30 July 2015
The view from the M20
by Neil Tidmarsh
A motorway which has been turned into a car-park is a very strange sight indeed. The stillness and the silence are truly surreal. Movement – fast movement – and noise – loud noise – are two of the things which define a motorway (even when traffic is stuck in a jam, there is still the sound of engines turning over and the sight of lucky traffic streaming by in the other direction). All those stationary vehicles – lorry after lorry after lorry, all lined up nose to tail miles and miles ahead, as far as the eye can see, on both sides of the road, all the way to the distant horizon – it’s like something from an apocalyptical science fiction movie. Operation Stack is a J G Ballard vision made real.
The M20 takes you from London to Dover, Calais, France, the Eurozone… or at least it should. These days you leave bustling, booming, fast-moving London and speed southeast through Kent. And then, the closer you get to France and the Eurozone, things start to slow down. They get slower and slower until you stop altogether. You stop in the middle of nowhere. Well, you stop in the middle of the glorious Kent countryside, in fact, which would be very pleasant if that was your actual destination, but it isn’t. Your destination is France, the Eurozone, Europe, and you have business to do, you have a lorry-load of goods to deliver on a tight schedule.
What’s holding you up? You get out of the cab and peer ahead. You sniff the air. There’s a faint acrid smell on the southern breeze, coming from Calais. It’s the smell of burning tyres. Striking French ferry-workers have built a barricade of them across the Eurotunnel entrance. You listen hard. The silence isn’t quite absolute. There’s birdsong, an aeroplane passing overhead, and, carried from Calais on that same south-eastern breeze, the sound of raised voices, angry voices, the voices of those striking Frenchmen. They get louder and louder, and behind them you can hear more of them, you can hear other furious French protesters from beyond Calais. France seems to be full of them. Voices from the Tour de France shouting ‘Cheat! Cheat!’. Voices from taxi-drivers setting fire to Uber drivers’ vehicles. Farmers protesting about falling meat and dairy prices, and blocking Spanish and German lorries at the borders, and ripping those lorries open and throwing their cargoes out onto the road. You aren’t the only one trying to do business in France who has found your attempts grinding to a halt at its doorstep.
You can just about hear the voices from Madrid issuing a formal complaint, but President Hollande can’t hear them. He will stand by the farmers, he says. You can just about hear the voices from Berlin, complaining to the European Commission that this boycott of German products is in breach of EU rules. But is the European Commission listening? You mutter something about the free movement of people and goods, but your words are drowned out by those angry voices shouting “Notre travail a un prix!”
Amid all the raised voices in Brussels as the future of Greece was furiously discussed, there was a big silent entity. It was silent because it was hoping no one would notice it in spite of its size. It was the elephant in the room, and President Hollande did his best to hide it, terrified that someone would talk to it. The elephant in the room was the French economy. President Hollande knows his country is in dire straits, possibly as dire as Tsipras’s country. He knows that sooner or later the discussion about the necessity of austerity in Greece will turn into a discussion about the necessity for austerity in France. So the elephant of the French economy remained, ironically, silent. And all the Eurozone leaders pretended it wasn’t there. But it trembled anxiously as it watched them spoon bitter medicine down Greece’s throat, fearing that sooner or later it would have to swallow the same unpalatable but reviving brew.
President Hollande must see that his elephant is sick and he must administer the appropriate veterinary treatment. If he doesn’t, his great nation is doomed, because no one else can. Since 1958, when de Gaulle effectively replaced parliamentary democracy with a presidential system, the republic has been embodied in one person. “Basically the republic is me” said de Gaulle, but at the moment it is M. Hollande. Bruno Waterfield, in his review of Jonathan Fenby’s recently published “The History of Modern France”, wrote of the Fifth Republic’s ‘elected republican monarchy’. Paradoxically, France’s president is much more powerful than Britain’s monarch: Britain, the monarchy, is in many ways more like a republic, with a hereditary president; France, the republic, is more like a monarchy, with an elected King. But, as Bruno Waterfield and Jonathan Fenby point out, “the office (of president) itself has allowed the elite of the Fifth Republic to dodge the need for reform. Embodying the republic in one person has insulated the state from the pressure to change.” But things are not necessarily so hopeless; power has always been concentrated at the top in France, and it is precisely this which has enabled France to push through spectacular big projects – high-speed trains, nuclear power, Haussmann’s transformation of Paris under Napoleon III (compare that with the failure of Wren’s grand plan to rebuild London after the Great Fire). It all depends on the man at the top.
Meanwhile, a few miles from the white cliffs of Dover, you stop straining your eyes for a glimpse of Cap Gris Nez, south across the Channel. You turn your eyes east, and wonder whether the goods in the back of your lorry wouldn’t find a better market in China. You look west; the USA. You turn through 360 degrees. India… Australia… Canada… The world is a big place. It ought to be wide open to your lorry. You wonder yet again why you’re stuck here, hammering at the one door which ought to be open to you. You wonder yet again if it isn’t perhaps time to knock on other, bigger doors. You have a lorry load of perishable goods and your livelihood is on the line. You can’t wait forever for President Hollande to find his inner de Gaulle.
