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800   1 September 2003   

MARS and my magical Uncle Lawrence

This week’s preoccupation with the planet Mars has triggered rich memories for me.  Memories of my favourite uncle, Uncle Lawrence.  

Before WW2, Uncle Lawrence (married to my father’s sister Dilys) had a steady job.  He was a sales agent for Bovril, and in his little Austin Seven he travelled the pharmacies of South Wales and the Midlands ensuring that they never ran short of Bovril.  He was an immensely creative and original man, an amateur inventor and part-time novelist who in the pre-War period published some seven pot-boiler paperback thrillers, the best-known of which was The Kid Glove Skipper.  The routine “steady job” with Bovril seemed nevertheless to satisfy him, as he cruised the Welsh roads planning new inventions, new outrageous plots. 

During WW2 the War Office, with rare perspicacity, recognised him as an inventor, a natural "boffin".  When War broke out, he volunteered and was assigned to a Special Projects Unit dedicated to devising new ways of defending the English Channel Coast against German invasion.  That is what he did throughout WW2, dreaming ever more outlandish devices.  I was aged 10 when the War finished, and I remember him when he returned to his Wye Valley cottage.  I remember his anguish at the thought of having invented an “unsweepable mine”, devised to constitute a last line of defence against an oncoming German invasion fleet.  He thought they might still be threatening key shipping lanes. 

• Lawrence David was, above all, a contented man.  After the War, he returned to his job with Bovril, restarted his car, and worked as a pharmaceutical sales agent until he retired. 

Lawrence and Dilys had no children of their own, and my sister Eleanor and I use to visit them at their home near Monmouth.  We travelled alone by train from Cardiff to Monmouth, on the old Wye Valley line.  Uncle Lawrence was a magic uncle.  He would talk to me about his writing plans, and his determination to make his cottage self-sufficient in electricity, by way of water-powered wheels, positioned in a brook running through his garden.  

Where does Mars come in?  One of his pet post-War plans was to write about the depopulation of Mars, and the origins of the world-based human species.  He was convinced (following through 19^th century theories) that Mars had formerly been populated by humans, but that its atmosphere had thinned, rendering human life impossible, with oxygen and water running out.  Humans first tried to bring water from the iced-up poles, by canal to the Martian Equator.  When that failed, the last humans had devoted all their energies to building space-ships and a small expedition eventually succeeded in escaping from Mars, landing on Earth in the north-Indian region.  That was his theory.

That explained both the “missing link” in the ape-to-human genetic chain (another 19^th century preoccupation) and the concentration of civilised life in the cradle of North India.  For a 12-year-old like me, these theories – and his telling of them - were magical, riveting. 

But I remember Uncle Lawrence principally for one reason.  He never did write again, after WW2.  He never did get the water-wheels going.  He had no further inventive ideas.  But his gift was to talk to me as an absolute equal.  There was no condescension, no “talking down”, no concession to childhood.   Lawrence stands out in my memory as the one adult (my parents not excepted) who conveyed this sense of profound equality - with a child.  Most adults seem, however unconsciously, to modify their style in their communication with children, with many using a different tone of voice, even different forms of speech.  There was none of that with Uncle Lawrence.  He would explain everything to me, invite my contributions and debate them, on the footing that I was self-evidently his equal. 

• That was heady stuff. Those were the memories which flooded back this week.  And I try to honour each child I meet, in precisely the same way.

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801  1 September  2003  

Reasserting Political Sovereignty
Ryanair, and Cancun

What does the withdrawal of Ryanair’s Strasbourg Airport subsidy have to do with Cancun, and the WTO Summit in September?    

They both raise the same central political question about about the primacy of democratic sovereignty.  When is it reasonable for Governments to aid “their own” economies, by favouring certain trading initiatives? 

At Cancun, the third-world WTO members will be arguing at Cancun that they should be allowed to “intervene” in markets where they adjudge such intervention to be in the interests of their countries’ economies. 

At Strasbourg, the Chamber of Commerce argued that it was reasonable for them to forego £1m pa in airport charges to Ryanair, if that meant making cheap direct flights from Luton to Strasbourg economic.   Brussels ruled the Strasbourg subsidy to be illegal under the EU treaty. 

The US Government will be seeking, at Cancun, to prevent any comparable advantage being accorded to local enterprise, or local state initiatives, inhibiting market penetration by the corporate sector (in many cases, the US multinational giants).  In both cases, the drive is to promote free trade by outlawing the exercise of political discretion.

The advantages of “free trade” are in my view self-evident.  Trading systems have always been too complex and too diverse for them to be “managed” by Governments – otherwise that in time of war or other exceptional circumstance, and then only on a short-term basis.  The interests of humankind lie in developing flexible (or “responsive”) trading systems which are self-regulating, capable of adapting to change without governmental intervention.  I remain committed to that perception.

• But I consider that Governments should remain free to assert their sovereignty if they wish.  Even if they may be "unwise" to do so...

I see no reason whatever why Governments should not decide to intervene, by way of the exercise of their political discretion.  That is what political freedom is about - even if it should be, on occasion, used unwisely.  I see no reason whatever why the City of Strasbourg should not use its own tax income to bring more tourists to the city.  State authorities should make very sparse use of such powers, for they can upset other interests and prove very disruptive – but is that not of the essence of political power?   I used Swansea City Council subsidies in 1983 to promote the development of an air-taxi service from Swansea Airport: the project failed, and but I do not consider the attempt to have been misconceived.  I also subsidised the launch of patent agents’ practice in Swansea – that practice is still thriving, without subsidy, twenty years later, and has greatly strengthened the professional infrastructure of the City.

Protectionism can be very unwise and destructive - the Indian and Brazilian economies are still painfully emerging from decades of vicious protectionism.  The “Cuba path” remains a hazardous one, but it ought to be open for adoption, by the poorest countries, without being visited by the outrageous privations visited upon Cuba by the US.  The political lessons of protectionism are being rapidly learnt, even by the protectionist French and the Irish – and the penalties of excessive market intervention are likely to grow greater, as globalised trading networks proliferate.

But judging just when a measure of subsidy or protection is appropriate is an aspect of political sovereignty – and US corporate interests must not be allowed to extinguish the springs of  political independence in any country, let alone the impoverished countries of the Third World.

We, under the leadership of a UK Labour Government, should be demonstrating our sensitivity to the sovereignties of the Third World.  We should become the thinking advocates of free trade – even if it means distancing ourselves from the business-led Republican US Government.

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