"Brawl, Britannia"
ALAN, RAY
Euro vista BY RAY ALAN Brawl, Britannia The conversation turned to urban insecurity, and I mentioned a mildly alarming experience I once had in Cairo. My friend M, a Spanish Socialist congressman...
...English women currently top the West European league for neuroses and personality problems attributable to social and environmental factors...
...Although the class system hasn't broken down, there is less respect for it and for the restraints that back it...
...My friend M, a Spanish Socialist congressman who has a sentimental attachment to Egypt, said:" Cairo is a less dangerous city than London...
...Trade-union pioneers had to fight for their rights...
...If she really knew Wilson was an "enemy agent" in 1940, when the United Kingdom was at war, why did she not speak out then...
...There is a tradition of violence in our society...
...and one evening, while walking in a London park, he strayed into some kind of " drunken orgy" and had to flee to escape assault...
...The computerization of vehicle ownership and licensing records by the Home Office and police is a how-not-to-do-it case study in management schools...
...It is seething with minorities urging sedition...
...More strikingly than in Disraeli's day, Britain today houses not a single nation but several...
...During the next few days I read stories in the British press of clashes between miners and police, and of the depredations of bands of urban marauders in some parts of rural England...
...About one third of British electronics graduates emigrate to America and the Continent...
...A Scottish police officer told me: "One reason young people are turning sour is that they've heard so many lies, from parents and politicians alike...
...Some French villagers had saved the husband's life during the War, and he spared no effort to make my stay pleasant...
...The French CRS [public-security police] haven't had a serious riot to deal with since the Maoist student troubles of 1968...
...Even the London Daily Mail, which tends to pander to lower-middle-class chauvinism, has just published an item about gangs of British tourists on the Costa Brava who attack passers-by, "are drunk day and night, and complain that there are too many foreigners in Spain...
...Well, the North Sea money is being frittered away while vast stretches of Britain become economically and morally derelict...
...Some have political motives...
...An official study estimates that more than 1.5 million British children aged 11-16 have part-time jobs, four fifths of them in illegal conditions and earning less than $1.20 an hour...
...Pub brawls, soccer riots, mod-and-rocker battles, skinhead rampages and vandalism have to be studied against this background...
...But their house was in one of those grim districts with hundreds of identical houses, and I suppose the monotony and gloom oppress young people...
...To complete the catalog, a football enthusiast raised the subject of British soccer riots...
...He told us that in London's West End he had been threatened by weirdly dressed rough necks...
...Americans might be forgiven for wondering whether Britain's Security Donnybrook is the Establishment equivalent of the hell-raising lower down the social pyramid...
...An economic writer said: "There's this terrible feeling of frustration, sometimes desperation...
...The Ibiza police have asked Madrid for help in dealing with these "hordes of English savages...
...I suspect Little's charge against Wilson owes much to Right-wing and anti-Jewish spite (Wilson was friendly to Israel, and Little, an anti-Semite, deplores SIS cooperation with Israel's Mossad...
...Similar reports come from Benidorm and the Costa del Sol, where most of the tourists arrested for vandalism—and drug-smuggling—are British...
...3) the rich young Communist Elie(acryptonym), who recruited superspy Kim Philby for the Russians, later joined the British Security Service (MI5) and went on to become an adviser to Wilson and to Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath...
...It was the British—dirty, destructive and indecent—who behaved as if they had just emerged from the Amazonian sel-va...
...He added: "Not all are hooligans...
...And for most of the past century we've been involved in military violence —in Ireland, India, Africa, two world wars, and the postwar colonial struggles...
...It's not so well known as the younger American tradition, partly because the British film industry has never been vigorous or frank enough to tackle the subject and only a few good novelists have explored the underdog's Britain...
...A young French doctor said: "I spent a month in London to improve my English...
...Then someone who had lived in England in 1981-82 recalled the riots and looting he had seen, and the battles between hooligans and police...
...I stayed with a charming middle-aged couple...
...Only 12-15 years ago, British civil servants and politicians used to laugh at the Americans, French and Germans for their obsession with higher education and management courses...
...Wright is one of a group of former members of the SIS and MI5 who are lobbying, through friends in the media, for a serious investigation of security scandals hitherto stifled by Whitehall to avoid political embarrassment...
...and (5) there is still widespread pro-Soviet influence in the SIS...
...even computerization of the country's tax system is 10 years overdue...
...I say 'he' but a lot of women feel desperate, too...
...A quarter of the population is living below the poverty line...
...Not all of this was new...
...And some people in the Labor movement believe that everything will be transformed if they can bring the government down...
...Young fellows with nothing to lose are less obsequious than their fathers were...
...D'ye remember all that guff about the affluent society and how rich we would all be thanks to North Sea oil...
...An English nurse said she and her colleagues had to travel by taxi to and from their London hospital because the streets around it were unsafe...
...Soccer hooliganism has in recent years been exported to the Continent when United Kingdom teams have played in international competitions, with British fans devastating stadium equipment, cafes and shop windows...
...We're near the bottom of the EEC's gross national product tables...
...Its truculent minorities do, however, reveal a lot about the society that has spawned them...
...Now the laugh is on us...
...2) a member of the British Security Commission is a senior Soviet agent...
...Kitty Little, has just written herself into the script...
...An English duke summed up: "The country is tearing itself apart in the most inept social wrangling since the fall of Rome...
...The reverse is true...
...While the French have become cool about politics in the last 20 years, British politics has become radicalized...
...He continued: "The average young adult has little understanding of what's gone wrong, but he feels let down...
...Fortunately, one can't judge a people by its rowdies—and anyway, what is a people...
...some were injured, others had their uniforms "drenched in spittle...
...A sociologist agreed...
...A middle-ranking police officer in southern England expressed a simple traditional opinion: "There are violent elements in British society that only understand one language—force...
...Security Saga With Koo Married off, Andy resting, and Liz and Charles admirably steadfast, the Palace Dallas has lost its sizzle...
...So there are a lot of strains in the system...
...Some of them were skinheads and motorcycle louts, and they used to hunt foreign students and threaten to beat us up unless we gave them money...
...This revolution is based not on coal but on education, a commodity the present government has doubts about...
...A Spanish couple spoke of drunken British tourists in Ibiza who take over whole streets at night—playing loud rock music, fighting and copulating in public to the cheers of their companions...
...A new character, disarm-ingly named Dr...
...An English police officer had told the press that to keep order at a league game in his town 450-500 policemen were needed...
...Here's the UK, once a major industrial power, deindustrial-izing and—as a result of upper-class incompetence and lower-class apathy— resigned to being a camp follower in the hi-tech revolution...
...Associated with the Conservative Monday Club, and once connected with nuclear research and a security organization, she has alleged, in a privately circulated report, that (1) former Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson is a Soviet agent (she says he told her this in his room in Oxford in 1940...
...Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has been obliged to apologize to half a dozen European governments for her compatriots' vandalism...
...even suffragette demonstrators were beaten by the police and male bystanders...
...People who don't know France think politics is more agitated there...
...The Brazilians were clean, gay and sim-paticos, and sang and danced amiably while waiting for matches to begin...
...I began pouncing on inoffensive British citizens myself in search of an explanation of the "aggro" everyone was talking about...
...He asserts that out of about 200 Soviet spies implanted in the British secret services, only a dozen or so have been uncovered...
...but the Security Saga is still high in the ratings...
...and there are irresponsible and degenerate elements at a high level in the Establishment...
...4) the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) continued to use a blacklist compiled by Philby long after he was exposed and allowed to go off to Moscow...
...they now devote most of their time to road patrols and beach and mountain rescue work...
...Buttoning up my jacket to hide my UK passport, I had to admit that of the football fans I had seen during the World Cup series in Spain the Brazilians were the most civilized and the Brits the least...
...Having slashed university education, the government has suddenly discovered that we urgently need 5,000 more graduates in hi-tech subjects...
...A community usually gets the delinquents it deserves...
...The names of the alleged Soviet agents in (2) and (3), both titled men, were already known in security circles in London...
...The school systems of every country in the European Community except Greece produce a higher percentage of university entrants than Britain's (those of France and Germany nearly twice as many...
...For televiewers who have seen us battling in English towns and mining areas and Ireland, it's the British police who have the violent image...
...Little also alleges that an ex-MI5 man named Peter Wright, now living in Australia, was a Soviet spy...
Vol. 67 • November 1984 • No. 21
