a form of strike breaking’. The heart of the whole wretched problem was expounded by a valiant economist of the Right, Walter Eltis, who said that if at Oxford in 1965 the question had been asked as to whether an absence of growth, inflation, unemployment and a balance of payments crisis could coexist, the answer would have been yes, but only in an underdeveloped country. The Bank of England noted in 1975-6 that the real return on investment was now zero. By then taxation of salaries had reached 83 per cent and on interest or dividends, 98 per cent. The government was in no condition to face trouble from the unions again, and there was more panic; the City refused to buy government stock, mistrusting it; interest rates rose above 10 per cent again, to 14 per cent by May 1979, when the next election happened. The annual debt — ‘public sector borrowing requirement’ — almost doubled, to some ?10bn, but even then some effort had to be made to control public sector wages at a time when the government was taking three fifths of the entire national income for itself. In the summer of 1978 the unions rebelled against the system, the Ford workers leading the way, and by the winter there were surreal strikes, including dustmen and even body-buriers. But England, messy as she was, was not without creativity, or even tissue regeneration. There was to be a reaction against all of this. Edward Heath had been dismissed as leader of the Conservative Party, to his own and his supporters’ great surprise. Margaret Thatcher replaced him, to his disbelief. She meant business, at last.
18. Europe: The Phoenix Flops
In the early 1950s Moscow had been frightened at the prospect of a Europe headed by a rearmed Germany, and in alliance with the United States. Stalin had tried to bully the Germans; in the early years of Khrushchev there had been fewer crude ploys, but then he too had become a bully, exploding huge experimental bombs and serving ultimatums over Berlin. The West only closed ranks, and NATO became quite sophisticated, with an intelligence network and, in some countries, even a shadowy, underground organization. But by the 1970s matters had changed. Nixon and Kissinger needed to stop the Vietnam War somehow, and had approached Moscow in May 1972 with proposals for detente. They were couched in terms of disarmament — SALT I, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks — and the American bait was a credit deal over grain shipments, easings of conditions for Soviet visits to the USA, etc. The Americans’ threat was of a deal with China, and the context was a division that had been emerging since Khrushchev’s last years: he had withdrawn help and refused Mao the secrets of the bomb, and Mao responded with a sort of offended nationalism. In 1969-70 there were Chinese-Soviet armed clashes on the river Ussuri, a disputed border, and the Chinese responded to the American opening. But it was not just the Americans who appeared. West Germany launched her own probe, known as
At the time Europe certainly seemed to the outside world to be a miracle of prosperity, without the concomitant crudities of the United States. However, she remained less than the sum of her parts. The European Community itself (to use the shorthand) was not particularly efficient: quite the contrary, it stumbled along drearily. Its institutions (and its flag) went back to the early fifties, and the Coal and Steel Community: a court, an assembly, and a High Authority to sort out the very technical technicalities of who was to produce what at which price. Jean Monnet himself had become bored with his creation, and its European outcrop was generally used as a parking place for failed politicians whose vanity needed to be salved. The first president of the Commission had been Walter Hallstein, possessed of negative charisma. Later on came heavy-lecturing worthies, the heaviest and longest-lasting a German Widmerpool, Gunter Verheugen. It was all desperately uninspiring and even in some ways fraudulent. At the heart of this multinational community was Belgium, subject to the most absurdly provincial nationalisms; even Luxemburg dressed up its dialect, the Dutch equivalent of Liverpudlian, as a national language. In the 1970s, to give the Community some sort of personality and appeal, a parliament was set up, with direct elections. This was again, as with everything touched by the then French president, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, lifeless and even ridiculous.
A British journalist of genius, Catherine Bennett, wrote an article about it in 1991. She had unearthed a British Labour member of the European Parliament, one Glyn Ford, who claimed to be so busy that he could not make appointments. ‘Anyone wanting a little of Mr Ford’s time must wait beside the telephones dotted around the bars and hallways, bleeping him now and again, for a gap to occur between the seven simultaneous meetings which Ford says he has “all day, every day”.’ He had been an MEP since 1984 and was ‘Chair of the Committee of Inquiry into the Rise of Racism and Fascism in Europe’, ‘which’, as he explained, ‘was pretty high profile,
This reflected one of the great developments of the seventies, the rise of the ‘soft professions’. Deeper down, it also showed the increasing powerlessness of parliamentary bodies in general as bureaucracy and technology made semi-secretive committees and lobbies more powerful. The soft professionals, demanding a European policy for gays or women and the like, were expensively used to hide the shift of real power. Besides, the experience of any multilingual parliament was not encouraging, and Margaret Thatcher in a later speech made mock of such bodies as the Austrian before the First World War, where proceedings became chaotic and even budgets could be produced only by decree. The secretiveness of the Council and the Commission, the sheer loftiness of their civil servants, and the extraordinarily slipshod ways with money were notorious. In the seventies matters were made worse because the machinery worked almost ridiculously slowly. Creating a unified market was supposed to mean the ironing out of endless small differences. The bureaucracy was not in itself very considerable and did not amount to more than that of an English local government. However, it did involve far more people, in the separate countries, as they went through the European laws and had to apply them. The ways of these bureaucrats were, to outside eyes, very strange, and involved a degree of petty bullying noticed in every country. As an Italian said, it was an age of bureaucratic micro-persecution: no smacking of naughty children (a French father was imprisoned in Edinburgh) and increasingly no smoking. Europe became unpopular in England because shopkeepers could be arraigned if they went on marking goods in the old weights and measures, rather than in the metric system. There were stories as to the harmonization of condom sizes, the Italians claiming that they needed three millimetres more than the Germans, who took offence.
At a more serious level, in the 1970s various governments applied regulations on health, safety and the like in order to prevent imports: the Germans kept out foreign beers, for instance, because of their alleged impurities. The French insisted on certain classes of imports’ being trundled along highways and byways for a six-month-long inspection, paid for by the importer, in Poitiers (which, on the strength of the income, wrecked its medieval centre with a corrugated-iron
