Can Britain Work It Out?

by FRANCIS and KATHARINE DRAKE

1

WHILE the rest of the world, with varying interest, is watching the impact of Labor and Planned Economy on England, John Bull himself, in a frayed shirt and multi-mended socks, is anxiously eyeing the clock. It was wound up last year with American dollars: $3,750,000,000 voted by this country to help the war-mauled British to their feet. These dollars are running out frighteningly fast — 60 a second, 5 million a day. By autumn, half the Loan will be gone, but Britain is still much less than halfway to her goal.

Today, in fact, Britain is rather in the position of a crippled horse, forcing the pace along a treadmill that is moving remorselessly in the opposite direction. Although she is covering ground twice as fast as before the war, to win her race with the clock she must speed up almost twice as fast again. Unless she can do this, she will be unable to pay even her food bills when the Loan runs out. Will she succeed? That is a question of towering importance not merely to Britain but to every nation hopeful of keeping the world in democratic balance.

Food is Britain’s Problem No. 1. She has plenty of others — a vast debt at home, crushing obligations abroad, the upkeep of 1½ million men in uniform, a defaced homeland still to be repaired, expanding experiments with Nationalization — but warding off starvation, that is her greatest worry and the first job of the American Loan. It is alleged from time to time that she is using our dollars as a trade weapon against us — that we may emerge from post-war headaches to find John Bull complacently astride the fattest markets. There is no reason to suppose that Britain would recoil instinctively from such a thought. But to accuse her of it at the present time is on a par with accusing a drowning man of trying to keep his pants dry.

The Loan (together with a smaller one from Canada) represents Great Britain’s lifeline. This is the way the money is being spent: —

To make the Loan last longer, the British are continuing to live on an austerity diet, a regime of skimping monotony that would raise goose flesh in an ordinary American home. They are being urged to superhuman effort on this basic ration per week: 1 quart of milk, 1 egg, 2 ounces of butter, 20 cents’ worth of meat (the equivalent of two small lamb chops), 2½ ounces of tea, 2 ounces of cheese, 1 ounce of cooking fat, 3 ounces of bacon, 8 ounces of sugar, and 2 pounds, 10 ounces of bread. Outmaneuvering the ration is a next to impossible feat for the common man. If a family keeps chickens, it must forfeit its egg ration in exchange for feed. If it keeps enough chickens, the Government collects the eggs.

Hobbled by the fat famine, British cooking has deteriorated to an all-time low. Not even that bulldog tenacity which from the Norman Conquest down has looked askance at Variations on the Boiling Theme can relish the stupefying lengths of boiling imposed on it today. For seven lean years families have faced each other across unending vistas of boiled mutton, boiled beef, boiled fish, boiled potatoes, boiled cabbage, boiled and insufferable Brussels sprouts, boiled fruit, boiled pudding. In the shortage of sugar and seasoning, nothing has taste. Gray, stodgy war bread stuns the stomach like a dip from a cement mixer. A fresh orange, a lemon, a fresh anything, is almost beyond price. A whole young generation has been bred without a working knowledge of a cookie jar, a homemade cake, a fistful of salted peanuts.

There are a thousand other ways in which it would be bliss to spend part of the Loan. Every house screams for paint and plaster, for wallpaper, for repairs. If a ceiling falls down — and they are constantly falling — it stays down for six months and then only plasterboard, without the plaster, is permitted. Every chair calls for new covers, every bathroom for towels, every bed for linen. The fact that even Sir Stafford Cripps is poking toes through tattered sheets at night, that even Buckingham Palace is minus curtains in the upper windows, is no longer news. In all walks of life, people are out at the knees, the elbows, the seats of their pants. On top of licking the spoon, the British have had to learn how to patch, mend, turn, make over, haunt secondhand shops, to renovate clothing that few Americans would keep to wash the dog. They have learned how to dry dishes on scraps of old shirts and tablecloths, to cover chairs with pieced potato sacks, to extend the lives of tens of thousands of dilapidated underclothes with worn-out sheets and pillow slips.

A London family, approached at random, goodnaturedly provided the following sartorial footnote: wife in coat and skirt jigsawed out of her deceased father’s Sunday suit, her shoes, which pinched, bought from a neighbor who had bought them secondhand from someone who had bought them new in Switzerland; husband, in a suit acquired secondhand at an Odds-and-Ends sale, “a bit of luck, really, because he’d used up all his own coupons getting the boys presentable for school”; daughter (aged 24) in underclothes made from a set of old chintz slip covers, in shapeless Utility stockings warranted to sink even the streamlined Dietrich legs; daughter (aged 20) also slip-covered, but in nylon stockings, “taken in a bit at the toes,” prized handout from a homewardbound American two sizes larger.

To furnish food, the Government has lopped off every nonessential import barring two: (a) Tobacco, (b) Movies. It is a nice point to decide whether to make austerity complete or whether the curtailment of these small dissipations might not indeed turn out to be the straw that cracked the camel’s back.

Isolated reminders of Britain’s superb workmanship — a heavy silk dressing gown, a pigskin bag, a tea set far removed from coarse Utility ware — will find their way occasionally into West End shopwindows and stay there for a week or two, magnificent against a background of dingy consumer goods. The tag reads plainly: “For Export Only”; and the passing stares, while wistful, are seldom surly. The people know how necessary it is to eat. With 80 per cent of densely populated England under cultivation, using more tractors proportionately than any other country in the world, Britain has already pushed her food production to the limit — a limit that maintains only one half the austerity ration.

American visitors going down for the third time in a morass of Brussels sprouts let fly impetuously with: “ Why do you stand for it? Surely some decent food and a few rounds of clothing aren’t going to bust the country?”

The British are standing for it because they must. They have no choice between present living standards and bankruptcy. A quarter of all their assets were wiped out by the war: factories, machinery, houses, half of their shipping, half of their foreign stocks and bonds — a total of 30 billion dollars. These losses are over the dam, but their foreign responsibilities are a continuing burden. If they abandoned these, it would free about 1¾ billion dollars annually to relieve pressure on the home front. But to pull out of Palestine and India might precipitate civil war between Arab and Jew, Hindu and Moslem, bring death to millions in India through famine, and extend an open invitation to Russia. If Britain withdrew from the Rhineland, who would feed her zone in Germany?

With such a setup, Britain’s hope of solvency lies in the amount of raw material she can ram into the industrial hopper at home and sell abroad for hard cash. Only goods can help to meet the food bills when the Loan runs out; only time can get the goods rolling. Time is what our dollars are giving her — not much, perhaps not enough, but at least some time.

2

THE real heart of England’s trouble is not the Right, the Left, Imperialism, Conservatism, Communism, or any other ism. It is arithmetic. Statistics are tiresome, but in the following external balance sheet, familiar as their own family budgets to British men and women, is the key to their predicament: —

This statement is the activating force behind Britain’s policy today. It explains why she dare not import more and better food, why she cannot improve the clothing ration, why she is building ships night and day to boost her shipping income to its pre-war level, why she wants a self-supporting Germany.

In her struggle toward recovery, Britain’s most harrowing shortage is manpower. Her war casualties, killed and disabled, numbered 600,000. The six-year diversion of most of her youth into some kind of war service has added the handicap of inexperience on nearly all skilled trades, slowing down output. Controls, including rationing and Civil Service, channel 2.1 million into white-collar work. Conscription, the necessity for keeping up the biggest peacetime army in history, cuts off 1.5 million more. From a remaining manpower of 18 million, 11.5 million must be diverted to supply the armed forces and to keep the island going via farming, shops, transportation, utilities, essential trades, and so forth, leaving only 6.5 million available for manufacturing industries.

None of these manpower shortages can be laid on the doorstep of the Labor Government. It is arguable, however, that in these critically numbered days some of the ideological plans for mass benefit now being pressed are out of step with the speediest stride back to recovery. New branches of constantly expanding Government service demand more and more clerks to cope with more and more lists and forms. The 40-hour week and higher wage scale demanded by the Trades Union Congress — now almost a Government Department — must boost the cost and narrow the profit of every single export. It can hardly be called the short cut to a 70 per cent production increase when so little labor is available.

It is a further fact that a recent public opinion poll revealed that 40 per cent of the population between the ages of 20 and 30 wanted to emigrate. This is an all-time high. The present lack of shipping rules out any substantial amount of emigration, but it is not a rosy outlook for any country to be threatened with the loss of 40 per cent of Tomorrow’s mainstay, of its youngest and strongest blood.

This shortage of manpower coupled to the urgent need for output leaves the signpost pointing in just one direction — machine power; and it is plain, beginning with the mechanization of the mines, that the planning experts of the Labor Government are bearing this in mind. Much of Britain’s total machinery was destroyed or worn out during the war, much of it is obsolete, leaving a woeful shortage, but the problem goes deeper even than that. The British are undeniably inventive but their machine-mindedness has never exerted itself conspicuously in the direction of mass production. Topflight craftsmen, they have excelled in turning out hand-finished products of incomparable quality, time and price no object, for which, prior to World War II, there had always been a sufficiency of well-heeled customers. Oddly enough, British management and British labor have been equally squeamish about the machine— management because it has feared the collapse of prices, labor because it has feared the collapse of employment, of its traditionally plentiful if poorly paid jobs.

In a land where the vast majority of homes are without telephones, refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, where not one family in seven owns a car, not one in 10,000 has steam heating, and where much of the haulage is still done with horse and cart, a certain preoccupation with mass-producing machines seems a bit overdue. By American standards of comfort and laborsaving, Britain has been a land of makeshifts: quaint for a visit, exasperating for a prolonged stay. That England can no longer afford to live without modernization is perhaps best appreciated by a quick look at her coal industry.

It would be hard to unearth a more congenital example of unimaginative thinking than the example of Britain fooling around with her richest natural resource. Aptly described by Herbert Morrison as the “key to survival,”coal provides practically all the power for British industry and all the heat for homes. Hacking away by hand at their filthy, backbreaking jobs, each man producing only one sixth of the daily output of his machine-aided counterpart in this country, generations of British miners have patiently heaved millions of unnecessary tons of coal to the surface in order not to distract the nation from the time-honored custom of wasting it. Out of England’s annual production of 180 million tons of coal, over one quarter is wasted in houses and plants by antiquated methods of use. The export value of the wasted coal would be roughly 375 million dollars a year. Before the war she exported millions of tons annually. Today she has not nearly enough for her own desperate need.

The nation has gravely explained away the waste as an investment in national health. Huddled before open fires, scratching their chilblains, twinging with rheumatism, sneezing convulsively, for decades the English have loyally maintained that steam heat is “unhealthy” or “only necessary in a climate like yours.”They have worn “longies,” drunk gallons of tea, installed tiny electric heaters, hugged stone hotwater bottles, turned and twisted in every direction to avoid being evenly warm. Prodding them with news that an open fire utilizes only 15 per cent of the potential value of coal against 60 per cent for central heating, that it thus wastes three tons out of every four, has been like prodding a leopard.

In a single block, as many as 1500 chimney pots cradle the foetus of the notorious London fog, which, along with chilblains, the British have accepted politely as an unalterable Act of God. Tens of millions of dollars have been jettisoned by pea-soupers in business losses, in extra illumination, even in soap, because they did not choose to convert. Now that it would be expedient to try, now that they are so short of coal that the supply of power to factories and houses is being perpetually interrupted, they cannot afford the labor or the material to do so.

Many a British industry, from plumbing on, is still a prisoner of the past. The automobile industry is Britain’s third largest, but the automobile itself has always been out of reach of British workmen. This is not to say that Britain can achieve only the more aristocratic designs like Daimlers and Bentleys. She has demonstrated that she can make cheaper cars too, and it is no fault of the industry if their appearance often suggests a clientele of Singer midgets. Successive Governments — Conservative, Liberal, and Labor alike — have gone doggedly down the years, depriving the industry of its opportunities and the poor man of his car, by plastering the finished product with fanatical taxation. Taxes are seven times the American rate, and are based on horsepower, with the result that 90 per cent of British cars are 12 h.p. (and under) cockleshells, too cramped for comfort, too puny for utility, and so diversified as to engine size that the industry can reap the benefit neither of standardization nor of mass production. On top of this there is a tax of 16 cents for gasoline, bringing the cost per gallon to 46 cents. Produced under corresponding conditions, our Fords and Chevrolets would have to sell in the United States for about $3000 apiece, and gasoline for 90 cents a gallon. Yet so abiding is the tradition that it is not seemly for cars and lower classes to intermix that the sportsman sliding by in his $16,000 Rolls-Royce and the laborer ogling it from the sidewalk have been equally enchanted by the splendor of achievement. Few have pondered the mass benefit of translating the cost of one super-deluxe model into twelve standard assembly-line jobs.

Constitutionally allergic to change, Britain is now facing the necessity for an overwhelming change-over from quality craftsmanship to assembly-line quantity, in keeping with the Government’s program for “low-cost, laborsaving production.” Furthermore she is obliged to about-face just at a time when she is out of breath, overtired, and perspiring in her race with the clock. Not to change is to invite suicide. To change is to invite nerve-racking delays, for mechanization of even one such industry as coal cannot be accomplished overnight. Factories cannot be revamped, machinery assembled, new methods learned without the attendant setbacks of trial and error. Summed up, therefore, it is very doubtful whether machine power will have had much of a chance to boost production before the Loan runs out.

3

THE job of retooling British production to meet the present situation is of necessity up to management, to a group of men who have always been their own bosses. As a class, these men have been primarily interested in the furthering of traditional patterns of production, and in finance and salesmanship. They created world markets brilliantly and they hung onto them until the war blocked them off. Today, it is no longer a matter of resuming business at the same old stand, for the same old prices. Dominions and Colonies, and many of Britain’s most profitable customers, have moved towards self-support by setting up factories of their own. Britain can only regain this part of her foreign trade if she can undersell the competition of these new plants. Eighty-eight per cent of her exports are manufactured, and underselling is doubly difficult. First she has to absorb the cost of raw materials, which have risen sharply, and of fetching them home before she converts them into goods. On top of that she now has to absorb the cost of higher wages and shorter hours.

To organize the effort on a national basis, the Government has plunged headlong into a Planned Economy. The instruments of this policy are Controls and Nationalization. Controls are so detailed and require so much paper work that their surface effect is very much like that of Nationalization. But there is a difference, and a vital one. Controls can be revoked and, on or off, they leave the private manager nominally in command. Nationalization is irrevocable, and under it the manager becomes a servant of the state.

Such a revolution in managerial status on top of a revolution in production methods would seem to require a program of ten or twenty years, with gradual transfer of authority. Judging by present developments, the Labor Government is jumping in with both feet. To date, it has either completed or initiated the nationalization of the Airlines, the Bank of England, Mines, Medicine, Cables and Wireless, Rail and Road Transport, and Oil, with Electricity, Gas, Water, and Steel coming up. In addition it has substantially nationalized the working control of Land and Agriculture by Enabling Bills.

The speed of these actions is creating a growing feeling of apprehension, a feeling that the Government may be leaping first and looking later. A case in point was the Bill for the Nationalization of Medicine, bustled through without consulting the British Medical Association. It was promptly repudiated by the doctors, leaving the Government with a billion-dollar scheme and nobody to implement it. The feeling of apprehension is reflected in a question raised recently in the House of Commons, and commonly echoed throughout England: “Are we not risking the chance of doing anything effective by attempting to do too much?”

The division of view on Government action does not concern any challenge of the end goal — greater production. On that issue all parties are agreed. The difference hinges on the respective merits of public and private ownership in obtaining this production. Government leaders claim that public ownership will enormously stimulate the production drive, but they are short on explanations of exactly how or why this should be so. Sir Stafford Cripps defines the formula as “an integration of partnership between the Government, as the over-all planners, and the employers and employees as the executive of the plan.”

It is not clear why a Government which includes in its Cabinet not a single industrialist should inspire better planning than a class of men who, whatever their shortcomings, have spent their lives among the problems of production. Nor is it clear why a system in which Government authority must be exercised through a number of Boards and Commissions should work better or faster than a simple directive between boss and employee. The red-tape regime undergone by our own country during the war seems to indicate rather the reverse. With the best men and the best will in the world, Boards and Commissions cannot avoid running into the difficulties implicit in management by Government. An urgent retooling expenditure, for instance, may have to be referred to the Board of Trade, the Ministry of Supply, the Bank of England, the Treasury, and, if it is major enough, to the Cabinet. It is likely to find itself, at every step, in competition with other Commissions campaigning for appropriations and priorities.

Private management is already protesting that it is not possible to raise production under such conditions. It complains that the planning is unrealistic and unimaginative, that administration is inexpert, and that it is one thing to charge a Commission with “providing an efficient, adequate, economical and properly integrated System of Transport” (or of anything) and quite another thing to get it. Although daring and initiative are obviously needed to galvanize Britain’s recovery, it has still to be demonstrated whether these two qualities can combust spontaneously in the hearts of men who have had their plants taken from them, who can never again own shares in them, whose status is no longer boss but servant. Whether Nationalization is right or wrong, the crux of Britain’s whole experiment is the quality of management supplied by the state.

If the professional managements decide to withdraw rather than work under such conditions, it is not clear where new ones with comparable experience are to be found. The Government does not anticipate any such move, but it is not impossible, particularly in view of its policy of deferring to the Trades Union Congress, whose members put it into power. The T.U.C.’s first consideration, complains management, is not so much to achieve output as to make employers civil servants in a Government controlled by Labor. Management feels that Nationalization is being driven through primarily to extend this control, that the Government is being used to enforce the closed shop, and that appointment of Block Captains to deliver the Government vote at the next election is unprecedented in free-voting Britain.

Uncertain when or where the lightning will Strike next, management — in the steel industry, for example — is hesitant to risk capital expansion on programs which it may or may not be able to see through to the end. The Government counters by saying: “It is thought that only about 20 per cent of industry will be publicly owned, while the remaining 80 per cent will be left to private ownership.” It is a singular coincidence, replies management, that the nationalized industries are the very ones that form the bases of economic power and thus control all the remaining industries.

A house that is divided against itself cannot stand. More than deprivation, a growing disunity between Government and Industry must reduce almost to a vanishing point Great Britain’s chances of reaching her production goal. Even with working harmony, the chances of reaching it before the Loan runs out are none too good. If she cannot better them, she will find herself face to face with collapse. If she cannot feed herself, she cannot succor others. With no alternative but starvation, it is hard to see how she will be able to avoid making a move of world consequence, by scratching from her Balance Sheet these two vital items: Military forces abroad, $1,200,000,000, and Help to Germany, Italy, etc., $500,000,000. If Great Britain is driven to do this, the democratic world will find itself confronting a question mark of very grave significance.

As far as Britain is concerned, such a move, combined with a moderate rise in exports, would at last enable her to keep herself afloat economically. But it would be a sorry day if the British, working their hearts out to be free from debt, were to find that in their preoccupation they had lost a deeper freedom, one that had always been their best-loved, most fiercely guarded heritage. The Planned State is being put together in Britain by men of honest purpose and ideals. But Planned States have been put together before by well-intentioned men, only to be hijacked, prostituted, concluded in chaos and in a nation’s shame. When the minority voice is silenced, the road to serfdom is opening up ahead. Already in Britain it is becoming a condition of employment to belong only to unions affiliated with the T.U.C. No approved union, no job. Already there have been attempts to limit the jurisdiction of the courts, to deny the individual full rights over his house and land, to deprive him of the rewards of initiative. Doing what one is told to do is not so many steps away from thinking what one is told to think.

Outwardly, the people of England are carrying on much as before, short though they are of almost everything but patience. The people may be shabby, but they still keep their island neat and pretty as a park. Crimson-robed judges still dispense the same incorruptible justice. Housewives still share their rations and fight their everlasting battles of making do. Men still put their shilling on the dogs, stop for a pint of mild-and-bitter, for an argument about the Test Match.

Inwardly, there is a slow, growing uneasiness. The people, so patiently working for better days, are less patiently watching the growing invasions of their individual freedom, so scrupulously respected by every previous British Government. Something more than rationing is worrying the British people. During a recent attempt to strong-arm the nurses of a big London hospital into a closed-shop union, the nurses protested and were roughly dismissed. Instantly headlines blazed. Editorials crackled. A long, menacing growl arose across the nation. The Government backed down, the growl subsided. But for a moment there had been prescience that the vast irrevocable powers of Nationalization, if misdirected, could lead, over the dead body of John Bull, to One Party, One Leader — to Despotism.