Certainly one of the most striking divisions in British life is the now unbridgeable gulf between the young and the old. Even if the peace talks start and a settlement is finally reached, will it be possible for them to live together in one society? A legacy of resentment, intolerance and sexual jealousy has been fed by years of violence and open war. At a time when the twin pillars of life in the government areas are the strip club and the US dollar, does Britain any longer possess the political and social institutions to make possible a real society?
I don’t see Parliament now as a functioning entity in any way. It’s a rump of older Members of Parliament and extreme right-wingers, a blow-hole for all kinds of unpleasant fascist gas. As a legislature it’s non-existent. Let’s face the facts, the British government is a puppet regime, and it means to keep it that way. The economy has a real balance of payments surplus for the first time in thirty years, thanks to American war-spending and the GI dollar. Baby, nobody on this side says ‘Yank, go home’. They’re more likely to offer you their sister — or their mother. Their sister’s on the other side.
Patriotism takes many forms. Is it significant, though, that the flag of the Liberation Front is the Union Jack, long-standing symbol of the union of Britain’s major provincial areas — a symbol now hated and feared by the government supporters? To what extent can the government itself provide any prospects for unity?
A former Labour Prime Minister recalled to office, to lead the all-party coalition, he sits uneasily inside a sandbagged Downing Street, literally ducking every time a shot is heard. He is surrounded by armed guards, but looks shifty and dispirited. All too clearly he is at the Americans’ mercy, and has no ideas for bringing the war to an end.
Could I ask you first, Prime Minister, are you hopeful at the moment at the outlook for peace?
Well, it depends very much on what the other side wants to do. The latest offensives — attacks against the ordinary people of this country don’t suggest that they’re particularly sincere in their talk about wanting a settlement.
Do you envisage that the departure of the American troops will create problems? If one travels around London one sees that a large part of the local economy is geared to serving the GI. When the GI is gone, won’t there be problems for those people who presently are Prime Minister Well, this contains the same problem shared by all those countries that have had large American forces on their soil Germany, Japan, Vietnam. I think it will be a good thing because we shall be back to normal and a lot of people will have to look for a living within their means. They’ll have to give up a lot of windfall benefits which come from the war and create social problems. We’ve now got in this country a class of people created by the war, and I think it’s a good thing that this will stop.
Childhood for most of the children in London has been a strange life with the American dollar, hasn’t it? The American dollar has been the way they passed their childhood. When that in the form of the GI goes, are they not going to have a lot of problems?
I’m sure they will. They’ll be economic problems mainly. I think we’re all going to have to find ourselves, so to speak, a painful process whether it’s an individual or a nation. I think there’s going to be a period of readjustment, possibly of turbulence, but they must go through the process. Perhaps if they’d gone through it twenty years ago there wouldn’t be a war now.
Commentator Can the British people find themselves? Can they go through the painful process of reestablishing themselves as a single nation? With 70 per cent of the economy tied to the war, with the revenues from North Sea oil long since sold off to the Germans and Japanese, will ordinary people be able to make the adjustments necessary to living with the other side? In short, do they want the war to end at all? World in Action visited a village in the front line to see how the bulk of the population is facing up to the reality of the war.
Barbed wire, road blocks, troops and armoured cars. Gunfire in the distance.
