Verses
Sir: Ten per cent? Six pounds a week? Parity is all we seek. The Boss is gaoled. The Statesmen roar. The Statesmen they want twenty-four.
Sybil King 6 Heather Brow, Claughton, Birkenhead, Merseyside
Sir: •
Four Englishmen decided it was wise for them to pander
. To humiliating orders from the tyrant of Uganda,
Because if they refused to chair the rather heavy President, F. E. Chappell Moor Cottage, Setley, Brockenhurst, Hants
Market membership
Sir: Both Mr Folkes and Mr Jordan are quite right in saying that culture and social ties respectively have nothing to do with our Common Market membership. This is undeniable within the traditional 'narrowly political' framework, as Mr Jordan puts it.
But the point of our membership ought to be more adventurous than this. How much more successful such a membership would be if it also tried to bring the member countries to a closer understanding of one another's special problems and strengths, not just in terms of annual growth rates, local unemployment figures and so on, but in collating and sharing on an official basis such information as ecological pitfalls, the needs of certain local areas like Southern Italy and Northern Scotland, the international problem of foreign workers with its attendant cultural and social stresses, probleths and successes in counteracting urban tensions, and so on. It might even be possible to set up an international 'watchdog' body to regulate the activities of the giant multinational corporations that exert extraordinary political and economic power wherever they operate. Much of such information is already available, but it must be officially recognised as important in building and maintaining some semblance of a stable economy in today's infinitely complex and interconnected world of trade and finance. It is equally important but much more difficult to apply the same criteria to all trading countries of the world, in an effort to keep one jump ahead of the daily changes in Cairo, Lisbon, Milan or Rio de Janeiro: all of which can affect our oil, wine or meat markets. This requires a new way of seeing and understanding modern economies, so rapid and so far-reaching are the possible changes that their financial and social spin-offs in the affected countries are rarely understood before another change takes place.
Surely then, the very best we can do to benefit ourselves — if not others as well — is to widen our common experience as well as to lower our trade tariffs, among our immediate trade partners. It was to this new importance of the foreign cultural and social scene — the key to the financial and economic — that I referred in my original letter.
As a footnote, let me acknowledge, before I'm accused of plagiarism, that this line of thought is-only partly mine and altogether very much indebted to Alvin Teller's Eco-Spasm Report', published in February this year by Esquire magazine and a month later in paperback. It ought to be required reading for all today's Top People. And anyone else interested in the future of industrialised societies, for that matter.
Anthony McCall 24 Fernshaw Road, London SW10.
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