Welcome to the Greater Europe of porn, the mafia and Britscum
I must have vomited,' said my
youngish taxi-driver, narrowing his eyes and making a mental calculation as he overtook a Sainsbury's lorry at 80 mph on the winding death run of the A36, 'in at least 20 bars. Maybe 30. Brilliant time. Just 48 hours, non-stop.'
He was talking about the stag weekend in Prague from which he'd just returned. He knew it was Prague because it said Prague on the plane ticket, but of course he had no idea that it was in the Czech Republic. Nor that it was probably Wenceslas Square in which he copiously relieved himself, alerting the attentions of the local police. 'I was pissing for Britain,' he laughed. And I didn't get a chance to quiz him much more about his sojourn because the ride was over all too quickly. But you can guess most of it. 'Come on, Svetlana, get your fuckin' tits out. Beer, beer, we want more beer; all the lads are cheerin', get the fuckin' beer in ' Prague has been, for some time now, the destination of choice for British chavs out for a good time, making the Czechs — once one of the few people in Europe with an affection for Britain — despise us almost as much as the Spanish now do. Luckily for the Czechs, though, the companies that cater for these ghastly weekend binges are looking further afield. Riga, Tallinn and Vilnius are next on the list, with Bratislava and beautiful Krakow to follow. Soon enough, from Szczezcin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic there will flow an endless river of British piss and vomit, a chunky, noisome Vistula full of British filth. As invasions go, it will be less spiteful and physically destructive than the ones these lovely countries have been more used to experiencing from their Western neighbours, or indeed their Eastern neighbours. But they will come to loathe it — and us — all the same, even as they deposit their bulging wads of euros as a result. Oh, why did you vote to join us? Didn't you know what would happen?
This is one reason why I can't get too worked up about a handful of Slovakian pikeys loitering with intent at the bottom of my garden. We are, after all, giving the Slovaks far worse in return. Along with pornography, the mafia, Coca-Cola, Britney Spears, McDonald's and EastEnders, Britscum on booze cruises are an inevitable consequence of firstly the free market and secondly the European Union. And it will continue until the whole eastern sector, from the graceful Hanseatic seaports of the north to the far-flung outposts of the old AustroHungarian empire in the south, is one homogenised, Bruxelloise morass.
Believe me, I have no romantic hankering for the somewhat dirigiste excesses of the old Soviet empire. When I was young I went by train to Moscow with a bunch of people from the Communist party of Great Britain, and I can still remember the ravenous speed at which they tore into the West Berlin branch of McDonald's on the way home, having endured two weeks of Marxist food: meat like wet rope from the gulags, the occasional bowl of buckwheat and no fresh vegetables. But in a slightly limp-wristed manner, one rather wishes there was a middle way that allowed just a little dignity to be kept intact.
And nowhere more so than in the agricultural industry or, as they tend to call it out east, farming. It is bad enough that we will wreck their cities, but just wait until market forces and the EU agricultural policy get hold of their land. At the moment, farming east of the Oder is — by our lights at least — a little 'backward'. It is not what we, over here, would call adequately 'developed'. An inordinately high proportion of the populations of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary is engaged in food production, often on a virtually subsistence level. That's not going to last long, now, is it? And yet it is largely these farming methods which have ensured that the lands to the east have remained a haven for wildlife, from the wolves and bison and bears of eastern Poland to the corncrakes and bustards that festoon the Hungarian plains. Farming is part of a natural cycle, with long fallow periods that enable the land to regain its energy and as a consequence attract wildlife. And there is a diversity of product inside comparatively small areas.
The boss of the Soil Association, Patrick Holden, puts it like this: 'There's a culture there, which managed somehow to survive the Soviet occupation, whereby the people see a direct relationship between themselves and the land. A lot of the farmers are selfsufficient and the average holding is somewhere around seven hectares.'
Holden, as you might expect, is worried about what might happen. 'What is a more solid form of social security,' he asks, rhetorically, 'a system whereby people are self-sufficient and produce what they need, or our form of social security?' But the impulse towards rationalisation, efficiency and competitiveness has already begun. The good news is that, taking a break from his own dairy farm in Wales, Holden and others like him are getting involved. 'Already there are people in Poland doing what we call counterdevelopment work, advising the food ministries in the new EU states,' he says. Holden himself has just returned from a visit to the former East Germany.
In the end, though, it will be the manner in which we behave that determines whether or not Poland, Hungary et al. go the way of East Anglia. At present we have an insatiable demand for cellophane-wrapped, blemishfree, taste-free fruit and vegetables, and in general we couldn't give a monkey's if they are organically produced so long as the queue at the Waitrose check-out counter is short enough and there's some moppet ready to help us pack up the carrier bags. The Slow Food Movement, which began in Italy and insists that consuming food should be an agreeable social ritual rather than a rapid swallow in front of the TV followed by a belch, may begin to change all that. It sounds like the sort of thing to which Spectator readers might well be attracted. After all, there is nothing intrinsically unconservative about countering market forces when those forces are apt to act in so unconservative a manner. And the Soil Association itself has noble and rather radical conservative roots, if you remember.
Meanwhile, I don't suppose there's anything that we can do about the river of piss and vomit. We and the Czechs and the Letts shall merely have to wait, bide our time until some enterprising tour operator lights upon a new destination for the denizens of Chavland UK to spew up their inflated wages. Ulan Bator, maybe. Or how about Riyadh?
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