Uniting Europe
ALAN, RAY
Euro Vista Uniting Europe BY RAY ALAN Scotland, Wales, Catalonia, the Basque country, Brittany and other distinctive regions of Western Europe are groping toward autonomy. Simultaneously,...
...For sound democratic reasons, many Europeans?particularly those living in areas that have suffered economic neglect or cultural discrimination—feel a need for smaller political units...
...We do not wish to become imitation Englishmen...
...The immigrants' unemployment rate is twice the national average...
...About eight years ago, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callaghan was tossing Britain's monetary reserves down the drain in the hope of averting a devaluation of the pound that every competent observer knew was inevitable and desirable...
...and they consider themselves virtually unrepresented in Parliament...
...According to the datestamp label, no fewer than 23 splendid citizens had borrowed my book, and some had left pencilmarks and tobacco ash on its pages as if to prove that they had at least opened it...
...Simultaneously, Western Europe is moving slowly toward greater unity and integration: European-Community passports and direct elections to a Community parliament in 1978...
...The Liberals fielded the magnificent total of one...
...The EEC might already be equipping itself with federal institutions had not France, as a consequence of the Algerian war, fallen under Charles de Gaulle with his 19th-century nationalism, his hostility to the European Movement and his claptrap about "I'Europe de Patries" (the Europe of Fatherlands...
...During the last few years Islam and Buddhism, in particular, have won converts from all churches in England, and the building of mosques has been one of the country's few growth sectors...
...Even before it was broadened and invigorated by American writers, English literature was already one of the richest in the world...
...Politics is probably the only business in which a resounding and expensive failure is no hindrance to promotion...
...Library-users, other than old folk and children, could certainly afford to pay a penny or two every time they borrow a book, but librarians (who seem not to have heard about the goose that laid golden eggs) object that this would increase their workload unbearably...
...During the last few years London has sought to lessen the devolutionists' appeal by channeling investment to Scotland and Wales...
...So people in Yorkshire, Lancashire and Durham arc saying: "Let's make a fuss like the Jocks...
...So bookstores are becoming rare and authors are an endangered species...
...A free-bread principle would be pretty enlightened, too, but I've yet to hear of politicians preaching it to farmers and bakers...
...To its credit, Labor is considering a scheme whereby additional royalties might be paid to authors from a government fund, according to the number of times their books are borrowed from a small cross-section of libraries...
...Andre Gide described it as "the literature whose disappearance would most impoverish mankind...
...The citizens of the future United States of Western Europe will shake their heads over our stupidity in putting up with them for so long...
...This is a misleading statement, since some white MPs make an effort to represent their "colored" constituents...
...But they are good at arithmetic and know that if each country in the UK acquires its own parliament the English House is likely to have a Tory majority: It is Scotland and Wales that defeat them...
...An Indian lawyer says: "English Liberals do not understand that very many immigrants do not want assimilation...
...Significantly, there is no adjective to describe UK citizenship...
...Helped, too, by expenditure on the North Sea oil installations, Scotland is now more prosperous than Northern England...
...Conservatism, fear of innovation, vested interests, and the skill of politicians adept at manipulating chauvinism will, no doubt, keep our old Patries and Vaterlander alive a few more decades...
...Many Bretons, Cor-sicans and Languedociens have a similar attitude to Paris...
...The English are voracious readers...
...Home rule for what one English friend of mine calls "the snivelling Celts" may stimulate a movement for a measure of automony for the neglected North of England...
...We now seem to be moving toward a federal Europe of Peoples in whose institutions the Scots, the Bretons and the rest will be represented directly, not by officials nominated in London and Paris...
...Nevertheless, it remains true that there is not one black, brown or yellow face in Parliament, and that at the last election (in 1974) neither Laborites nor Conservatives sponsored a single colored candidate...
...Many Catalans, Basques and Gali-cians describe themselves as "subjects" rather than consenting citizens of the present centralized regime in Spain...
...The government, worried that the recession may exacerbate racial tensions in areas of high unemployment, is setting up a Race-Relations Commission...
...Fewer significant books will be completed if writers can no longer afford the time to produce anything more substantial than articles and TV scripts...
...The Conservatives are, in principle, opposed to any weakening of central institutions...
...s.o.s...
...Another dozen or so people would have to borrow the book before the library bought another copy and, entitled me to another five cents...
...There is nothing paradoxical or illogical about this centrifugal-centripetal ballet, though it seems to have bewildered some American commentators...
...Powellites are currently complaining that the Asian immigrants' religions are competing "alarmingly" with Christianity...
...Dividing a Kingdom Although the English are not exactly happy that the ungrateful Scots no longer want to be governed from London, they are not wearing sackcloth and ashes...
...closer monetary ties, all being well, by the early 1980s...
...With trembling hands, I opened it to see if I had any readers...
...It will not disappear merely because the English Establishment gives it a lower priority than subsidizing unsalable aircraft and automobiles, yet it seems bound to suffer...
...because most colored people in England are relatively recent immigrants from countries with quite alien cultural and religious traditions...
...Traditional entities like Spain, France and the misnamed United Kingdom are neither one thing nor the other...
...Whitehall only notices you when you kick it...
...The 3 million Welsh have 36 seats in Parliament," a London Indian spokesman said recently, "but we immigrants, more than 2 million of us, have not one...
...The anti-immigrant Conservative Member of Parliament Enoch Powell tried- recently to revive ,his faded political fortunes by alleging that hordes of Asians and West Indians are continuing to sneak into the country...
...free-library principle—to most non-writers, a highly enlightened one?though one wonders why writers must be enlightenment's proletariat...
...I was restrained from celebrating by the knowledge that my total fee for this public service was a royalty payment of about five cents...
...For sound economic and geopolitical reasons, a big community is desirable —hence the EEC...
...Now, of course, he is Prime Minister...
...they live in the worst slums...
...Decentralization can hardly come without constitutional changes: It may even provide an opportunity for decarbonizing the inefficient, time-wasting parliamentary machine...
...and to upper-class Englishmen the use of the word "British,' except by foreigners, is revealingly "non-U...
...They produced some poetry and pageantry, but they murdered too many millions for anyone with any feeling to mourn them...
...Unfortunately, they borrow more than 90 per cent of the books they read from free public libraries (inflation is increasing the percentage every year...
...Receiving only one royalty payment for (on average) 36 hardback readers, most English authors now earn less than totally unskilled workers...
...Visiting an English public library, I suddenly found myself face to face with one of my own books...
...We are anxious to preserve our own culture and religion...
...The problem is more complicated than in the U.S...
...This would be better than nothing, although administrative costs would be high and the average author would receive only a pittance—less than $50 a year...
...In the end, he devalued and was hurriedly transferred to the Home Office where, it was felt, he could do less damage than at the Treasury...
...Scotsmen, Welshmen, Yorkshire-men, East Anglians, Cockneys and the rest do not think of themselves as "UK citizens" unless they arc filling in a passport application...
...Politicians, meanwhile, are scared of tampering with the...
...Some leaders of England's big colored community are also talking like that...
...As the Economist says breezily, "Devolution offers a welcome chance to break the suffocating hold of London and its Oxbridge Establishment on the rest of the country...
...Some of their spokesmen complain that English Laborites and Liberals, although well-meaning, are cloyingly paternalistic and assimilationast...
...they are the first fired and the last rehired...
...The only sizeable West European country that has avoided regional hassles in recent years is Germany, a decentralized federally-constituted state...
...but writers have fewer votes than, say, the men who make Concordes, and are easily overlooked...
...P.S...
...Politicians occasionally promise to think about the problem...
Vol. 59 • April 1976 • No. 9
