Thomas Bain (Orange)

Early life

Bain was born in London. He lived in Kingston upon Thames and near Southampton while attending prep school at Highfield School (Liphook, Hampshire). He suffered from Dyslexia, and made slow progress in the educational system. He was put back two full years in study when he moved to France, where his dyslexia was disregarded in a small town school in the South-West of France (Monsempron-Libos). Later in the suburbs of Paris he was put into the Saint Erambert School (which had collaborated with the Germans during the WWII) "to discipline him". He revolted and was expelled for listening to and discussing AC/DC. In 1982 he moved to Spain, and took up Hispanic Studies in a small private college in Salamanca. Upon return to France he passed the exams to get into the state educational system, a school then called Lyceé Claude Debussy, now called Lyceé Jeanne d'Albret. He excelled and was made Délégué. He qualified for the Classe préparatoire aux grandes écoles. He accomplished his Khâgne in the Lyceé Jules Ferry, one of the topmost (Place Clichy, Paris). At the same time he accomplished his BA Humanities in the radical Paris West University Nanterre La Défense. Bain then migrated to Switzerland, where he accomplished his M. Phil in European Studies at the Institut Universitaire d'Etudes Européennes (IUEE), the institut was founded by Denis de Rougemont, and had a federalist outlook. Later on he attended the doctoral seminars of Wlad Godzich in the University of Geneva.

April 1988

The students of the IUEE (as above), sympathising with many of the faculty in exile, organised two study tours of the Soviet Union. The first one went to Kiev and Moscow, the second to Budapest and Prague. He attended both. The tour of the Ukraine gave him insight into the degree of hostility vis-à-vis Moscow, and the signs of dissidence in the leadership of the Komsomol. In Moscow, a student from the highest school of politics and administration leaked the shape of the army: suicides and an organizational incapacity. Moving on to Budapest, the dissent was quite open, and Bain saw the opportunity of a break-apart of the Communist Block. In a meeting with the then dissident Professor Géza Jeszenszky the option of letting East Germans out of Hungary was discussed as a means of bringing the Wall down. Bain also met with FIDESZ leaders, and learned that recently NGOs in Hungary were allowed to be financed internationally, an open door for the West to finance dissident organisations. He went to Prague to meet leaders of the democratic opposition, in an underground Café called "U Kafku" and further discussed the plan of letting East Germans through Czechoslovakia into Hungary. He was followed in Prague by the police, and in a jest of defiance took them on a 14 kilometre walk around Prague. On his return to the Europa Hotel, the receptionist called him into the lift and explained that the police had been through his belongings. He had to leave. Bain escaped from Prague due to an InterRail pass, he was able to get into a train without buying a ticket (he would have been noticed at the ticket counter). On the train, stooges noticed him but it was too late; the train had already crossed the border into Germany. In Munich, he was hidden by a friend for 5 days, while the German television showed pictures of him as accused of common crimes of murder in Czechoslovakia. He escaped from Munich thanks to former Hungarian exiles, in a freight compartment, then from Zurich to Geneva in a toilet compartment. On arriving in Geneva he went to the house of Professor Dusan Sidjanski. Here he discussed all the plans of the dissidence to bring down the Wall, and subsequently hid for a month in a flat in neighbouring France, in Annemasse. His research report signed with the pseudonym "Orange" was shared with Emile Noel, Secretary General of the European Commission. It was also shared with the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), as well as the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It is said to be one of the key documents that alerted the West of changes in the East, and triggered of a change in their foreign policy towards the East and Central Europe just a year and a half before the Wall falling.

Pro European militancy

In the summer of 1991, Bain led a group of young European enthusiasts from different European Union (EU) Member States during a 2-day meeting in Romainmôtier, Switzerland on the theme "An EU Constitution". The same year he initiated a process in the Budapest University of Economic Sciences (Currently Corvinus University of Budapest) that led to the attribution of a Doctorate Honoris Causa (see Honorary degree) to the President of the EU Commission Jacques Delors (attributed in 1994). He is a member of the UK European Movement and the French Mouvement Européen. He has taken part in the UK Liberal Democrats Brussels Chapter, and has been a close friend of UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg during his European years. In 1993, as shadow director projects for Fidesz, in the Hungarian Ministry of Interior, he revised the firstly refused Hungarian application for the EU. His draft was approved by both the EU Parliament and the EU Commission, paving the way for an accession to the EU for Hungary in the first round of enlargement of the EU. At the same time, Bain has been a public opinion maker in Hungary, with a series of articles published in the Budapest Sun, and the Budapest Week. He has held several postings with the European Commission, including as a diplomat in New Delhi, India.

Alternative activism

Bain's alternative action started after seeing the film "Gandhi" in Madrid at the age of 18. He had a Basque companion, and befriended the Basque cause. In the early eighties he took part in the Aberri Eguna nationalist demonstrations, in despite of serious deterrence by the Spanish Guardia Civil. His basque friends used to call him "la naranja" (because of his orange hair), from which his nickname emerged. He subsequently went to Kreuzberg, Berlin, the heart of alternative Germany. This is where he got a fist sight of the Wall, and a first taste for the underground exchanges between the East and the West.

Bain was militant in the French Lycée system, and as délégué sat on two school boards (Conseils d'établissement). In 1988, Bain took the French Ministry of Education to court for discrimination on the ground of nationality after his refusal to take the CAPES (secondary school teachers' exam). He won his case in 1992 under European law, opening the secondary school exams to foreign European nationals in France and several other countries of the EU.

In 1991, out of idealism, he set up the trainee's newsletter "Le Piston" (nepotism) in the European Commission, and denounced several scandals. For this, he was tortured by the French Direction de la surveillance du territoire (DST) for more than two hours. The "Piston", which lasted for 4 years, is considered by the grapevine in Brussels to be one of the elements that forced the European Commission to adopt a reform including contractual and financial control over all expenditures.

Dyslexia

As soon as 1988 he realised to potential of IT for the dyslexic, in particular the possibility of correcting himself before printing. In 1991–1992 he worked with Microsoft managers in Budapest to determine how to create grammar correctors in Microsoft Word. Bain established the relationship between a database structure of language rules (encoded), and the scientific structural linguistic approach developed in Nanterre University. The matter was taken up as a research project in Harvard University, and finally when it came to be in MS Word, the grammar corrector logic enabled Microsoft to also improve the spelling correctors.

Scholarship

Whilst in the last year of high school, Bain attended the post-graduate seminars of the literary critic Lucette Finasse in the "Collège International de Philosophie" in Paris. Later on he joined the group of young Spanish language scholars that surrounded Golo Mann in the later years of his life, and stayed regularly in Golo Mann's country residency in Berzona, Switzerland.