By now you will have switched your millennium order from real champagne to a rather good methode champenoise wine from Chile. Your brie henceforth will exclusively be of the Somerset variety. The Citroen remains firmly locked in the garage. The Francoise Sagan novels and the Jacques Tati videos are in the bin, while Bernard Buffet’s clown has been turned to face the wall. Those Frenchies won’t know what hit them.
They had it coming, mind you. First, they banned our perfectly safe beef – in flagrant breach of European Union law – and then we find out they have been feeding their cattle with sewage. Can you imagine anything more disgusting? Apparently there is a pettifogging Euro-rule that says we can’t simply march into their bistros and force-feed them with perfectly safe British beef, so we really have no choice but to boycott them. It is the least we can do to express our anger at the wrong-headedness, the stubborn arrogance, the sheer Frenchness of it. Hop off, you frogs.
They have always been like this. They say they’re true Europeans, but they only obey the rules when it suits them and they have no shame about their selfishness. It happens again and again. Look at de Gaulle: so haughty, but it wasn’t the French who won the war, was it? Look at Mitterrand: slippery, devious and full of high talk about solidarity and socialism, but he turned out to be a liar and a crook (and had a scandalous private life to boot). Now look at Chirac and Jospin: one a Gaullist and the other a socialist, but basically the same. Like all the French (it grieves me to say) they are completely oblivious to responsibility, to the greater European good, to the need to abide by the common code when it doesn’t suit as well as when it does. They are just like children.
Welcome to the high moral ground in late 1999: outrage, hypocrisy and xenophobia jumbled together in a four-week wonder of a kind seen every year or so. It doesn’t have to be the French (although it usually is); it can be the Germans, the Japanese or the Italians. Not long ago, a football match provided an excuse to have a go at the Spanish.
It is all nonsense. A boycott of French goods – the active ingredient in the package – is, if not absolutely impossible, so complicated a proposition that it is beyond most of us to apply it, even if we want to. We would go blind combing the labels in the supermarkets trying to filter out French yogurts, French sauces and French fruit juices, and that is before we began tackling the stuff that is made here or elsewhere but includes French ingredients. As for other goods, is a Peugeot made in Britain a French car? Is a Rover with Michelin tyres to be boycotted? And what about a shower in water supplied by a French-owned water company? The economic reality, in short, has run far ahead of the taxi-driver politics that inspire all this.
And so has the political reality; for this dispute will certainly not be resolved by the use of the megaphone. Yes, the French position on British beef appears to be wrong, but not so wrong that it should be beyond our imaginations to understand why they have adopted it. And certainly not so wrong that it should obliterate overnight all memory of the disgusting British farm practices that preceded the outbreak of BSE. In this matter, it will be a long time before Britain has a ladder long enough to reach the moral high ground.
True, hard-pressed British farmers are the victims of this French wrong, but it is an illusion to think that their cause is advanced by hysterical headlines in the British press. Racial insults will not facilitate either a legal or a diplomatic remedy and may make them more difficult to achieve. Nor will any solution to this problem end the farmers’ hardships; their difficulties are more profound than that.
The boycott campaign is, to use the word that got the Railtrack man into trouble, hysteria. It is the immediate successor to train safety in the long parade of short-term obsessions that fill the newspapers and pass for public debate in nineties Britain. Nowadays we get one story at a time, and we get it in volume and with feeling.
The effect of this hysteria is to inflate and simplify every issue, and usually to leave an impression of obvious solutions being wilfully neglected. The farmers are in difficulty? The French are to blame. Brussels won’t sort it out? Then the government must act. They can’t? Then the British public must take matters into its own hands. Think of the poor farmers! They need your help. Boycott French goods! And so on, until a plane crashes or a politician gets caught with his pants down and we have something else to feel indignant about.
None of this means that farmers should not be helped or that train safety should not be improved; it just means that we have a crazy, distorting way of discussing our problems. By the same token, it does not mean that these outbursts of hostility towards foreigners, transient and hysterical as they are, are not worrying.
It is usually the French, but we should not read too much into that. If there is a special relationship between Britain and France in these matters, it almost certainly reflects nothing more than a greater familiarity, which brings with it a greater facility when the need arises to identify things to hate. It is thus much easier to hate the French with feeling than it is to hate, say, the Belgians or the Dutch, about whom the worst that can normally be said is that they are boring, simply because most people are too ignorant about them to produce any more refined abuse. The Germans and Japanese, of course, have a category all their own.
And this is not just a tabloid phenomenon. Although tabloids lead the way, the same overheated views find plenty of expression in the broadsheets and the radio news programmes. In addition, horrible though this thought may be, the tabloids are almost certainly tapping into something real. In their barmy campaigns of boycott and abuse, they are merely performing the familiar function of displaying – in the largest print available – the most regrettable facts of national life.
Perhaps it is a sort of therapy. Perhaps it is useful to hold up a mirror, or even a Mirror, and see these feelings exposed. British life contains a strain of xenophobia. It may be fairly indiscriminate and it may not run very deep, but it is there. It certainly causes offence and, at times, it is indistinguishable from racism.
Political correctness, they cry. Next thing we know he’ll be trying to ban Fawlty Towers. Surely France and Germany, rich and confident nations that they are, can take a bit of teasing?
As if Britain, rich and confident as it is, was capable of taking a joke. Or even mild criticism.
A few weeks ago, the outgoing German ambassador complained of Britain’s regrettable obsession with the war, which confirmed that Germans do take offence. The reaction was no less revealing, embracing as it did a good deal of outrage of the who-does-he-think-he-is and who-won-the-bloody-war-anyway type. Foreigners are fair game, it seems, but hands off Britain.
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