London

AS THE year came to its close, the public mood in Britain seemed to be one of extraordinary disenchantment. By the beginning of winter the prestige of the American Administration had fallen in London to a new low. So had that of Britain’s own Government. There was tension in industry and a mixture of apathy and anger in politics. NATO seemed to be viewed with as much cynicism as enthusiasm.

Yet, under the surface, a feeling of much greater closeness to the United States and Canada now lives and grows. There is a fundamental stability in Great Britain too, in spite of appearances. A one-billion-dollar surplus of trade, which Britain will almost certainly be found to have achieved in 1957, is likely to form an unexpected commentary on a year marked, apparently, by economic crisis.

In its own peculiar British way the mood has closely paralleled that in France. The British have not daubed the walls of Parliament with the slogan “Down with Members of Parliament!” as the French during the October political void wrote on the walls of their National Assembly. Instead the British went out in significant numbers and voted at by-elections for a party that could not possibly form a Government.

The Tory Government has lost support. But Her Majesty’s Opposition, the formidable Labor Parly, has gained but little of it. Most of the lost votes have been going to the Liberals. In three important by-elections in 1957 at Edinburgh, Gloucester, and Ipswich— Liberal candidates, although they did not win, increased their proportion of the vote by more than 20 per cent in each case. The Tory Government lost most of these votes. But twice the Labor Party lost support. And on one occasion when a Labor candidate gained, his proportionate gain was .5 per cent.

Joseph Grimond, forty-four-year-old leader of the Liberal Party — a tall and tousled Etonian — represents the most remote constituency in Britain, the isles of Orkney and Shetland, to the north of the northernmost tip of the mainland of Scotland. In the House of Commons he leads a party of five. Grimond has some hopes of sparking a great Liberal revival. But he is aware that until now it is less his party’s program — prison reform, new roads — that has caused the switch in votes than public impatience with both the major parties.

Public apathy

Prime Minister Macmillan has notably failed to rouse public enthusiasm, except on rare occasions. Britons are not at all sure they understand him. There was an odd scene in the lobbies of Parliament after his first speech to the new session in November. He had seemed on this occasion tired, and his speech sounded dull. Reporters gathered to discuss whether or not what he had said had been important. The London Times and the Manchester Guardian apparently decided it had not been, for they threw away his best lines next morning. The popular press, however, made them the big news.

The pith of what Macmillan had to say was found in these phrases: “The nations of the free world must make an even greater contribution of their national sovereignty in the common cause. . . . All this requires changes, adaptations of many of our most ancient national traditions.” It reads like strong stuff. It has been the Prime Minister’s recurring theme ever since. But nobody has been sure whether or not Macmillan meant anything unusual by it. This is the measure of his failure to put across himself and his beliefs.

Lord Hailsham, the vigorous new chairman of the Conservative Party, has roused party workers to a new pitch of enthusiasm. He has been seriously canvassed as a successor to Macmillan as Prime Minister, even though he sits remotely in the House of Lords.

Hailsham’s hand is seen in the intended reform of the Lords by the creation of special peerages for life only. He himself would have much preferred to remain plain Mr. Quentin Hogg, M.P., but he inherited his peerage willy-nilly from his father. He protested against inheritance forcefully but ineffectively at the time. Yet, colorful as he is, Lord Hailsham has so far made little impact on the public.

Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labor Party, in pushing through as the new platform his own brand of milder new-look socialism has also strengthened his position inside his own party. Outside the party he is well liked but not popular. The new socialism quickens no pulses.

Aneurin Bevan, by espousing the cause of British possession of an independent H-bomb, has lost some leftwing sympathy. But he, too, has gained little new support outside the party to offset this. Possibly the public half agrees with Bevan’s own assessment: “Either Nikita Khrushchev must be a supreme actor, or I am very credulous.” The weakness of Bevan as a potential foreign minister lies in the fact that he seems to believe that in order to come to terms with Russia it is only necessary to wish to do so.

Nellie McGrail’s tuppence

Nellie McGrail has been the winter’s popular heroine. Widow McGrail — young, modest, poor, and likable—won $578,760. tax free, on a football-pool gamble. (Her winning forecast of that Saturday’s results cost her twopence.) This was a modern version of the well-loved Cinderella story.

Mrs. McGrail’s winnings were significant in more ways than one. The pools, on which the British now regularly stake in pennies and shillings more than $200 million a year, flourish as an unconscious reaction against the welfare state. They reverse the usual procedure. They take money from the many and redistribute it every week among the few. Millions of Britons take it for granted that this redistribution — in which the chances of an all-correct selection of forecasts, like Mrs. McGrail’s, are one billion to one — represents their only chance of ever being rich and acquiring capital.

It is not only this belief that the Macmillan Government has to buck, but the actual fact that in modern Britain, thanks largely to the socialist revolution, capital has become very much more important than income. If invested wisely, even Mrs. McGrail’s great fortune would produce, after taxes, an income of less than $10,000 a year. But she can hope to make far more out of capital gains, which arc still tax free.

Oddly enough it was the sudden arrival in space of the Soviet Sputniks that dramatically pointed the moral of this widow’s tale. Britain, like America, must produce more scientists. But Britain has not only to produce them; it has to find out how to keep them. Most of the new scientists come from families with little or no capital. But professional incomes, without capital to back them, are so little worth earning nowadays that an alarming number of trained technologists are already emigrating.

It is estimated that in the past seven years 6 per cent of the postgraduate chemists and 10 per cent of physicists have left Britain for either the United States or Canada. Others have gone to Australia and Africa. The total drain of skill is unassessable.

Frightening inflation away

One aim of Peter Thorneycroft’s intended economic revolution is to restore the balance in some measure between industrial wages and professional salaries. The chancellor of the exchequer hopes at the same time to get out of the Keynesian era of perpetual and more or less gentle inflation — wages have risen 90 per cent in twelve years, output 30 per cent, costs 60 per cent.

The chancellor’s main weapons, so far, have been high interest rates and hardened credit — “There just will not be the money available for inflationary wage increases” — but his aim is to frighten rather than to wound. Anything approaching a return to pre-Keynesian days, bringing on a slump apparently as an act of deliberate financial policy, would complete the public ruin of the Conservatives’ reputation. The party is well aware of this.

But the Labor Party is equally aware that support of widespread strike action for higher wages now, when there may be no question of real hardship involved, could lead to its own political ruin, too. In fact, socialists are convinced that the only election the Tories could possibly win would be one arranged suddenly during an industrial clash over wages while employment is full and pay is high. Labor means to avoid that at all costs.

There is still the possibility of such a clash; transport union leader Frank Cousins has roundly declared that there will be no wage restraint. There is still the possibility also that the credit squeeze could of its own accord accelerate into deflation. But it is just as likely that Britain is now entering a period of rather angry stability.

Import prices are already falling. If wages do not now rise faster than output, the increase in British costs will be halted. Britain could then find itself in a position of considerable strength. There is little else wrong with the economy. The pound is not overvalued; exports are very high; trade has been soundly in surplus; a great increase in productivity is possible. These are the realities.

Restrictions on the supply and circulation of money, in the United States as well as in Britain, seem likely to accelerate the fall in the prices of primary products. This fall seriously affects all agricultural and underdeveloped countries. Of special concern to Britain is that these include India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Malaya, Central Africa, Ghana, and even possibly Australia and New Zealand.

Even if Britain itself is strong, another British balance-of-payments crisis is always possible. It can come through reduced earnings on the part of Britain’s partners. If it comes, it would threaten finally to break the sterling area. Part of the blame would undoubtedly be laid to Thorneycroft’s financial policies. But the United States, which is also believed to have a duty to underdeveloped lands, would also have its share of the blame.

The American partnership

Britons have been disappointed in the quality of American leadership. And they have been alarmed by what has seemed to them an almost hysterical response to the Soviet Sputniks, diverting attention from the challenges of hunger, freedom, and economic opportunity.

R. H. Crossman, leading member of the Labor Party executive and columnist of the Daily Mirror, declared: “Sputnik II has left the American people without a leader — and with scarcely an idea — to believe in.”

On the other side of the political divide, Henry Fairlie, political columnist of the Conservative newspaper, the Daily Mail, said: “ This is the world’s crisis. Mr. Macmillan must be prepared to give leadership on a world scale, because all the indications are that President Eisenhower, whose duty it really is, is now incapable of doing so.”

But at least implicit in this last criticism is an understanding of the importance of the Anglo-American alliance. Britons want American partnership. They want American leadership. This is most important to them now. Bevan himself joins the chorus, urging “far closer understanding between America and Britain about policies to be followed in critical parts of the world.”

If the public seems cynical, it may be because it is bewildered. Where does NATO stand in relation to European Free Trade? Is Britain to give up sovereignty to Europe, as the Germans believe? Is it to give up sovereignty to the U.S.A.? Or does interdependence in the end mean just the same as coöperation: new joint groups of experts and independent policies? The British are very tired of fog. More than anything else they need a cause to believe in.