians holding on to the American hostages should have been seen at the time as the end of four centuries of the practice of diplomacy', or, whatever.

So, I tiptoe into the newspapers and notice several things which, whether in time they turn out to be crucial to our time or not, are certainly typical of our time. A bunch of extortionists blow up a casino in Nevada with a bomb containing 1,000 pounds of TNT but the defusing experts, the UXBs, if you like, say that the remote control device was as clever, or sophisticated, as any they've known.

In the House of Representatives there was a vote which may sound routine to a foreigner, but it could sound a knell to the Republicans in November. The debate, the bill, was one to increase the amount of federal money that would go for what they call 'energy assistance' to poor people. Now, for people who live in the frigid winter of the north-eastern states, energy assistance means money for home heating. For people who live in the ghastly summers of the south and south-west, energy assistance means more money for air-conditioning.

The northerners put their case quite simply. Surely the poor people who live in Vermont and Massachusetts and out in Minnesota, where in winter you wake up most mornings in 20 below zero, surely they should get more money than people in Florida and Mississippi who wake up most winter mornings in temperatures of 50 or 60 degrees above? Sure, said the southerners and the south-westerners, but a southern Democrat from Arkansas made the point that more people died during the June/July heatwave in the south than died in the previous century in the whole country from cold weather.

So, it was not as simple a humanitarian debate as it first appeared but the New England congressmen who'd put together the bill as a simple reimbursement bill for heating the homes of the northern poor were outraged to see southerners tacking on to it extra money for cooling the homes of the southern poor. Of course, this extended view of energy didn't stop at the suffering states of the Deep South and Texas. The Californians wanted to get in on the federal handout also, though California has a great range of climates ranging from the hundreds on the east of the Coast Range mountains to the balmy sun and steady cool of the more populated coast.

And a Republican from Massachusetts put his finger on the Achilles' heel, 'This is unconscionable!' he said, 'This amendment would drastically set askew the funds at the expense of the very coldest part of the United States. Everybody's going to California. How many more congressmen are you going to get because of your beautiful climate?' He was referring there to the one-third increase in the population of California in the past quarter century which has made California, now, the most populous state and which, therefore, has more congressmen, more representatives in the House, than any other state.

Well, the House voted and as somebody put it, 'The Frost Belt defeated the Sun Belt and refused to take money from the shivering northerners in favour of the sweating southerners'. The vote was close, 215 to 299, but most of the triumphant vote came from Republicans in the north and the significance of that is that, while Mr Reagan has been making his main campaigning pitch towards the swelling population of the Sun Belt – the Republicans see it as Reagan country – you can say that the Sun Belt took a licking in Congress not from the Democrats, a great number of whom come from the south, but from the Republicans who are presumed to be going to vote for Mr Reagan in November.

Now this vote is not anything that made big headlines. There were other votes and will be others yet, for the House is moving towards adjournment but what's striking to me, coming back to the record of these debates and these votes in the congressional record, is that quite a lot of these votes are going the way Mr Carter wants them to. Come a month or more, he's going to be able to say with an emphasis annoying to the Republicans, 'I put up so and so and it passed. I urged the Congress to do this or that and it did it.'

None of these votes is dramatic enough to drown out the rage and chatter of political debate between Mr Carter, Mr Reagan and Mr Anderson but they are adding up to a record of what Mr Carter is doing, has done, instead of to a record of what Mr Reagan and Mr Anderson promise they will do.

So I'd say the vote to warm the homes of the northern poor was as significant as anything that's happened while I've been gone but if you want to know what most people believe to be the most thrilling, the most significant, the most baffling and, at the same time, the most promising movement of history in these past few weeks, there's no doubt what it is. The workers' strikes in Poland.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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