A tale of two cities Richard West R eturning to London
from Paris is always a dismal experience. This week, with the transport strike, I found that I had to agree with the sentiment of a friend from New Zealand I met waiting (in vain) at a bus queue, that England is now 'an arsehole country'. It seems to get worse and worse while countries like France remain the same, or even improve. The underground trains are just one example of this dif- ference. In Paris now, one can travel for 3.5F or 30p to any station on any one of the lines that serve every part of the city with regular, fast clean trains. The fares are very much cheaper with season tickets or books of tickets. French railway services are get- ting cheaper all the time; also faster, cleaner and more efficient.
When I walk these days from Holland Park to the Holborn premises of the Spec- tator, I am frequently stopped by foreign tourists who start by asking where one can get a bus or a taxi and usually end up by asking why are the tubes on strike. Only foreigners ask that question. The English have long since stopped asking about the reason for strikes which now are regarded as acts of God. In fact they are acts of the trade unions which in this country enjoy a power unheard of on the continent. In France the unions have no power except as instruments of the political parties. The largest union, the Confederation Generale de Travail (or CGT), is an instrument of the Communist Party. The present French Transport Minister, the excellent M Charles Fiterman, is a Communist. It is his belief that cheap and efficient public transport, if needs be at the expense of the motorists, is good for France and especially good for those who cannot afford a motor car. He also believes that railways are less destruc- tive of Nature, or what is now called the en- vironment, than roads.
According to an article in the Guardian, rail travel has had an increase in France over the last 20 years, from 32 billion to 55 billion passengers per kilometre, while over the same time British Rail has declined from 35 to 28 billion passengers per kilometre. The decline in rail travel in Britain has meant an enormous increase in motor travel, with the resulting desolation of motorways, ring roads, by-passes, clover- leafs and spaghetti junctions. The present Conservative government has announced plans to squander still more billions of public money to build a by-pass round every town or even village in Britain not yet defiled by this concrete and tarmac horror. The giant construction companies, the peo- ple who seem to run this country, will grow even richer and even more powerful.
We are left with the paradox that reputed socialists in the railway trade unions are wrecking the system of public transport in order to give more money to the construc- tion and automobile industries, whose in- terests are represented politically by the Tories. The Parliamentary Labour Party, or some of its members, may understand that it does not make sense to help the Tories and big business to wreck our public transport system. There is nothing they can do about it. The leadership of the Labour Party was long since taken away from the Parliamentary group by unscrupulous blackmailers and Mafiosi within the trade unions. The trade unions were helped by Michael Foot and his closed shop Act by which the Parliamentary Labour Party sur- rendered still more of its own power. In France, the Socialists and the Communists exercise power through Parliament, just as the Gaullists and other conservatives did.
In Britain, above all in London, one sees that big business, not Conservative politi- cians, has run things for most of the last 30 years. Walking to work because of the rail strike, one sees how everything has got even worse since 1961, when Lewis Mumford wrote in a sombre and all too prophetic ar- ticle: 'Today that unique city is in danger of turning into a mass of undistinguished, if not uniform, high buildings, encircled and penetrated by ever wider lanes of motor traffic, where a constant surge of motor cars and lorries will wipe out the last traces of those human qualities that have been protected by the very intricacy or deviousness of London's old web of streets, alleys, mews and cul-de-sacs.' Of high-rise buildings, Mumford wrote: 'Even when `Our only hope of being rescued is to be in- vaded by the Argentines.' standing alone, such overbearing buildings should not be permitted to violate certain districts of London that are historically uni- que — areas like the great political and religious complex of which the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey are the focus. Here the erection of London's tallest skyscraper, the thirty-four storey Vickers tower, on the Embankment west of the Houses of Parliament, dwarfs the fine towers of Barry's and Pugin's great building, as if to proclaim that finance, not politics, controls the destinies of the Com- monwealth.'
In central Paris, one hideous skyscraper, in Montparnasse, stands out as an eye-sore just because it is almost unique. There are too many tower blocks out in the suburbs: you see them coming by train from the north. Yet Paris has by and large rejected the evil designs of Le Corbusier, who found disciples instead in Britain and the United States. People still live in most of the cen- tral arrondissements. Where I was staying on this visit, near the Trinite Church and the Opera, some of the locals complained that things were quiet at night: they blamed the politicians for having driven away the residents. But even this area seemed to be bustling when compared to most of central London.
The streets of Paris are cleaner, gayer, above all safer than those of London. At Notting Hill Gate the other morning I saw a middle-aged man attacked by a young West Indian, so nonchalant that he did not even take his cheroot from his mouth. When a couple of motorists intervened, the young assailant strolled away, still puffing at his cheroot. To attempt an arrest would pro- bably have been condemned as harassment.
France suffers much less than England from modern humbug, the type for which we can use the shorthand term of `Guardian Woman's Page'. It is true that Elisabeth Badinter, wife of the Socialist Justice Minister, has recently published a book called The Myth of Motherhood but all it shows is that through the ages some clever but selfish women have neglected their children in order to do things like writing books on the myth of the maternal instinct. But Madame Badinter is abnormal in Paris. The reason for this is linguistic. Most of the modish drivel on feminism, psychiatry and sociology comes from New York and is published in English. All of it is therefore available to the British reader. Translating it into French takes time, money and effort, so most of it goes un- published. The French are therefore slow with the latest fads, of which the two cur- rent favourites are, I think, Sexual Harass- ment of Women at Work, and Women's Assertiveness. At any rate I have read in the paper this week that Camden Council has ordered a two-day course for more than 100 senior officials on `women's assertiveness'. The lecturers are described as: 'Ronnie Frit- chie, an independent consultant and formerly Women's Officer with the Food, Drink and Tobacco Industry Training
Board; Nickie Fonda, a Brunel University lecturer "presently retained to run women's assertiveness training sessions as part of the Equal Opportunities Training Programme" and Kirsty Ross, formerly director of the Equal Opportunities Commission'.
I cannot see the Parisians taking lessons in 'women's assertiveness'. Indeed one of the great and abiding joys of Paris remains the beauty and sexuality of the women. No city in the world better illustrates the divide between femininity and feminism. Or in- deed, between gaiety and the 'gay move- ment'. The only real blemish on Paris, though here it is still not as bad as London, would seem to be education. After the strange and very un-French 'evenements' of • 1968, the schools and universities became infected with laxity, sociology and even `structuralism'. The lycees no longer pro- vide a good education and many parents are sending their children to private schools. The Communists in the present government
(they have infiltrated the educational system) propose to abolish private schools, causing great embarrassment to their Socialist partners, half of whom now send their children to such establishments. So Paris is not quite free of the French equivalent of Shirley Williams. Apart from that, it looks as though we must emigrate.
PS: On my walk to deliver this article, I encountered yet more things I dislike about London. For instance, Iranian students. In an article on these pests from the Philip- pines, I wrote how back in London one often sees scrawled slogans like 'Death to the bloody hangman Shah', sometimes with `Shah' crossed out and 'Khomeini' substituted. Today, in the dirty, folk- singer-infested underground walkway at Marble Arch, I saw the slogan FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS IN IRAN, to which
there had been an amendment. The final `N' of Iran had been crossed out and 'Q' had been substituted.
Previous page
