The Tories pride themselves on being “family-friendly”, says Giles Fraser. Yet their belief in nurturing this precious institution doesn’t extend to “those of us who fall in love with foreigners”. Under a policy introduced in 2012 – and upheld last week by the Supreme Court – Britons applying to bring a non-EU partner or spouse to live with them in the UK must earn at least £18,600 a year. So no problems for the Queen and Prince Philip, and an effective bar to “scam marriages set up for money, or lonely men conned into acquiring mail-order brides from Belarus over the internet”. But what about the rest of us? Nearly 40% of Britain’s working pop­ulation, and a majority of its young people, earn less than that; in which case you and your partner either have to live apart or “shove off and set up family life elsewhere”. When my foreign-born wife and I went to a registry office to set a date for our marriage, we were interrogated as if we were “smuggling heroin though passport control”. The UK is now “the least-welcoming country to mixed-nationality couples in the Western world”.  (Giles Fraser, The Guardian).

Returning from France a year or two ago, my wife, who is American, had a very unpleasant conversation at UK passport control in Paris with a very aggressive official.  She was reluctantly allowed into England, but even though she is legally  allowed  to be there for up to six months in a year.  The effect of this sort of treatment  is discouraging for those who, not contemplating immigration, are simply visiting for more than a week or two (we were staying 4 months). At one point we talked about her staying in England for several years as my spouse, in order to apply for  British citizenship.  For various reasons we never did it, but now the time has passed – it is just too difficult, queueing at the Croydon office being just a small part of the problem.  Britain, once uniquely open-minded and well-informed about the people and politics of foreign countries, is perceived to be suspicious and sometimes even hostile to foreigners, taking its cue from the right-wing Tories, “cabin’d,  cribbed, confined, bound in by saucy doubts and fears”.

My father spoke excellent French, good enough for him to be an  RAF liaison officer between the British and the Free French forces after D- Day.  He loved France, as my wife and I do, and would have been devastated, not only about the current state of French politics, but about the fate of smaller, ancient and historic towns in la France profonde that he showed me back in 1949, when, thanks to the war, you felt you were stepping back at least a hundred years in time, or more.

On March 1st the New York Times carried a story about Albi, one of the oldest and most attractive of these old towns in Southern France.  The advent of supermarkets and out-of- town shopping has decimated the economic life of the town.  The food shops and the market have gone, the cafes and shops boarded up and deserted.  What thrives are the hotels and tourist souvenir shops, and presumably the  restaurants savvy enough to supply international food to an international audience.  The place is becoming a museum, like Carcassonne or Mont St. Michel. (This, by the way, has happened in Britain, too, only most of the towwns affected are not as picturesque as the French ones)

Of course, young people have been abandoning these towns for decades in favour of Paris or abroad. The French have done a great job, with the help of the EU, keeping the countryside looking like countryside, even if the shepherd and the cowherd have disappeared, and the average age of the “paysans” is, well, rather high.   But, alas, the great tide of mass marketing is destroying the towns.  How long will it be before tourists conclude that they’ve seen enough museums?  I am sure that, were he alive today, Epicurus would mourn with us the loss of the old, relaxed – and at one time the seemingly never-changing – French way of life.