AND ANOTHER THING
Maastricht: could Orwell be proved right after all?
PAUL JOHNSON
What the row over the Maastricht Treaty has brought to the surface is the salient fact that Britain's real enemy is not Germany but France. Not, of course, ordi- nary French people: workmen, farmers, commercants, small shopkeepers and the like. They are all well disposed towards us and always have been. By 'France' I mean the tightly organised circle of people, per- haps 20,000 in all — the ministers and political sergeant-majors, the senior bureaucrats and state managers, all from the grandes ecoles, where hatred of Britain and the individual freedom it stands for is a religion. These men (and a few women) constitute /e pouvoir the oppressive, ubiq- uitous, arrogant machine which, whatever the regime, controls that pseudo-democra- cy. They hate the British, and our freedom- loving ways, because they consider us, and our -example, as an insidious threat to their grip on the French masses.
Of course the Kohl regime in Bonn is our enemy also, and a pretty dedicated one too, if you examine the way it undermined ster- ling during the recent ERM crisis. France is now, in one sense, Bonn's puppet, since the Bundesbank controls the French currency. But the German ruling establishment does not consider Britain a threat in the way France's does. The interests of Bonn, soon to transfer itself to Berlin, lie eastwards. It wants to dominate east-central Europe and much of the Balkans. It is quite content to allow France the job of emasculating and impoverishing Britain, through the French- controlled Brussels system, and through its dark archangel, Jacques Delors, our most determined enemy since the late Pierre Laval (executed for treason after the War).
And France, thanks to its Euro-fanatic Fifth Column in London, is making a good job of it. It is the Brussels system, and the way it is differentially applied, which is mainly responsible for the progressive dete- rioration in our balance of payments, lead- ing to the weakness of sterling, high inter- estrates, and the massacre of British businesses which have been the hallmarks of rule by John Major and his cronies. Many Brussels regulations have a devastat- ing effect on British interests, and are designed to do so, because Brussels knows that the British authorities, believing in the rule of law, apply them, whereas the coun- tries behind the Brussels system, chiefly France, do not. As one French farmer put it, not unkindly, `les regles son: pour les anglais, pas pour les francais.' One Mon- sieur Henri Duval, who describes himself as an Anglophile, wrote in Tuesday's Daily Telegraph that he is 'saddened' that '[Britain] alone of the members of the EEC abides by these ridiculous edicts [from Brussels]. In France we have always ignored those directives of which we have disapproved and implemented only those we have considered to our advantage. It is the French way.'
You bet it is! But it is not the way le pou- voir in France and its Brussels appendage will allow Britain. Jacques Delors has no doubt in his own mind that his role as Pres- ident of the EEC Commission is to serve French interests. Indeed, he said so openly during the recent referendum campaign in France, in a moment of candid panic when he thought the vote would go against him. Yet he had the impudence, so typical of French Anglophobes, to tell Major, when he became President of the Council of Ministers, 'Your role is to be objective and represent all the EEC countries.' Jacques Delors and his minions, while protecting French interests threatened by EEC rules, take good care to insist that the British obey them on any matters the Eurocrats consider important. It is also worth point-
'I've worked at Sellafield all my life and it's never done me any half a pound of tuppeny rice. .
ing out that France's ally, Germany, sends spies to Britain to examine and inform on any breaches of regulations — for instance by the Highlands venison industry.
Even more important, from our point of view, is the threat of the international trade war which the French (and Brussels) estab- lishment wish to bring about. France has always been a protectionist country, just as Britain is a free-trading one, and the aim of France, both under the single market and Maastricht, is to create a Fortress Europe. By this is meant an internal free-trading area, manipulated in accordance with French aims, surrounded by a huge exter- nal tariff wall, designed to keep out cheap manufactures of all kinds, and reinforced by an agricultural support system designed to exclude cheap food. It is impossible to conceive of a design more opposed to the practical interests of the mass of ordinary French men and women, but that is the aim of le pouvoir.
Despite the efforts of Britain — conduct- ed mainly, of course, by our feeble and demoralised Foreign Office, which eyes the quai d'Orsay and the Elysee with the paral- ysed terror of a rabbit confronted by a snake — there is a strong chance that the French will wreck the Gatt talks and get their Fortress Europe. In that case, espe- cially under a Clinton Presidency, we shall have the North American Free Trade Zone transformed into a Fortress North Ameri- ca. That means, in due course, a Fortress Far East, led by Japan, which will find its manufacturers excluded from both Euro- pean and North American markets. Thus the world will be divided into three aggres- sively competitive, protectionist and antag- onistic trading zones — rather like the three horrific intnerational conglomerates described in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four. Such a division means trade wars, conduct- ed on an enormous, global scale; and histo- ry reminds us that trade wars have a fright- ening tendency to develop into fighting wars. That is indeed a grim prospect, and Maastricht, in whatever form it is finally approved, will bring it much nearer. It is a strange thought that Orwell's grim proph- ecy, which events seemed to have dis- proved, might actually come to pass in an unforeseen way, thanks to narrow-minded bigots like Delors, and the wretched men in high places here who play his sinister game. Wemust not let these things happen, even if it means taking to the streets.
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