Dislocated to Success (24 page)

However, generally, things were stable - which was why I was surprised at a visit from the Spanish Ambassador. Relations with Spain had been publicly frosty, but privately fairly decent. There were constant niggles about Gibraltar, but for instance Panama was going very well, and we had assisted with a very reasonably priced contract with Cunard to replace the treasure ships completely with British secured vessels which would allow the remains of the Spanish fleet to concentrate on the Caribbean trade.

Spain had only recently announced that the last of its attempted colonial rebellions had finally been dealt with. My understanding from our woman in Panama that it was more a case of "driven into the jungle" than put down; they were somewhat twitchy about any more. Unlike the other European powers, the Spanish had an intelligence service which knew what it was doing and had spent some time and money adapting to modern times. Whilst others were working on rifles, artillery and even hot-air balloons, Spain had started playing with radios, semaphores and codes which actually strained the minds of GCHQ for a few minutes.

What the ambassador had was a somewhat dodgy dossier relating to activities in and around Cuba. The Pearl of the Antilles was a very sore point; it had nearly been lost to a slave rebellion, and we had certainly turned a blind eye to some interesting humanitarian support and to a small volunteer flotilla that evacuated people from the final rebel-held port. Indeed, around 90% of our tiny number of asylum cases in 1982 had been from Cuba; most had stayed in the Caribbean, but some had come to London - including their highly charismatic leader, Ángel Marti.

Marti, which he had taken as a nom de guerre, was an extremely intelligent young man who knew how to use his considerable physical and mental prowess to leverage a good position for himself. No ASL march was complete without a speech by Marti, no London Leftist occasion could be deemed a success without him and several Lefty ladies had fallen for his charms. However he was not a stupid man, as was shown by his decent command of somewhat charmingly broken English after only a year in the country, and since Easter he had also been buttering up the right and the centre as well as the left.

Of course, we had this over and over again with a number of Powers. We were not in the business of restricting free speech; whilst we did not support violent revolution, we fully understood those who wished to be freed from their chains or that nations were being held captive against their will.

However, as I had mentioned, the Spanish had developed somewhat of an intelligence service and the Ambassador had plenty of photographs of various people at a charity dinner organised by Mr Branson, sound recordings of some speeches which did rather go beyond the pale and clear evidence of collections being taken to buy arms for rebels. Now this probably would have been something to pass on to the Home Department, the presence of Pinters and Pakenhams be damned, if it wasn't for a couple of pictures that showed a Royal Personage dancing with young Mr Marti. Luckily at this point we managed to persuade certain newspaper columnists that discretion was the better part of valour, but we also had to make promises to Spain to ensure that modern arms didn’t reach the former Cuban rebels - I think this was a wise move, as no one wanted a repeat of the Bay of Pigs.

The party conference of 1983 was not the best in the history of the party; the unexpected loss of the Farnham by-election to the Liberals and the near-loss of the Portsmouth South by-election due to an unsuitable candidate, plus a string of unpleasantly poor local by-election results in the South, had left the voluntary party a little fractious. Unemployment, whilst continuously decreasing, was doing it more slowly than many imagined it would and inflation was rising slightly as price controls were relaxed on material now felt to be sufficiently in supply. To be honest, I found the latter point spurious - 4% inflation was far, far better than anyone would have predicted for 1983 before the dislocation, and Nigel assured us that the long-term trend would be probably be down to around 1-2%. However, having been very generous in 1982, the increases in various rations in 1983 were paltry - the press accused us of having cooked the books somewhat the previous year in order to make things seem a little more rosy before the election. I must admit that there had been some creativity and the use of some barrier stocks that shouldn’t have been used, but essentially GJ-S
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was always looking to try and increase the ration by as much as possible. He had perhaps over-egged the pudding and was paying for it because of bad weather this year.

However, the mood wasn’t helped by quite a large number of bilious delegates from the Southern Home Counties who, no matter what the subject, seemed to think that money was being wasted which could create suitable jobs for their unemployed. I was forced to agree with Tony Homewood - which is not very common for me - that they should shut up, put up and sort things out for themselves. Homewood is one of Nature’s rough men, although his bark is much worse than his bite and his general crudity actually hides a fairly decent heart and brain. As he said to me, it was probably 3 years before the next election and as long as things were turned around by then we would be alright. I tended to agree, but I was somewhat worried about the constant losses of councillors in some areas.

My own speech went down reasonably well; I emphasised how we were making peaceful contacts to boost our trade, and that we were becoming increasingly respected across Europe as neutral arbiters. It wasn’t my finest hour, but there wasn’t that much to go off over the previous year. You can’t bring home a Treaty of Bordeaux every year - not that that pleased the men and women of West Kent. The PM was much picked up from last year, and was pretty much cheered to the rafters on a simple rendition that we were both rolling back the frontiers of the State and also rolling back the frontiers of ignorance.

By the autumn of 1983, we had reached the position where the endless flurry of work had pretty much ended and the Foreign Office was functioning well. There were still some black holes in the Far East, and Lord only knows what was happening in Central Asia, but this wasn't regarded as a problem by Number 10 and she was quite right in her assessment.

In fact, most of the remaining problems in foreign affairs were at home; cis and trans mores are so far apart that three years made little difference. Most powers had learnt that the best thing to do with a transgressing British citizen was to just hand them over to the Embassy, but it didn't stop a constant barrage of outrage. Much of trans-Europe was frankly very unpopular; one or two of the more flamboyant rulers were regarded as amusing but even the more enlightened despots were at best regarded as
opera buffa
figures.

Sweden did try and put over its democratic credentials as a selling point, which whilst weak were much better than just about anywhere else in Europe, and then spoilt it with outrageous protectionism. The United Provinces... well, our poor start and their dogged defence of slavery until 1982 didn't help there either, but they too were a bit further ahead than others - not much, but enough for some of the more intelligent newspapers to notice.

The best people at handling their relations with the UK were the Portuguese; they hadn't taken on their embassy staff for nothing, and although there had been somewhat of a gap in thinking between modern social democrats and Portuguese absolutism the idea of Portugal came first. They even managed, over a period of time, to co-opt a fair number of Brazilians as well - not all of them, but the cis-Brazilian diaspora in the UK had been very small.

The main difficulty was the retention of slavery; there had been a series of proclamations which had promised to remove slavery, but the economic needs of the Portuguese state had also been taken into account. Slavery was more being phased out than removed. For the grand plan to work, a constant stream of revenue was needed - mainly from some very unpleasant gold and diamond mines. Hence the Portuguese had moved into a paid indenture system for the Royal Mines, with promises of a decent lump sum and land at the end of it. Conditions, however, were rather grim to say the least, but it was just about enough to mollify most people.

Of course, British businesses were being engaged hand over fist for contracts in Portugal; Lisbon had stated how much it wanted to spend in real money on preparing for the earthquake, general modernisation and on making Brazil a success. Whilst before the Dislocation such sums would have been laughed at, now they were nearly the only serious non-British game in town.

Part of this was trying to get people to invest in Portugal itself; they had spent some serious money on hiring consultants from the Dorset Institute of Higher Education to teach some English and basic tourism skills to people around Faro and Funchal, where they had lured UK hotel and holiday camp makers into making an investment. Experts were making the vineyards of the Douro, Madeira and the Dão more productive and more palatable, whilst others were working on irrigation and market gardening. We had even briefly touched on the exploitation of some sensitive mineral deposits further up the Douro Valley, but those had unusually been refused.

The Portuguese had also been very busy making business contacts; Maxwell House, the London Rubber Company and John West were all now investing Brazil, Angola and the Cap Verdes. A bunch of Cornish chaps had gone out there, to look for some metal that was used to coat ball-bearings and in transistors, and had started operations. Coalite were the latest ones to be lured there, with the idea that the vast coal deposits of Rio Grande do Sul could be used to sell fuel to the River Plate, to the rest of Brazil and maybe even further afield.

This left Portugal with a huge shortage of labour, in Brazil in particular. They were dealing with this by offering a free passage and either land or money; the intention was mainly to try and get many people out of Lisbon before the earthquake. It was partly succeeding, but our man in Rio said that some of the new emigrants were somewhat unhappy. There was also a small emigration stream in the other directions; because of the long standing alliance, rather more Lisboetas spoke tolerable English than in much of the rest of Europe, and quite a few who didn't want to be farmers in Brazil had become domestic servants in London or had decided to take their luck by trying for BNA.

However, the Portuguese let nothing die on its feet; their latest approach was fascinating. Obviously, we received a number of applications for colonisation from Europe that we rejected; could they possibly have a look at the rejections to offer them a place in Brazil? I resolved to discuss this with Michael; I didn't see anything wrong with the idea and - mercifully for our relations - neither did Michael.

Of course, all this was somewhat moot as, over the winter of 1983/4, an additional number of colonists became available to the Portuguese - and more suitable ones than rejected Catholic Germans, in that they were quasi-Lusophone anyway. Spain had only really recovered very slowly from the after-effects of the war and the losses of the Treaty of Bordeaux. A poor summer had not helped things, and the tendency of Andalusian farmers to grow luxuries for the English market and buy their food elsewhere meant that there were food pressures on other areas. It was something we saw happening in several countries, a ripple effect on food prices leading to one poor and usually remote area becoming at risk of famine. However, in Extramadura, it did lead to famine and quite a savage one - we were tipped off early about it by the Portuguese and were able, in conjunction with them, to make some useful preparations - which also assisted the Portuguese plan to deal with the future Earthquake.

The famine itself was fairly grim; there really was no spare food in Spain - or at least not transportable spare food - although we were told that it wasn’t a major famine, the cheery souls from AgAndFish reckoned that there would probably only be about 50-60,000 dead. How this doesn’t equate to major I don’t know, but they tell me that a not inconsiderable number of people die of malnutrition every winter in most European countries, partly for cost and partly for supply reasons. I know Willie did a sterling job in some of the more remote parts of Ireland in the first years which was related to this.

The Portuguese were willing to help; they also had some spare food because they had starting building up state reserves. They also saw a chance to gain the extra colonists for Brazil that they had long wanted - and ones who, being from a border province, had some command of dialects closely related to Portuguese. They were also willing to assist with paying some of the costs of the operation as it unfolded, which was very fair of them - although they did gain around 50 miles of good quality road we built during the crisis.

The idea was fairly simple: people would be taken in over the border, assessed, given medical treatment and then taken to an easier to supply tent city further down the Tagus; there they would be fed until conditions allowed them to return home. During that time, the Portuguese entertained them by showing them jolly little films of the wonders of Brazil and pointed out that there was free land, financial and food support for the first year and that they would be free farmers with no feudal ties.

Of course, all this depended on the Spanish playing ball, and that appeared to depend on what day of the week it was. To start with there were no problems with people exiting into Portugal, then there were, then there weren’t. It seemed to depend on whether the local lord or the local bishop had issued the last edict. Luckily we managed to get a message through to Madrid about this, and after a couple of weeks of chaos it was all sorted out and the remainder of the operation was successful. Around 40,000 people went to the feeding centres; around 25,000 took the Brazil option, and the majority of the rest returned back to their homes. The main exceptions were some people who had found jobs in Portugal and decided to stay, and a group of around 800 unaccompanied children who were a bit of a problem; they were regarded by the UK as too young to go to Brazil on their own, although the Portuguese disagreed. After a considerable effort, some of them were reunited with their parents - in many other cases the parents had sent the kids so they would survive. We ended up with about 200 orphans, or presumed orphans, between about 7 and 12 (any younger children found places in Portuguese families) who we brought back to the UK and eventually fostered with families in British South East Africa.