Word: britain
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...except refer the controversy back to the Western Foreign Ministers, who will meet in London this week. Herriot's callers were escorted to the door by five ushers in evening dress. As the delegates got into their cars, Paul Reynaud told a British journalist that on this issue Britain appeared en mauvaise posture. "Yes," the Briton translated freely, "we are on a bad wicket...
Lancashire v. Lyon. What had happened to Western Union? Last year, Winston Churchill had grandly advocated the "grand design." All that Europe heard from Britain on the subject now was what one U.S. newsman called "the dull plop-plop" of Ernie Bevin's speeches, urging step-by-step progress. A British M.P. last week explained: "The French plan is an effort to pass on to some kind of European government the problems which the French government has so much trouble solving. Some call it 'escapism.' I prefer to call it the search for a short...
...point this way. In any effective European federation, tariff barriers would come down. That might mean, under a free economy, that some inefficient Lancashire textile plant would close down while production would be expanded in a Lyon factory, better situated for general European trade. In a planned economy (which Britain's Socialist government considers indispensable to Western Union), the Lancashire-Lyon shift would be the subject of a formal government decision. It would come up for discussion in the kind of assembly the French want (say the British), and it would stir up nationalist resentment in Lancashire, which would...
Wine v. Potatoes. Behind the British-French argument on a European assembly lies a vast difference between Britain's and France's national way of life. The British are fighting a hard, increasingly successful battle for economic survival through planned austerity. The French have chosen a sometimes crooked middle road between a free economy and socialism, rely almost entirely on U.S. help for survival; as a result France has one of Europe's weakest currencies...
...French are beset by Communist sabotage, and a black market raised to the status of a national institution. How hard it would be to make these economies jibe is shown by France's wine industry, which traditionally depended on exporting its luxury products to Britain. Austeritarian Britain can no longer afford them. Some Britons coldly suggest that the French would do better to pull up some of their vines and plant potatoes instead...