Sir: I wonder if you would be generous enough to
allow space for the expression of a view on the Common Market that has nothing to do with the terms; that is, in fact atavistic and will no doubt be derided as ' emotional ' but is no doubt held in common with many.
I oppose the proposed entry because of a profound distrust of France and a belief that the socalled Common Market is, in fact, a French empire. Until the end of Victoria's reign, my countrymen knew and, I believe, correctly assessed the qualities of the French nation. Any reading of eighteenth and nineteenth century letters and memoirs and biographies will tell the same tale: while we were known to France as 'perfidious' Albion, they themselves were more worthy of the label. They were characterised as frivolous, selfish, superficial, intensely materialistic and consumed with the illusion of their superiority of thought and action over all other nations as well as being dedicated to the gospel of ' la gloire.' Victoria died. Edward VII, for reasons of his own, frivolous reasons perhaps, initiated the ' Entente Cordiale.' This was a two-part lie: it was not an understanding on our part, since we were deceived; it was not cordial on the part of the French since the Franco-Prussian war, as La Rochefoucauld was about everything. The French were then presented to us as enlightened, logical, civilized, generous and freedom-loving. It was thereafter as impossible to think of modern civilization without giving all the credit to the French as it would have been to consider its ancient counterpart without giving all the credit to the Greeks. In fact, they
have not changed. They are still what the people of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries believed them to be. In addition, they have never forgiven us for defeating Bonaparte and, later, saving them from Hitler. It was because de Gaulle was too mean-spirited to admit what he owed to us that he kept us out of the Market and embraced the Germans who, ever since the Franco-Prussian war, were supposed to be France's traditional enemies. De Gaulle died. In the past few weeks the French have turned to us. The reason is perfectly clear and equally simple. The Germans have made some sort of rapprochement to Russia. The French are frightened.
I do not wish to be dominated by any foreign nation, least of all France. If the French had never existed, all I should have missed would he their paintings, their wine and Marcel Proust.
The other members of the EEC are said to want us in as a counterweight to France. When did we last dominate anybody? Ever since the war, thanks to the stranglehold exerted on all potent means of mass communication by people of whom Miss Marghanita Laski is one of the most objectionably aggressive prototypes, we have done nothing but cover our heads with sackcloth and ashes, beat our breasts and cry, three times a day in sob-laden voices, " We are all guilty" — of everything, needless to say. Is this the country that is going to stand up to France? Anguilla, perhaps; France, no.
There is one other thing. Mr Heath's obsession with this project has now reached the point where it is almost indistinguishable from mania. He is not a man in whom I repose my unreserved trust. The impression he gives from here, which is a long way from the inner circles and their incestuous swapping and acceptance of each other's ideas, is of a man of great energies and abilities in organization, of great tenacity of purpose and of a self-conceit which seems to grow
almost daily and always alarmingly. I see no signs of exceptional intelligence. His sole achievement up to the winning of the general election was the abolition of retail price maintenance. We are beginning to reap the fruits of that disastrous measure. The small trader has been almost completely eliminated and in months rather than years we shall be in the hands of the supermarkets with their detestable little do-it-yourself wire baskets and their pseudo ' bargains.' They will then be able to sell us any muck they choose at any price they name. And we shall have no choice.
Therefore, if there is a referendum (and there ought to be, because to call one referendum in five hundred years 'government by referendum' is preposterous) I shall vote against joining. If there is an election with the Tories pro and Labour con, much as I detest him, I shall vote for Mr Wilson.
Mr Powell, whom I have approached on this matter, is putting his faith in the collective power of even a minority of anti-Marketeers to defeat our entry and I can only pray to God that his faith may be justified. For I can see no other quarter from which help may come. Stephen Bagnall 67 Fog Lane, Manchester Sir: The recent spectacle on television of Jeremy Thorpe urging Britain to walk into the EEC central parlour of the central bankers roust have terrified those relics of Liberalism who, like myself, remember one of the important things that Liberalism was supposed to be about — namely, that human beings should be freed to the point where they could behave as human beings; not just as taxpayers and, thereby, security for moneylenders.
One thing is clear in Ireland now that Jeremy Thorpe has emerged from the British television box as the death's-head of British Liberalism. We need no longer look for an intelligible political pattern beyond the Irish Sea. As I wrote some months back in an article in the Irish Times: "No use looking across the Irish Sea to where Harold Wilson and Edward Heath clobber one another like exasperated competitors in a sack race, their lower limbs swathed in identical winding-sheets of taxation."
To which, elaborating the same passage, I now add to the last page of an unpublished volume of historical sketches: "The turncocks of Threadneedle Street have extinguished the fountains of Westminster, and the political opera bouffe in Britain leaves us, now that Jeremy Thorpe, emerging as a skeleton from the Liberal graveyard, has torn down the last signpost, facing backwards to the point made by Shelley when, in 1812, he remarked of our former Parliament House just turned into a bank, "They have turned the fane of Liberty into a temple of Mammon!"
After that the Liberal road got lost in the smoke-clouds of industrial Britain, and Jeremy Thorpe now finally cuts the throat of the British Liberal party. To believe, as judging by his television appearance he apparently does, that problems are solved by enlarging them, must surely be the most un-Liberal credo unchained since Lloyd George unchained the Black and Tans as prophylactic for British political imperialism. Denis Ireland 17 Wellington Park Terrace, Belfast 9
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