HUMOUR, TENACITY, REALISM
'It is generally recognised that the English have three qualities, humour, tenacity and realism. I think we are still at the stage of humour. I have no doubt that tenacity will follow. I hope that realism will come after and will triumph.'—President Pompidou, on Britain's appli- cation to join the European Economic Community.
It is greatly to be hoped that M. Pompi- dou's generous analysis of the English character should prove itself, in the even- tual outcome of the Common Market adventure, to be accurate. Few reasonable, undogmatic and sceptical Englishmen will dispute M. Pompidou's assessment that there is something very funny about the present stage of our negotiations with the Continent. Mr Macmillan's original ap- proach was funny in the flippant sense: funny in a way that only Supermac could be flippant. Since at the same time that his negotiations with Europe looked as if they might become serious, Mr Macmillan journeyed to Nassau there to parley and to deal with President Kennedy, President de Gaulle at once recognised the British appli: cation as the joke it was, said, Won, we are not amused', and that should have been that for once and all.
But Prime Minister Harold Wilson, as much a wag in his way as was his mentor in the political art, Mr Macmillan, could not resist trying the joke out for size again, particularly since it seemed to him that in so doing he might dish Mr Macmillan's ultimate successor, Mr Edward Heath, the arch-marketeer himself. Certainly there was always much that was essentially comic in the contemplation of Mr Wilson's Labour administration's application to join, although for pure knockabout farce, the most humorous of all aspects of Britain's applications to join a closed shop has been the unwavering support for any such applications of that party whose ideals are most opposed to any Common Market, that is the Liberal party, now re- duced to political penury by Mr Jo Grimond, the most clownish politician of the post-war years, and his amusing mimic and successor, Mr Jeremy Thorpe.
It is possible that when M. Pompidou says, 'I think we are still at the stage of humour', he refers to Mr Geoffrey Rip- pon's opening negotiating position; that M. Pompidou thinks (or considers it advan- tageous to say that he thinks). that Mr Rippon's offer (presumably that of an initial British contribution to the Common Market budget of around 15 per cent of the total budget) is a great big typically humerous British joke; and that only when Mr Rippon starts saying that the British will pay around 18 per cent to start with, rising to 23-24 per cent within about ten years, will the stage of tenacity have arrived; and that the stage of realism will have come about subsequent to this, with Britain starting off at 20 per cent rising to 25 per cent after five years. say, and when it is clear to one and all that the British housewife will realistically accept that she must keep the French peasant laughing all the way upstairs to his bank under his mattress.
'I have no doubt', M. Pompidou says, 'that tenacity will follow.' Here, although we may not share his certainty, we must certainly hope that he is correct, and not merely being funny. it is difficult to see how any English tenacity (presuming, unlike M. Pompidou, that our present negotiating position is not supposed to be funny) can have any other effect upon us than to make us tenaciously say, 'You have misunderstood us, M. Pompidou; we have not been joking. Our negotiating position as stated by Mr Rippon, is not some humorous gesture of ours at all.'
Tenacity means, in English, holding firm and holding fast. Historically it could cer- tainly be seen as an English quality, although its absence has usually been more obvious than its presence in our Common Market negotiations, except that to say that we have held on to the Common Market delusion much as a drowning man may be said to have held on to the straw he uselessly clutched. Apart from this sort of holding on, English statesmen have persevered with tenacity to no view of the Common Market; for they began the ad- venture years ago by saying that the poli- tics of the thing were of no real concern and that it was the economic advantage that should attract us whereas now they say precisely the opposite. Here is evidence of flightiness, the French quality, rather than of any English tenacity of purpose or of understanding. The English people, how- ever, as opposed to their rulers and bureau- crats and tycoons, have increasingly dis- played a form of tenacity: tenaciously they have resisted, and tenaciously it seems that they will continue to resist, the foolish blandishments of their leaders.
Thug, in the admittedly unlikely event that M. Pompidou should experience from Mr Heath and Mr Rippon the stage of tenacity reflecting the English character, which he has no doubt will follow the present humorous stage, that stage can hardly be as welcome to the French—sup- posing they earnestly desire British entry —as they imagine. But let us give M. Pompidou the benefit of the doubt; let us suppose that what he describes as 'tenac- ity' will turn out to be English infirmity of purpose in negotiating, and that after a lot of window-dressing bargainings, made to look tenacious no doubt but in reality nothing of the sort, some sort of agreement —a dowry to a marriage-contract other- wise already determined—is arranged. 'I hope that realism will come after and will triumph', says M. Pompidou. But so do we, so do we.
Pompidoulian France, after de Gaulle is dead and buried, may well be coming round to the view that the best way to check Germany and at the same time pro- duce a useful pension for her inefficient and greedy peasants would be to have Britain in the Market for the most money possible: and if French realism sees the situation this way, we may be sure that French tenacity will pursue such a policy.
Let the English quality of realism, the knowledge of our true self-interest, then triumph. Once Mr Heath sees the folly of excessive entanglement with the Common Market as clearly—and as realistically—as he has come to see the folly of excessive entanglement with the Commonwealth, then we may expect to see his undoubted quality of tenacity following the dictates of realism. That tenacity would be better em- ployed upon pursuing the best interests of this island, by heeding the realism of its inhabitants, and by not straining too much their essential good humour, than it could ever be by any infirm and unrealistic humouring of the French and the other continental countries whose interests are not, never havelwien, and never will be the same as our own.
Previous page
