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Analysis: Biblical plagues hit Britain
Wednesday, 28 February 2001 23:23 (ET)
Analysis: Biblical plagues hit Britain By MARTIN WALKER,UPI Chief International Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Feb.28 (UPI) -- What has Britain done to offend the heavens? A plague of Biblical proportions has descended upon the British Isles.
Another train crash, the third in less than a year, leaves 13 dead. The National Parks, horse-racing and the Wales-Ireland Rugby match are all closed, and the stench of funeral pyres rises above the bleak countryside, as slaughtered sheep and cattle are burned by the thousand.
Farmers, vets and the government are grappling desperately to save the national herd from a new outbreak of foot and mouth disease. Fighting, rather, to save what is left of the national herd after $10 billions were spent in compensation for the last great slaughter of British cattle, only five years ago, to deal with the outbreak of mad cow disease.
Hundreds of motorists spent last night in the cars as blizzards blocked the Glasgow-Edinburgh auto route. Trains to Scotland were cancelled. And Ireland and Northern Ireland - while trying to restore power to thousands of homes --stand united in sealing their ports and gates against the threat of Britain's latest blight infecting their own herds.
Meanwhile, the schools face closure as teachers go on strike. Train drivers on the London Underground, probably the modern world's most unreliable and least comfortable mass transit system, are threatening a new strike.
It is a bad time to be in Britain now. And it should be a bad time to be a government, with a general election looming.
Oddly, it isn't. Tony Blair's New Labor government enjoys a 20 per cent lead in the opinion polls against a dispirited Conservative opposition. This is not just because Blair enjoyed some useful headlines as the first European to visit the new American President George Bush, and was even the first visitor to enjoy a weekend at the President's private retreat at Camp David. Blair's probable election victory owes almost everything to the fact that he is presiding over the most impressive British economy in decades.
Britain currently enjoys the lowest inflation rate in Europe, one of the lowest rates of unemployment, and by far the highest rate of foreign investment. Blair's booming Britain is enjoying robust growth and high productivity, having soared past the GDP of Italy and now France to become the second-biggest economy in Europe after Germany.
And that, ironically, may be the real problem behind the Biblical plague upon the land. Despite Blair's partiality for American Presidents, he has been the most pro-European British prime minister since Edward Heath, the Francophile Tory who led Britain into the European Common Market thirty years ago. Britain has suffered the psychological pangs and the economic costs of adjusting to that new identity. Shorn of the old Empire, the Commonwealth links with Australia and New Zealand casually abandoned, Britain has become not simply embedded economically in Europe, with sixty per cent of trade now going back and forth across the English Channel. It has become obsessed with Europe.
Europe now defines British politics. Margaret Thatcher's political career was broken by Europe, as pro-Europeans in her own party turned against her defense of British interests and her sneers at the federalists of Brussels. Her successor, john major, was also broken by his party's splits over Europe. The Labor party used to campaign against British entry into Europe. Now it is the pro-European party, with Blair promising a referendum to abolish the pound sterling and adopt Europe's new single currency instead.
Not that Blair seems to be getting much in return. Britain's most important export to Europe was Margaret Thatcher's message, of privatization and tax cuts, deregulating labor markets and rewarding entrepreneurs. They were crucial components of the British economic miracle - and one of its symbols was to privatize state-owned industries like British Rail. And now the British rail network stands revealed as the most overpriced, least popular and above all least safe in Europe. Britain's latest rail disaster is another plausible reason for Europe's left and labor unions to reject the British case for structural reforms.
And now Europe has turned against Britain again. Europe closed its ports and markets to British beef during the mad cow panic -- only to find that its own herds had been infected as well, after some farmers tried to cover up the initial outbreaks. Today the ports of Europe are sealed again, and the funeral pyres of British sheep and cattle are rising over Calais and Zeebrugge and Rotterdam.
Having adapted its farming to Europe's Common Agricultural Policy and its industrialization of the food chain, Britain finds it is fighting the latest epidemic virtually alone. Of all the plagues falling upon Britain this grim winter, that sense of aggrieved isolation may have the longest effect.
The Sun, Britain's best-selling newspaper argues "Those who say that Britain is the farming pariah of Europe are wrong...the real problem is that Britain is more honest than most countries. When we have a problem, we don't try to hide it."
Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights reserved.
-- Uncle Bob (unclb0b@aol.com), March 01, 2001