Death of an Anglophile
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
ATRAVELER'S NOTEBOOK Death of an Anglophile ^?^hmAN April in New York City, I hear, was wet, chilly and afflicted by both a transit strike and Mayor Koch's relentlessly cheerful response to it....
...One evening I watched a series of cabs approach a waiting line of customers at Charing Cross Station, then flee without stopping when the drivers saw that a well-dressed black was first in the line...
...British MP's are a disciplined lot who, save in extreme circumstances, hold their noses and vote as they are ordered...
...He turned out to be a Nigerian dentist, eager to rid himself of London and go to Edinburgh...
...Even the passage of two and a half years since my last English visit and the continued decline of municipal services in the Big Apple did not adequately prepare me for similar changes in London...
...Thatcher's land is a mean-spirited place, rather more racist and sexist than these United States...
...During election years, candidates take short views...
...The Prime Minister seems to have tapped a deep vein of masochism in the English psyche...
...Mrs...
...Racial tension is acute...
...The London police probably continue to be less brutal and more honest than New York's Finest, but a disquieting number of prisoners are somehow dying in police custody, more of the police are armed, and an ongoing investigation of police corruption has aroused suspicions that the force is coasting on past reputation rather than current behavior...
...Faithful to the Gaullist tradition of intransigence on all fronts, she will presumably persevere in her domestic policies as well, on the calculation that at some point unions will realize that big wage increases lead inexorably to huge layoffs...
...As for the ruling Tories, Margaret Thatcher has been reaping the benefits of her good sense in appointing Lord Carrington as her Foreign Secretary...
...For the tourist, London has always seemed a safe city...
...Of the last gang the Observer skeptically commented, "Some claim to be nonviolent and less greasy than others...
...Not all the women in the play were heroines and none of the men were villains...
...in protest against increasingly frequent gang rumbles...
...In quite sufficient trouble over foreign policy in general and Iran in particular, Carter can do no more than desperately hope that recession will be gentle and inflation will subside quickly enough to soothe the voters in November...
...By New York standards, tickets were cheap and fairly easy to obtain...
...I am not certain, in fact, what a militant of the women's movement in the United States would think of Rose...
...The young have no monopoly on violence...
...Thatcher leads a minority of the faithful...
...At the moment England, like the U.S., is sliding into a recession of unpredictable (though frequently predicted) duration and severity, quite deliberately precipitated by budgetary and monetary actions perceived as essential to the taming of a 20 per cent inflation...
...Thatcher's mood is exuberant...
...Within her own party, Mrs...
...Otherwise the differences are more striking than the resemblances...
...Thatcher leads the drys, true-blue monetarists...
...Just beginning the second year of a possible five-year term, she can count on the support of a solid 43-seat majority in the House of Commons for cuts in social services, tax relief for the wealthy, higher levies upon average citizens, and other unpopular measures...
...This set off an orgy of patriotic self-congratulation and complacent comparison with the Carter Administration's bungled rescue effort in Teheran...
...Rude Boys," who affect trilbies and pork pie hats...
...Skinheads," unpleasantly identifiable by "convict-style hair...
...fiasco...
...The experts and the technicians may have their niggling doubts, but Mrs...
...One of her trusted advisers, Industry Minister Sir Keith Joseph, openly admires Milton Friedman...
...To say this is not to imply a sudden surge of chauvinism...
...Even now a semi-public dispute between "drys" and "wets" amuses onlookers...
...The heroine of Rose is a primary school teacher, mildly women's liberationist of spirit...
...Pubs were dirtier and more crowded than ever, and their patrons far ruder...
...Mrs...
...As London's Financial Times correctly wrote, Mrs...
...Thatcher occupies approximately the same location on the far Right of her Tories as Ronald Reagan does in the Republican spectrum...
...As a radical of the Right, the Prime Minister is grimly determined to contract the public sector, sell off nationalized properties, revive entrepreneurial elan, and, above all, cure inflation, whatever the costs in unemployment and business bankruptcy...
...The Observer, which shares the country's serious sabbath readers with the Sunday Times, identified no fewer than seven groups: "Mods," who dress smartly, ride scooters and "often have parents' approval...
...The Carter Administration is painfully split between moderate Keynesians like the Council of Economic Advisers' Chairman Charles L. Schultze and temperate monetarists like Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker...
...Quite in the American manner, sales clerks ignore or snap at the customers, newsstand proprietors grunt at requests for directions or deliberately misguide the innocent, and natives as frequently as visitors jump ticket and bus lines...
...I shall long pleasantly remember a matinee performance of Lucrezia Borgia where Joan Sutherland, in splendid voice, aroused a youthful prom audience to volleys of flowers, wild displays of approving banners ("Joan, We Love You," "La Stupenda" and so on), and cheers prolonged to the time of pub opening...
...The city's public appearance, of course, was never to be confused with that of Zurich...
...Whatever Teddy Kennedy says, Carter and most of his official family are centrists, steeped in the Democratic tradition of antirecessionary intervention by the Feds...
...The gangs themselves have become bolder and more numerous...
...The National Front, Britain's neo-Nazis, last year staged a march in Lewisham, a working-class neighborhood, that degenerated into a violent clash with supposed anti-Nazis...
...All that need be done is grit the national teeth and persist in a policy of slow growth in the money supply...
...It is reasonable to assume that if April and May's ominous jumps in unemployment are followed by similar leaps in the next month or two, the Carter Administration will once again change its course...
...New York taxi drivers frequently refuse to stop for blacks, but seldom blatantly in front of an audience...
...and "bikers," expensively equipped with motorcycles and fringed leather jackets...
...Police forces are almost lily white...
...A deep enough depression might well erode party discipline enough to destroy her parliamentary majority...
...The wets are more compassionate, or, according to the Prime Minister, more faint-hearted types who fret over the social strains of recession and nostalgically recall a tradition of solicitude for the poor and unemployed associated with the dead Benjamin Disraeli and the still vibrant Harold Mac-millan...
...See, "Coping with the Politics of Extremism," NL, April 7.) When the National Front repeated its march in Lewisham this year, the police mobilized enough manpower to keep matters comparatively calm...
...The gamble is risky because no one can know how much unemployment must rise before the unions are tamed...
...An acquaintance was mugged in broad daylight as he approached the London School of Economics...
...As he delicately phrased his remarks in Parliament, external events (presumably opec policy) and internal institutional arrangements (notably union bargaining strategy and corporate pricing policy) rendered it impossible to designate a time certain when monetary discipline will surely usher in an era of stable prices, high employment and vigorous economic growth...
...In opposition, the Labor Party is even more than usually split between its Left or Socialist minority led by the aging Tony Benn, and its moderate or Social Democratic majority presided over by Jim Callaghan, Labor's answer to Jimmy Carter...
...The delights surrounding squabbles over the rules governing the selection of parliamentary candidates and the relationships between annual party conferences (dominated by the Left) and Labor members of Parliament (consistently run by life...
...Even for an American who yields to few in his low opinion of this Administration's competence, it was hard to bear the condescension of British commentators in the wake of the U.S...
...Britain may be enjoying her echoes of imperial glory, but its economy is a horror story...
...and a subsequent confrontation in Southall, a West London district heavily populated by Asian immigrants, resulted in the fatal clubbing, possibly by police, of a New Zealand schoolteacher named Brian Peach, who was a member of the Anti-Nazi League...
...To continue my litany of complaint, British politics are no more enchanting than our own...
...I shall simply divide my disaffection more even-handedly in the future...
...English prices must be paid to be believed...
...A group of Cambridge economists recently published an econometric model which, on the assumption that present economic policies continue, projects twice as much unemployment in two or three years as in 1980...
...A politician not given to self-doubt, Mrs...
...Certainly Milton Friedman, whose TV series has been showing on the BBC, could ask for no better laboratory demonstration of the potency of his doctrines than England is now supplying...
...On three successive weekends, underground workers halted train service before 10 p.m...
...Nor is London the home of sexual equality...
...Overpraised thrillers like Death Trap and intermittently amusing farces like Michael Frayn's Make or Break were more numerous than plays of quality...
...She has even warmly embraced the new nickname of She-DeGaulle, in salute to her rejection of a Common Market offer at the end of April substantially to lighten English contributions to the Market's finances...
...But never before have I seen so much litter on the streets and sidewalks, or so many graffiti along the passages of the underground stations...
...Aided by Lord Soames, the aristocrat on the spot in Zimbabwe, Lord Carrington may have given the House of Lords a new lease on puffed and judged Rose's behavior an outrageous assault upon male dignity...
...working-class "punks," who are "out to shock...
...My ninth visit to England has cured me of a lingering case of Anglophilia, a disease notoriously resistant to treatment...
...With equal skill, he has publicly supported the American position on sanctions against Iran and arranged that they cause a minimum of damage to Great Britain's thriving trade with that country...
...So ends my list of good things...
...Thatcher has repeatedly shared her expectation that inflation will wind down within two years...
...Gone are the fabled courtesy and gentle public manners...
...In the spirit of Colonel Blimp, they huffed and moderates) have effectively sabotaged the Labor Party as an immediate alternative to the Conservatives...
...With each day's statistical tidings, these hopes lose credibility...
...These "sus" laws are, as one would anticipate, a source of acute strain between police and nonwhite minorities, the usual targets of police action...
...A few weeks in England damage other cherished views that things are better in the old country...
...Thatcher is a monetarist and a true believer in free enterprise...
...Thatcher shows every sign of holding fast, and even before the Kensington melodrama her poll popularity was rising...
...Some random examples: The daily Times of London costs 45 cents, 2.8 ounces of salted peanuts $1.15, a pint of warm, barely alcoholic bitter $1.10, and buses and subways at least twice the New York rates...
...Much as President Gerald Ford junked his WIN buttons during 1974-75's mini-depression, the White House probably will halt its drive toward a balanced budget (all but publicly conceded to be unattainable) and opt for tax cuts and public jobs...
...No longer...
...The reaction of prosperous British males during the intermissions was unmistakable...
...But the second in command at the Treasury, John Biffen, himself a monetarist, recently warned that no automatic link between inflation and the cost of living existed...
...That he works for the International Monetary Fund inadequately excuses his assailants...
...It is easy to feel the same ambience of impending violence as Americans have learned to expect in their cities...
...Undoubtedly the star of an otherwise blatantly undistinguished cabinet, he first talked her out of hastily endorsing Bishop Abel T. Muzorewa, an obvious loser, and then brought the Rhodesia-Zimbabwe negotiations to a triumphant conclusion...
...Under English practice, policemen can arrest persons suspected of intending to commit felonious acts...
...Still, Accidental Death of an Anarchist stylishly revived the agit-prop genre of early Clifford Odets and Marc Blitzstein, and Glenda Jackson was spectacular in Rose...
...My wife and 1 rescued him (no one else offered assistance) by stopping a cab and ushering him into it as our guest...
...teds," addicted to drainpipe trousers and rock 'n roll nonmusic...
...London, on the other hand, was warm, sunny and adorned by masses of tulips, daffodils, roses, and lesser blooms in Saint James Park, Kensington Gardens and such out-of-town showplaces as Hampton Court Palace...
...Thatcher had another stroke of good luck when Special Air Force Service commandos stylishly stormed the Iranian Embassy in Kensington to free the hostages being held there by terrorists...
...roots boys," who are West Indians eager to protect themselves corporatively from the police...
...As usual, there were quantities of good music and opera, though very little dance...
...I have the feeling I have said enough to explain my title...
...Mrs...
...The situation in England is politically and ideologically severely different...
Vol. 63 • June 1980 • No. 11
