Catching the English disease
Richard West Cherbourg Before taking a boat-train for the Continent four years ago (Spectator 10 September 1977), I witnessed a shocking incident at Victoria Station: two Scottish women hurled racial abuse, and then their gin, at an Asian bar-tender who had displeased them. The memory of this incident came back to me at the bar of Waterloo Station as I was waiting to catch the boat-train for Weymouth and Cherbourg. There was an atmosphere of unusual and menacing calm which may or may not have had something to do with the black couple behind the bar. Then I became aware that a drunk man — a Scot once again — was addressing the girl in fragments of Afrikaans which, whether or not she understood him, was tactless. Words were exchanged with another customer and then all of a sudden, the Scot was flat on his back on the floor while a younger white man knelt on his chest and attempted to strangle him. The scene was all the more curious since the Scot managed to hold his drink upright and unspilt. Before any damage was done, a third man persuaded the strangler to ease his grip on the Scotsman's neck. Both men stood up and went off. Those of us at the bar relapsed into silence.
Over in Cherbourg next day, I saw how differently French people act to people of colour. A West Indian came to his regular cafe to greet his French friends and in turn to be greeted with 'Good morning...
cannibal...savage...uncivilised...hater of whites'; to which he replied with the obviously stock joke: 'How could I hate the Whites when I've eaten so many?' He leaned across to pinch the barmaid's bottom, and was in reply slapped over the face with a dish-cloth. At worst one could say if the French that they are no ruder to black people than white people. Perhaps Evelyn Waugh got it right when he observed in A Tourist in Africa, with reference to the Masai: 'Like the French they recognise nationality by social habits rather than by race. Men and women from other tribes who marry among them and conform to local customs are accepted'. Thus the French accept African and Antilleans who conform to French customs; they put up With uneducated migrant workers from Mali and Senegal. They sensibly condemn West Indian weirdies such as the Rastafarians. This French attitude seems to me not only more honest and sensible than the British but beneficial to immigrants, as it obliges them to conform to the customs and prejudice of the host country.
Race does not seem to be one of the problems so far tackled by Mitterrand's socialist government — though his decree of a high minimum wage in the French Antilles is certain to raise unemployment there, and thus immigration to France itself. Nor has there, so far, been much sign of a socialist economic policy: France already had much nationalisation of industry. The French, including the Socialists, are too well aware of what has happened in Poland to want a similar economic mess. Nor have the Socialists taken a left-wing line on questions like nuclear power and the neutron bomb, which they seem to welcome. However the British tourist in France will notice, with apprehension, some of the unmistakable signs of the idiocy which has overtaken our own British Labour Party in the last ten years. This has not, as the Tory newspapers seem to imagine, much to do with socialism, either in principle or practice. It is shown in the way that the old, perfectly honourable British Labour Party has now been annexed by the Polyocratic, Trotskyist middle-class left: the militant white-collar unions, the furious social workers, abortionists and women's libbers. Their victories have been won not in Parliament but in the trade unions — especially in public service unions — and in the new local government bodies.
The decrees for a rise in the minimum wage seem likely to do in France the same kind of mischief effected in England by Wages Councils, which have helped to put thousands of firms out of business. France has followed England's disastrous road towards equal pay for all regardless of age and experience; also of guaranteed jobs for women — another cause of unemployment.
Still more sinister are the recent demands by French unions in the public sector to have the right to strike: the hospital workers are now the case in point. They should take a lesson from England's 'winter of discontent' (as it was called by the press) when hospital workers, ambulancemen and firemen, power and water workers, the dustmen and mortuary workers, all vied with the government and each other to exercise their 'right to strike'.
The politicising of manual workers in public service is still not as dangerous as the work of Trotskyist agitprop in the higher ranks of the (hugely expanded) civil and local government service. In our recent civil servants' strike we heard union leaders crowing about their power 'to bring the country to a standstill'. Local government officers are still more overtly political. Certain West Midland councils have boasted of how they will not appoint 'anti-socialise colleagues. In hundreds of councils throughout the country, most local government jobs from social worker to housing official have now been politicised.
The same has now happened in France. Contrary to the smug belief of most Englishmen, the civil service in France is less political than our own. Now the Mitterrand government has proclaimed that civil servants, too, have a right to political action. It has granted, even before it was really demanded, the right of civil servants to hold political meetings in office time.
Again there are signs in France of a growth of the 'nanny state' and sheer political imbecility. I read that the Minister of Spare Time (Ministre du Temps Libre) has called for a crash programme to build workers' seaside chalets as part of his task 'to allow the French to choose and not just submit to the organisation of their time'. Soon France may create that sublime post once held by Mr Howells, the Labour MP, of 'Shadow Minister of Sport, Water and Sewage'.
Yet almost half the French, according to an inquiry published last week, like to spend at least some of their spare time in reading. There is much demand for books and newspaper serials on the Second World War. Here in the Cherbourg region, everyone seems to know of the June 1944 invasions at Utah and Omaha beachheads.
The last month has seen a quite unexpected publishing sensation. A new book of interpretation and gloss on Nostradamus Historien et Prophete has sold close on 300,000 copies at £12.50 a copy. Millions of Frenchmen are now debating, partly in jest but more in terror, the gloomy predictions made by this sorcerer of the 16th century. The serious papers have made the book front-page news for day after day. Even the wonderful France-Dimanche (which unlike our News of the World remains independent of foreign pornographers) gave Nostradamus precedence in its recent issue to Princess Margaret — 'Her New Love, An Older Man At Last'. The Nostradamus cult is of such extraordinary interest and significance that I hope to give it an article to itself in next week's Spectator.
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