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The economic and social problems for Britain caused by the West-Africa confrontation were brought into focus in October 1985 by the iron need to produce a government program to deal with them by the time Parliament opened on November 5, 1985. The program was traditionally presented in the archaic form of a speech from the throne, and the production line for that speech occupied the Cabinet and its assistants for a good two weeks in the second half of October.
There was the usual agonizing last-minute rush but Queen Elizabeth II's speech was finally produced in readable type in time for the Prime Minister's customary audience at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday evening. The Queen took this chance to reject finally any suggestion that for security reasons the royal procession on Thursday to open Parliament should be in any way curtailed, or that she should travel in a closed car rather than a horse-drawn carriage.
For the opening of what could only be, given the pending general election, a half-session of Parliament the speech was a surprisingly significant document. Though cast in the bloodless and opaque language of all speeches from the throne, some paragraphs dealt very openly with the legislation needed to defend the banking system from attempts to destroy it from without and to ensure that it was able to perform its proper function of financing the industrialized world. It was made crystal clear, however, that the key proposals in the government's program were to "revive and expand the traditional but neglected North Atlantic market" for producers and consumers as a matter of the highest priority. This slap at Commonwealth and European links was read by the Queen with her customary impartiality.
In the Commons debate on the Queen's Speech Chancellor Lawson led for the Government on the events of the past six weeks. Lawson proved himself master of the House from the outset. He repeated in more moderate terms the account he'd given the party conference of his victory over wily enemies one month earlier. He then painted a glowing picture of the North Atlantic trading world steadily improving its productivity and so both its earnings and leisure. "However," he warned, "there are always the big battalions of the envious who have put themselves outside this productive and profitable system and now wish to destroy it, having failed to claim it for themselves. We must keep up our guard against these enemies and their 5th column in our midst."
But Lawson was anxious to placate the quite sizeable group on both sides of the House which was ready to object to a policy that seemed designed to punish the Africans for being so poor, so he emphasized that if only they would collaborate with Britain they could become rich by the proper exploitation of their native resources. He concluded with a stern warning to those who attempted to sabotage Britain's march forward. "They should know that the British people are determined to control their destiny and will brook no interference with those who do not share our heritage or our ambitions."
The Opposition speakers found it tough to attack someone who successfully wrapped himself in both the Union Jack and Bank of England notes. The only effective shafts of criticism came from the Commonwealth Group---on both sides of the house---which focused on the disastrous loss of the proud, ancient, and valuable links with the Commonwealth. As one former foreign and commonwealth secretary pointed out, the loss was not just of the Secretariat and new Commonwealth; both Australia and Canada were also clearly alienated. Was the renewed link with the ex-dominion South Africa a good bargain at such a price, especially when that country seemed to be on a collision course with the US?
But in a House of Commons facing an election within 8 months few members were gung-ho to criticize the actions of a government facing resolutely external enemies and likely to win a popular victory over them.
Things were different in the House of Lords, where elections always seem somewhat less important, and which remains the final refuge of political non-conformity in Britain. Moreover, the Upper House was now enjoying an unwanted public interest because it had voted to allow the TV cameras to remain in the Upper House after the State Opening of Parliament. Their Lordships gave a brilliant and colorful performance, which won them a good deal of airtime, especially from the new cable franchises, ever hungry for free shows.
The first speaker after the rather conventional frontbenchers was the Archbishop of Canterbury, a colorful figure in full episcopal fig. He startled his hearers (about 100 in the chamber and eventually some millions worldwide) by comparing the Government to the Roman Empire in its persecution of the Christians. "The Anglican Church is worldwide, a great number of our members or negroes live in what is called Africa. By its actions in the past month, the Government has virtually severed these members from communion with Canterbury. I am told by the State that the Church is forbidden to send our missionary funds to Africa; I find that immigrants no longer send back to their families some of their earnings in this rich country. I was told this very morning that I cannot bring back our Nigerian priests for training here and that I am strongly advised against sending our young English priests on missions to any part of Africa.
"Let me say that we still consider our African members as integral parts of the Church to whom we owe the duties of Christian fellowship. I have consulted with those bishops whom I could reach and can say that the Church of England will maintain and strengthen its religious, financial, and personal links with our churches in Africa. I promised one year ago to go to Ghana to consecrate three new bishops in the diocese of West Africa, and at the same time to conduct the Remembrance Day service in Accra Cathedral. I shall keep my promise and will leave by a somewhat circuitous route tomorrow. Like one of my more illustrious predecessors, I may be denounced for these actions by the government of the day as a turbulent priest, but like Thomas a Becket I will not flinch from my duty."
This was high drama for the House of Lords, and before he sat down the Archbishop was being shown live on four separate channels which were glad to clear their afternoon junk to accommodate such political theater.
He was followed by another natural politician, whose work as an international banker took him out of the country for half of every working year and thus ruled him out for membership in the elected House, though it had made him a respected source of wisdom in this upper, less parochial, chamber. Lord Johnathon Garbert-Smithe began by praising the Archbishop's courageous speech and with a twinkle, apologized for lowering the tone of the debate by turning to the affairs of Mammon. He had some questions to ask the government about the extent and nature of the economic victory they claimed to have won. Had the banking system truly been saved, when it had lost virtually all its assets and goodwill in Africa? "The British banking system has never regarded itself as a bank for top people, but as a service to ordinary people and small businesses in every high street in every part of the world. All that has been destroyed in the last month. The monetary losses that can result from this Government's bold policies in Africa can be covered up by the IMF---perhaps that's what it's for but it can't restore the lost purpose of the system, which was to spread wealth around the world, and so to increase it.
"Will Britain benefit, even in the short run, by being cut off from supplies and markets in Africa? Already the price of African products such as tea, coffee, hardwoods, vegetable oils, chocolate, and cocoa is shooting up, to the benefit of neither the British consumer nor the African producer, but only to the black-market vultures who always get good pickings when the trade system is disrupted. Thousands of jobs are being lost by the cutoff of British exports to Africa; already it is clear that the Government's bankrupted export guarantee scheme will carry down with it scores of manufacturing and construction firms that have served the Commonwealth and Britain so well.
"After only one month of this new economic order, we are seeing its disastrous consequences. The new trade policy with Africa is pure protectionism which will drive up prices; our so-called debt settlements, by destroying markets, will push up unemployment. In six months we shall experience the true poverty of the miser who tries to hoard all his money in his own fortress home."
Conservatives already regard the House of Lords as a final line of defense against overzealous governments in the Commons and are therefore unused to attacks from it on their policies. Alarms spread along the government front bench at this double-barreled attack by Church and City. Reinforcements in the form of ex-Cabinet ministers were hurriedly directed to the chamber to support the Government. They gave the standard response: what else could we do? We had to defend our people. They probably had some effect on members of the House, but they were uninteresting to the TV audience and especially to those who selected what was to appear on the news bulletins. Their impact, therefore, on public opinion was minimal.
In the late afternoon another charismatic figure arose from the episcopal bench---the new Bishop of London. He was a controversial figure whose appointment was generally regarded as a triumph of the Church over the State. He had been the youngest professor of physics ever at Cambridge when he resigned to work in a mission school in Africa, where he was ordained. Eventually, he returned to a parish in the East End of London and after four years of parish work was catapulted into this, the most demanding post of the Church of England, by the almost unanimous demand of the Church against the unconcealed ill will of the State.
This was Dr. Quincy Beaumont's maiden speech and he accidentally defied tradition by appearing in his purple cassock without the billowing white lawn surplice that he had worn for the opening ceremony. But he had also consciously decided to defy convention by making his maiden speech both substantive and controversial. He started a little nervously but soon realized that their Lordships were just another congregation like so many others: aging, basically uninterested, and present mainly out of a sense of duty. He was sure he knew how to cope with them while concentrating on reaching the wider public outside. Turning to one of the earlier frontbench speakers he asked what exactly the government meant by "our people" whom they wished to protect. Did it include blacks born in Britain, but who had never had a job in their adult life? "There are many of these in my diocese and they do not feel protected today; they are turning in on themselves, seeking a haven in a hostile nation.
"We are building a time bomb within our cities. Today in London there are large areas which are becoming Bantustans, black homelands with their means of mass communication---the community radio, unlicensed but very audible. They have their command posts, usually pop groups which can issue orders to their shock troops, quite unknown to the authorities, through their cassettes or their records. In this tightly packed, thoroughly wired-up, and largely automated machine of a city, we are wide open to the most appalling disruption if any part of the community withdraws its collaboration. Without strikes, without violence, we can easily be paralyzed.
"But there may also be violence on an unimagined scale since the disaffected can obtain instruments of destruction of the utmost sophistication from the arms bazaar which we have created by flooding our former colonies with our surplus weapons.
"I do not intend to try and make your Lordships' flesh crawl, but I do wish to warn that Africa is not a far-off continent of which we need to know little. We are separated from it only by the English Channel, the Iberian Peninsula, and Gibraltar. It is in our midst, and we shall soon learn much about it.
"When we cease to help Africa, we shall learn that there is a solidarity of Africans around the world reaching into our cities. If we deny the existence of Africa, we shall destroy our nations, our continent, and ourselves."
The Bishop's speech was of course carried by most of the cable TV franchises, but the early evening news on BBC and ITV carried him live to a vast national audience. When he sat down---to very subdued applause from his peers but as a new bright star to the public---the TV broadcasts abandoned the chamber but stayed in Westminster for an even more bizarre scene being played out in Parliament Square. For the past quarter of an hour, the usual rush-hour traffic jam had begun to swell as more and more London Transport buses crowded into Parliament Square like huge red lemmings following some unseen urge to die. As Big Ben struck six, the TV cameras showed to the nation (and the world) a packed mass of over 300 buses stretching down to Victoria, up to Trafalgar Square, and along the Embankment as far as Lambeth Bridge. At the same time, the automatic gates in the surrounding Underground stations suddenly failed, so alternative means of transport were cut off. TV cameras picked out familiar MPs marooned in their cars in this sea of humanity, while anonymous civil servants used their umbrellas like swords in vain attempts to get out of their offices and go home.
Finally, the cameras focused on a wedge of blue which turned out to be the police forcing a passage for Home Secretary Douglas Hurd across the square and into the House of Commons. Once in the chamber, he was immediately called by the Speaker to make a statement about the situation in the precincts of the Palace of Westminster. He promised, with suitable bluster, that an inquiry would be held.
The TV cameras were not allowed in the Commons, but as always the BBC carried Hurd's voice over a picture of the chamber. As he stopped speaking, another voice was heard, apparently still from the House of Commons, saying, "Thank you, Mr. Hurd, but if you want to know how this happened we, the organizers, Brothers of the Spear, will be glad to tell you."505Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ2ofA2GnC38
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The Bishop of London was back on the screen the following Sunday conducting the Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph in place of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was performing similar rites in West Africa. It was the usual regulation event but this year it was noticeable that the Commonwealth High Commissioners attending were reduced in numbers from a platoon to a corporal's guard. With a careful eye on the time, the Bishop managed to end the service Just as Big Ben started to chime the hour, and the first maroon was fired to start the 2-minute silence. All over the country viewers and listeners were sitting in unaccustomed hush when it was broken by a voice saying quietly and reverently "----and let us remember especially at this time the million black servicemen of the Empire and Commonwealth who died in two world wars that others might be free---and let us pray that those for whom they died will remember the debt they owe to these men of the Royal West African Frontier Force and the King's African Rifles...." The second maroon exploded and the voice was drowned out by the bugle call of the Last Post.
It has (to this day) never been established just who spoke these words. Many who heard them were convinced that it was the Bishop of London since he had been the last to speak before the silence; the sound engineers relaying the service presumed at the time that it was a regular part of the ceremony. Members of the Royal Family and Cabinet ministers around the Cenotaph barely heard the interruption as the broadcast was only carried by loudspeaker to the people out of earshot of the true ceremony, so most of those around the Cenotaph presumed at first that it was some kind of a demonstration in Parliament Square. But inside the old Home Office, the full meaning of what had happened was made clear to all of them. The Queen asked to hear a recording of the interruption and nodded sagely as she heard it, but left for her car without saying a word. PM Thatcher and Secretary Hurd walked white-faced and tight-lipped back to No. 10 Downing Street.
The whole episode had been a fantastically effective demonstration of the truth of the Bishop's statement that "Africa is not a far-off continent---it is in our midst." Certainly, the British public felt that Africa had forced its way into the midst of their living rooms through TV, the feeling of violation and invasion of privacy was strongest in Westminster. It was unused to demonstrations taking place on its front lawn and at its local shrine. Members of Parliament were all uneasy and angry.
On Monday morning Secretary Hurd's committee of inquiry into the incidents in Parliament Square was due to hold its first meeting jointly with the Commons committee on privileges, indicating Parliament's deep concern with the disruption of the smooth working and dignity of its proceedings. But once again they were to be upstaged.
When the BBC breakfast show's staff arrived very early that morning they found in their post box a video cassette (one among dozens) marked "News Urgent BOTS." It was viewed routinely and turned out to be an old London Transport training film for instructing bus drivers in the use of the London Transport Integrated Control System (LTICS to the management, the 'spy in the cab' to all drivers). The training film blandly explained that the system had been introduced this year to reduce costs by eliminating manned control points throughout the metropolitan area. Instead of fallible inspectors the bus drivers now had an electronic screen that gave them orders to wait, to turn around at Aldwych to proceed as far as Peckham, to go fast or to go slow. Underground drivers and guards found themselves virtually robotized by this system, though they did have an override handle for emergencies. The whole system was controlled by one immense computer at 55 Broadway (London's Transport Headquarters over St. James's station) which received inputs from the automatic ticket machines on buses and in the tube stations and regulated the flow of transport accordingly. St. Peter (as the computer had been named after its original advocate when Sir Peter was head of London Transport) had worked extraordinarily well, the London Transport trainer said and was hailed publicly as an example of British advanced technology at work.
The bright lad reviewing this cassette thought it must be a practical joke and was about to throw it out when suddenly, as the picture switched to a North London bus route, the voice also changed and was replaced by a (black) African accent which had been superimposed, very professionally, onto the videotape: "You see here London Transport's Integrated Control System, which you need to understand, Mr. Home Secretary Hurd if you are curious as to how we caused the trouble in Westminster on Thursday.
"Here you can see an input point where information about passenger loads can be fed into St. Peter by bus drivers, or automatically from the computerized ticket machines on the new buses. There are 1,200 of these input points scattered around London. It was never very hard to feed a little wrong info into these machines, but we did not rely on that on Thursday.
"You now see St. Peter, which regulates all the buses and the tubes. If you alter its program to instruct all buses to go to Parliament Square, but not onward past Victoria or Charing Cross, you will see what you saw last Thursday night. It takes about twenty minutes of wrong programming to fill the square, and it is quite hard for the controllers to detect an irregularity in the programming within that period.
"But, Mr. Home Secretary Hurd, I can see that you will be searching the computer headquarters in Broadway to find out which of us blacks did this dreadful thing. You need not bother. There are almost no blacks left, they've all been sacked since this training film was made. But you do not need to be inside miles of St. Peter to instruct him, all you need is a telephone. Your experts can tell you about that. In theory, you can electronically lock us out, but your experts will also tell you that it will be very, very hard to accomplish, with all those inputs. Far harder, Mr. Home Secretary Hurd, than it was to lock you out of the Underground yesterday afternoon when you desired it as a means to get across Parliament Square."
The London Transport film faded, and the logo of BOTS ( a shield, with a spear and a hammer crossed behind it, the signature symbol of Africa) appeared there with a new addition: a large black hand. The same speaker continued behind this picture: "To conclude, Mr. Home Secretary Hurd, I shall now explain why we have done these things and will do more like them. Your government thinks it can run the world without we sons of Africa, and you think you can run this country while putting us outside the law. Perhaps you can, but you will pay a terrible price in fear, uncertainty, inconvenience, and sorrow. For Africa and Africans are part of your world and part of your British community; if we refuse to collaborate with that community you will lose your domestic peace."
The duty editor decided to show it at 6:45 A.M. in the local London spot and received a rocket instructing him to withdraw it. It had appeared on three other outlets before 10:00 A.M., when the members of the committee of inquiry, all of them feeling rather foolish, met an irate Secretary Hurd who asked for an adjournment for 24 hours.
At 10:30 there was a hastily called meeting of the senior colleagues (as the inner Cabinet of half a dozen was known) to decide upon immediate action. It was agreed that PM Thatcher's intervention in the debate on the Queen's Speech should be moved forward to that night so that proposals for legislation and immediate stern action could be announced. This should stop backbench agitation from making unacceptable demands. The committee on social legislation would meet at once at No. 10 with the PM in the chair to draft an enabling bill within the week. At Secretary Hurd's insistence (but with no other support) the law officers of the Crown were to be brought into the building so that they could review the proposed legislation page by page to ensure that it didn't violate the Human Rights Convention of Europe or the UN and was broadly consonant with the British race relations law as it stood.
The committee then met continuously until 4:00 P.M. when the members decided to stretch their legs in the garden while some typing was completed. It was then that they discovered BOTS had struck again. At about 2:00 P.M. the old Whitehall telephone exchange, now 930, had stopped functioning. 1/4 of an hour later the Houses of Parliament exchange, 619, had also called it quits. There was thus no telephonic communication between the various parts of government, nor between the Parliamentary machine and the world beyond Westminster.
Frustration and anger grew alarmingly as technical experts explained how easy it was for someone skilled in the numerology of telecommunications to tie up a single exchange, and how hard it was to prevent or correct it. The South London Radio announced that BOTS would restore service on the two exchanges in the early evening---without bothering to claim credit for the original disruption--but could not guarantee that similar blackouts might not occur to, for example, TV and radio broadcasts.
PM Thatcher immediately ordered Secretary Hurd to take charge of the committee preparing the legislation. It was to be introduced on Wednesday and passed through all its stages by the end of the week. Hurd went with the PM to ready to evening's speech. Judging from the internal evidence it was very much a joint product of these two.
All the shocks and humiliations of the past weeks were turned to their advantage in calling for draconian measures to prevent their repetition. The labor laws were to be completely revised for security reasons to prevent interference with communications (whether by bus, telephone, or broadcasting) and "to prevent sabotage of institutions vital to the national effort and public safety." How this was to be done was left somewhat unclear in the speech because ministers were still wrangling about legalities, but PM Thatcher set the guidelines as far out as seemed practicable.
A list of restricted jobs was to be drawn up, in which blacks could only be employed after vetting for loyalty by the security services. Thatcher acknowledged that this, though necessary, would cause some hardship. "As a concession" there would be no demand that blacks move away from the areas where they were living just because they were no longer employed in that area. However, camps and residential areas with special schools for black children would be set up for those blacks who preferred to move out of mixed-race areas into locations where they could enjoy their way of life. Thus the question of where blacks were to live was not to be settled by the State but by "private initiative and common sense."
In the drafting committee, deportation or repatriation had proved by far the most volatile issue. The center of the party had always tried to keep the image of a truly national party of all the people, but when the blacks became identified with a foreign enemy it became impossible to hold the line. There had been intense pressure from the right of the party and from some Cabinet colleagues to send the blacks back to Africa because they were a threat to national security. The law officers reported that while Parliament was sovereign and could do what it wished, the European Human Rights Commission could not be prevented thereafter from considering individual cases and ruling on whether or not they violated the European Convention on Human Rights. Any such mass deportation was bound to fall foul of the European courts.
Secretary Hurd ruled that mass deportation was therefore not a viable option, but the pressure went on unabated. One suggestion was that if the European Court so ruled, Britain should offer to ship all the blacks to the continent of Europe under the provision of the Treaty of Rome guaranteeing free movement of labor within the participating countries. The most common argument reported by backbenchers was that Britain should do what was necessary in the national interest and leave the EEC if it disagreed.
But the ministers' meeting in No. 10 knew that Britain could not afford to split with the West as well as Africa. They therefore sought a compromise whereby there was an absolute ban on further immigration from Africa and at the same time a thorough examination of all blacks' papers and records. Those who were not in order would be deported immediately; those who were entitled to stay would be given a plastic card with their photograph in color on it. This would not be called a pass or identity card, but a "privilege" card. On its reverse were the words: "The bearer has the privilege of residing in the United Kingdom. To be carried at all times."
PM Thatcher presented the deportation issue to the Commons in the toughest possible light, without actually committing the Government to any specific legislation. This did the trick, winning loud applause from the government back benches, and getting no shouts of outrage from the Opposition, which was left puzzled as to what was intended.
In the general debate on the enabling bill, the government did not get by quite unscathed, however, even in the elected house. The Alliance's leader delivered a scathing and mocking attack on the hypocrisy of the government and asked what caused it to react so strongly to a "piece of radio piracy and a bad traffic snarl" when in the face of far worse terrorism by the IRA they had never even deprived the Irish of their right to vote in UK elections. There were only subdued cheers from the rather empty benches behind the Alliance leader; threats to national unity are not good elective politics when played against a backdrop of patriotic resistance to enemy attack.
In the Lords, the opposition both from the bench of bishops and from the distinguished non-elected back-benchers was much more vocal, and more damaging because it was on TV. But the government spokesmen on this occasion were better prepared; they didn't try to answer at the customary Upper House level of cool reasonableness but just banged their patriotic drum. It may not have convinced their Lordships, but it had some effect on the viewers.
By week's end the British Mother of Parliaments, in a fit of hysteria and absence of mind, had enabled the Government to set up a passable imitation of an apartheid state, to the horror of her friends and foes alike. But between the enablement and the execution lay a broad gap filled with booby traps and watched over by a mischievous and still untrammeled press.
Within a few days of the passage of the Act, the Home Office, working under tremendous pressure, produced their provisional list of "persons to be served with deportation orders, effective within 30 days." The 300-yard computer printout contained, according to the Guardian newspaper, 18,530 names. The Guardian correspondent had beguiled the time of the press conference by randomly glancing through the names: "I was not surprised to find 273 K. Mobutus, but wondered if the total address for each of them, 'South London', was sufficient for delivering a deportation order. On the other hand, in the Scottish lists, as one would expect, the addresses were far more specific. For instance, that given for a clan of nearly thirty persons called Khethang was 'Balmoral, near Ballater station.'"
An apology from the Home Office was swiftly issued and some gremlins in its computer were located and removed. But public figures (and newspapers) who did not quite like to oppose the Government's strong measures began to ask pointed questions about the bumbling bureaucracy. How did the bureaucrats plan to return 18,000 blacks to 52 countries that did not want them and now had minimal relations with Britain? There were stories (not denied fast enough) that the QE II was going to be used to ferry blacks back to Africa, which led to a series of cartoons about "winter luxury cruises."
The net result was that opposition in Britain grew under a blanket of humor rather than secrecy. In Europe, the sense of shock about Britain's behavior was slightly relieved when it seemed to be typical British craziness rather than typical hypocrisy, but the opposition to the policies didn't lessen, and Britain's isolation from Europe increased. In Africa, however, where laughter is the greatest solvent of awe, once Britain began to look silly she became far less formidable and easier to oppose.
Among the first to note a possible loophole in the new laws were two Nigerians who received a deportation order on the very first day of issue, partly because the police had no difficulty with their address---a luxury apartment in Park Lane---and partly because they had been under surveillance for some time as prime suspects in a drug ring based in Marseilles.
Within an hour of receiving the warrant, but after discreet calls to the Press Association and Agence France Presse, they set off in their Mercedes for Dover. They loaded their car onto the ferry and then, producing their deportation orders as if they were government travel warrants, demanded to be carried free of charge. They failed in this ploy, but not before they had achieved good publicity on both sides of the Channel. In France, to the surprise and horror of the British public, they were welcomed as "refugees from British oppression." The British authorities were particularly shocked because they had informed the Surete of their suspicions about the Marseilles connection.
While in Paris the Nigerians briefed one of the best international lawyers to plead their case against the British deportation order before the European Court of Human Rights as a "class action" on behalf of all deportees. A few days later they left Paris for Lagos by a scheduled Nigerian Airways flight, which had no problems about using Le Bourget airport, though British airports were closed to it. They left behind them a trail of bad debts and for Britain a quagmire of trouble at the Court of Human Rights.505Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡdkmlT8lGA0
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It has not been unusual for British opinion to be out of sync with European thinking, but by 1985 the discords were made much more apparent and distressing by the network of television, which was putting all the European powers like fighting tomcats into a single bag.
By 1984 all the preparations for satellite and cable television suddenly came to fruition, with the result that almost anything of significance broadcast in Western Europe could be seen in Britain via one of the satellites or on cable TV programs of European repeats. In February 1985, most Europeans watched some part of the debate in the House of Lords and it seemed to confirm the general view that the British Government, with American help and German acquiescence, was leading the West in a wild overreaction to Africa's policies on debt. An enterprising Dutch television company began a series of programs on European social reactions to the economic divide which had opened up at the IMF meetings. The program on Germany showed how little real impact the conflict with Africa had on everyday life there. It was accepted that some quite lucrative trade would be lost and that some shortages, such as oil and gas from Libya, might appear before long, but in both instances, the man in the street blithely accepted the authorities' reassurance that greater opportunities were opening up in Latin America and Asia.
In response to questions about Africa in their midst, most West Germans simply looked puzzled, though West Berliners were quick to say that in their view the couple of million Turkish "guest workers" should be sent home, preferably voluntarily by bribing them but if necessary by more forcible means.
Yet some anti-African feelings surfaced in the program on France shown a few days later when a group of dock workers in a café in Marseilles (all confessed Communist Party members) protested about the revolutionary activities of the Algerian workers who had switched from Marxism to Islam in recent years. But in France, the general opinion was that the breach with Africa was an Anglo-Saxon ploy and therefore to be deplored. France had gone along with the debt settlement in Washington because it had to, but the government had no intention of relinquishing any ties to Africa that it could maintain; and it would continue its economic links through the Lomé Convention, even if Britain withdrew from this European initiative, as it was threatening to do. There was wide popular support for this policy throughout France, though in the newly-elected Parliament, the much enlarged Right did contain some vociferous nationalists who wished to expel all blacks and prevent any further immigration; but it was clear they were not listened to by the Government.
The program on Britain, the third in the series, was produced and presented by a Belgian-Congolese educated in England during World War II. The title of his program, What Else Could We Do?, was taken from an interview with a Merseyside middle-class housewife who had turned a Nigerian family out of the basement they rented because she was afraid they were plotting a black takeover in the area. It was a phrase that recurred in every interview. Perhaps because the interviewer was neither white nor British, the blacks talked to him with quite amazing candor, telling him of the discrimination against them at work, at school, in seeking lodgings or jobs, in shops, on the buses, and even in the pubs. But they readily admitted that they robbed white homes, ran prostitutes, sold heroin, cocaine, and marijuana to white people, and were rapidly arming their gangs to keep the police off their turf: "My God man, what else could we do?"
This program was not political material, which was why it was so effective in showing the division that had been brought into British life in a few short weeks, largely by the theatricalization of politics. For most people in Britain, it suddenly revealed how close to a second English Civil War their society had come.
The program also showed a minority who thought there was something else that could be done. On the political scene, the most significant force was the Commonwealth Group, led by former Conservative prime minister Edward Heath and including nearly 100 MPs of all parties. The Commonwealth Group was supported by the churches (at least by their leaders if not always by the man in the pew) and by that, quite a large section of the population had been brought up to believe that South African apartheid was evil.
It ended with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had just returned from West Africa. He told how the reversion of traditional tribal methods of agriculture, which had been going on for five or six years, was proving quite successful and gave much comfort to the advocates of delinking. But still, there were very sad failures: the attempt to feed populations that had doubled since independence was degrading the soil and making deserts of much of the farmland. Even with all this effort the people of the cities were not being fed. As a result, the modern sector, which was Britain's special legacy to West Africa, had broken down in Ghana and even in Nigeria. The Archbishop closed the program with a solemn pledge: "We in the Church of England could not and will not share in any abandonment of those whom we so recently ruled and prepared for an independent role in the world. I have promised that we will maintain our links and our responsibilities as a Church, even if we do not do so as a State."
The impact of this TV program in Europe, and Britain, was to raise criticism of British policy to new heights. The British Government felt wronged but not injured by this domestic and foreign criticism. All the intelligence that it had received, including the Archbishop's, encouraged it to believe that despite some setbacks it would soon win the struggle with Africa.
At a Guildhall banquet a few days after his return from Africa, the Archbishop found himself sitting rather uneasily near PM Thatcher, whose strident defense of the Government's policy concluded: "If we are resolute and hold on our course against the warnings of the faint hearts and the cautions of the feeble wills, we in the North Atlantic shall soon be once again masters of our fate and leaders of a reunited world." The TV cameras showed the general applause, but careful televiewers noted several who abstained, including Diana, Princess of Wales, several of the big bankers, and, nearest to the seat of power the Archbishop. Thatcher leaned towards him, ignoring a live mike, and said bitterly: "If you ever become a statesman you will see that I am correct."
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