Still an Island

"It will be easier for you to come pick our roses of Picardy, and for us it will no longer be a long way to Tipperary."

With those words French Secretary of State for Transportation Pierre Billecocq co-signed the historic 1973 treaty committing France and Britain to support the construction of a 32-mile train tunnel under the English Channel. Plans to link the two nations by "chunnel" had graced the drawing boards of imaginative engineers for nearly 200 years; French Engineer Albert Mathieu's 1802 design shows a coach-and-four trotting through a candlelit tube with ventilating pipes reaching above the waves. But whenever the 19th century pipe dream threatened to come true, Britain got skittish. A characteristically insular reaction came from Sir Garnet Wolseley who, as adjutant general of the British army, warned in 1882 that the tunnel "would be a constant inducement to the unscrupulous foreigner to make war upon us." Last week the British House of Commons, reviewing the issue for the 36th time in 172 years, scuttled the most serious effort yet to build the chunnel.

The official French response was a moderately worded statement of regret. Popular and press reaction was considerably more acidulous toward perfidious Albion. Interpreting the pullout as an anti-European gesture, the daily Le Monde said: "Great Britain is an island and intends to remain one."

Politics undoubtedly played a role, although a minor one. Only last week Prime Minister Harold Wilson tentatively set a June date for a referendum on whether Britain should remain in the Common Market--and some members of the Labor government see the chunnel as an undesirable link with the Continent. Indeed, many Labor M.P.s cheered enthusiastically when the project was killed. Still, the decision was based more on economics than on politics. Just 18 months ago, the cost for the tunnel was estimated at $2 billion. Today the figure has risen to more than $4.5 billion. Although the construction was being financed by private French and British consortiums, the two governments had agreed to guarantee all loans obtained by the two tunnel companies. Moreover, a high-speed rail connection between the tunnel and London would have cost Britain $885 million. For a nation struggling with a 19% inflation, the project started to look like a fiscal albatross.

Happy England. Preliminary work--including a 350-yd. test tunnel--has already cost Britain $70 million, and will cost an additional $50 million in cancellation penalties. For this $120 million, England has, as the London Sunday Times snidely observed, bought herself "two access tunnels to Dover's Shakespeare cliffs." Some Britons, however, are undoubtedly delighted. Their country will remain what William Gladstone called "Happy England. Happy that the wise dispensation of Providence has cut her off by that streak of silver sea . . . partially from dangers, absolutely from the temptations which attend upon the local neighborhood of the continental nations." As for the French, it would still have been a long way to Tipperary, anyway. Unless, of course, Monsieur Billecocq was looking ahead to the even greater improbability of an Anglo-Irish chunnel.

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