London Letter
DEAR
EDITORS,
If
governments were to be remembered by epithets like the Hun–
dred Days, or the Terror, this first government of the socialist era in
Britain would pass into history as the Reign of Virtuous Gloom. Both,
the virtue and the gloom, become strikingly evident if one compares
our life here with conditions in France (from where I have just returned
after a longish visit). The contrast is truly fantastic.
France has emerged from five years of occupation in a state of
almost complete economic sanity and moral insanity. She produces most
of the food she needs, but the normal channels of circulation and dis–
tribution have broken down. This breakdown is due not to economic,
but to political and moral causes. In other words, it is a functional, not
a structural disease. There is plenty of wheat but little bread, because
the farmers feed wheat to the cattle, distrusting the franc; there is
plenty of milk, but not a drop in Paris, for similar reasons; there was
little real inflation, but prices soared because goods were speculatively
hoarded. During my six weeks' stay there were six
scandales
or ex–
posures of large-scale rackets in bread, wine, potatoes, pulses, petrol,
and clothing coupons-each
scandale
implicating one of the political
parties in the then tripartite government and being launched by one
of the rival parties at the appropriate moment, as a routine move on
the political chessboard. There is no longer a black market as it has
practically swallowed the legal white one; the result is a general gray
of various shades, expressing the degrees of illegality of the transactions
which the ordinary Frenchman is compelled to do in order to obtain
bread, fats, meat, apartments, clothes, cigarettes; and to obtain the
money for obtaining them. The same routine illegality is forced upon
shopkeepers, department stores, business firms if they want to survive.
Even the political parties were cashing in on the black market according
to the production branch they controlled through their ministries; the
most notorious and brazen one was the open sale of licenses for the
acquisition of private cars by the then Minister for Industrial Produc–
tion, Marcel Paul, against cheques handed to the C.P. fund. Rationing
had broken down .so completely that nobody whom I asked even knew
what the official rations were on which he was supposed to live. This
inevitably led to the retort whether I knew what
our
rations were and
