by Kevin Carey

G21 Columnist Emeritus

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KEVIN CAREY says that in Britain the Accession of new Members of the European Union marks a new low in political morality.

Kevin Carey

SUSSEX, ENGLAND, UK - There are many more searingly graphic accounts in novels, films and even music of the physical and mental devastations of the Second World War but, for me at least, none is as poignant as Strauss's Four Last Songs; and so, as there were no Accession festivities for the ten new, largely formerly Communist, countries of the European Union, I put Soile Isokoske's brilliant new rendering on the player and tried to think myself into the composer's valedictory desperation.

That there were no festivities is due in part to our reaching a new low point in our political morality which, I am sorry to say to a largely United States readership, results from the coarsening that British society has undergone as a result of its uncritical acceptance of Margaret Thatcher's wholesale importation of American capitalism, transforming greed from a public vice to a public virtue and exalting meanness of spirit to the same level as the meanness of purse so admired by the wealthy. Perhaps this selfishness is not so corrosive in the relatively wide open spaces of the United States but in cramped, introspective Britain the density of nastiness is almost unbearable and for the first time in my life I am ashamed to be called British, even worse English. Whereas it was once brave to be insubordinate it is now brave to be decent. Morality is not so much quaint as ridiculous and generosity does not now so much surprise as bewilder. Were I a bright, young, brilliantly qualified Polish doctor I would live anywhere but here even if the salaries were ten times as high; but, of course, the irony here is deep for as the greediest country in the EU we are just about the poorest and within a decade our standard of living will be lower than that of many of the new entrants .

It would do us much moral and economic good to spend some time asking why. But our media, the most viciously shallow and xenopphobically narrow in any mature democracy, has pounded the population with forecasts of invasion by hordes of gypsies, unemployed scroungers and, strangest of icons for such hate, one-legged tilers. We are short of cheap migrant labour and because of our intellectual snobbery we are critically short of skilled workers and craftsmen but we refuse to attempt to make any distinction between our new, fellow European Union Members and that mixture of pathetic exiles and cynical cheats that constitute extra European immigration queues.

To understand how this has come about one needs a little history but there is such an ignorance of it that the significance of the Accession has largely passed without public comment. First, the domestic, political history. From his accession as Tory Prime Minister in 1990, John Major was at the centre of a bitter battle between the waxing tide of Euroscepticism and the waning tide of Europhilia. The policy he adopted to please both was the enlargement of the European Union. Europhiles could hardly argue against the extension of the advantages of the Union to other countries but Eurosceptics knew that any enlargement would, necessarily, dilute the power of France and a newly unified (to the tactless, publicly stated horror of Mrs Thatcher) Germany. It would also dilute British influence but that to them did not seem so critical.

As the 1990s wore on, however, Tories recognised that if they could engineer enlargement without any rule changes to the governance of the Union it would become so gridlocked that its effective governance would cease; there would never be unanimity in favour of starting or stopping anything and the horse trading would become so unscaleable that nobody could ever bring any round to a close. It would be like the late unlamented GATT sitting in permanent 7/24 negotiation.

This explains where we are now. We have enlargement from 15 to 25 EU members but the Tories will not support a single change in any of the Union's governance rules. In other words, they want us out.

This canno t explain, however, why the Labour Government has not staged nor encouraged the ignition of a single firework or barbecue. There are two reasons, one trivial, the other substantial. The trivial reason is that, in its early years, the Government was savaged over the Millennium celebrations and their iconic Dome; and so the calculation must be that that any probable pleasure which festivities might bring about would be far outweighed by the risk of something going wrong. The substantive reason is that in a manner very similar to President Clinton's Administration, the Blair Government is an exile in its own country, so imprisoned by the endemic greed and selfishness of the population that it is forced to do good by stealth, grudgingly indulged because of its relative competence which allows the poor to become richer as a byproduct of the rich becoming richer even faster. During its seven years it has substantially redistributed income from the rich to the poor but you will not hear it say so. It may well be that Clinton and Blair will be seen as heroic but quixotic bastions against the irresistible tide of corporate and individual selfishness.

It would be bad enough if this moral and intellectual coarsening were symptoms of alienation, as in some parts of society they are, but materialism is now in tandem with individualism. In an - one hesitates to use the word - intellectual ecology where no text is better than any other and when no opinion on a text is more valid than any other it is impossible to take analysis seriously. This explains ignorance of the wider implications of Accession. You have to be almost 80 to remember what the possibility of losing the war to Hitler felt like, 60 to remember being frightened that the tanks would not stop in Budapest in 1956 or Prague in 1968. The world had its Cold War crisis in Cuba but Europe, and particularly the people living under Communist rule, suffered decades of economic and, much worse, psychological, misery after the fall of Hitler. Britain, on the other hand, had a 'good war' and has lived on that phenomenon ever since to obscure its 'bad peace'. We are too superior to imagine and too superficial to analyse, so we manage that extraordinary psychological feat of being at once the sneering bully and the whining victim.

Another weakening of the imagination is brought about by our linguistic ignorance. The only foreigners we meet on holidays are waiters and chambermaids and we imagine that Eastern European Doctorates must be bogus. Strange, really, when a quarter of our National Health Service personnel are immigrants but, of course, the richer you are the less of this you see; and those who are in daily contact with immigrants live in a strange form of denial which separates people they know from people they don't know. Stranger still, fear of immigrant 'swamping' is in inverse proportion to contact with immigrants. And so, we want to kick away the ladder that Western Europe has climbed and build our fortress walls ever higher.

Now I clearly have a deep moral objection to this selfishness but I dislike stupidity almost as much. In fact if you were to maroon me on a desert island and offered me either Richard Millhouse Nixon or George W. Bush jr. as my sole companion I would certainly choose Nixon; one would have a better chance both of surviving the ordeal and escaping. In this case I am terrified by the stupidity of what passes for a 'policy' which purports to stem the flow of people from poorer to richer economies.

Ancient Greece and then Rome failed to manage immigration through assimilation and both were ultimately wrecked. The Ottomans, Japanese and Chinese, and later the Soviets, only managed by being brutal. In our global world, however, the enterprise is doomed. We can slow the trend by a massive injection of development assistance into poor countries and we can ease social tensions by constructing frameworks of citizenship in a pluralist society but that is all we can do. What we cannot do is to frame a sensible policy on the basis of irrational fear. Those who claim that their lives will be ruined by immigrant tilers, one-legged or otherwise, do not work in the building and related trades and those who most rail against 'benefit scroungers' are, unlike the poor, net gainers from the fiscal system. Even worse, because it is stupid, we expect our dirty jobs to be performed by magic.

On the day of Accession there was, quite properly, on the morning radio news detailed reporting of events in Iraq and a smattering of domestic stories but no mention of our new partners and certainly no note of celebration. I thought of the erstwhile May Day parade of workers and military hardware at the other side of the "Iron Curtain" and said a quiet prayer to St. Joseph the Worker before setting out to find that the local pub was still festooned - well, bedraggled might be a better word - with flags of St. George and they reminded me of a remark by a taxi driver earlier in the week when I arrived for the first time in the new London cross-Channel rail terminal, temporarily pressed into service as St. Pancras until the major engineering works are finished. "They are thinking", said the driver: "Of calling it Agincourt, to match Waterloo and annoy the French." He thought he was joking.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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