London

THE British will certainly long remember the summer of 1959, for it was the summer when England became rich for the first time in the Keynesian and the American senses. Among the notable gains were: an automobile to every three households; trade in surplus, at a season when it had always before been in deficit; unemployment at only 1.8 per cent; earnings at an all-time high. The volume of installment buying increased at the rate of 50 to 60 per cent a year. Sotheby’s made $1.5 million in commissions selling art, and London sprouted a crop of tall office buildings. Add to this the news of the Queen’s expected baby at the coming of the new year, and one can well imagine the supercharged emotional atmosphere.

The astonishing thing, however, is that none of this progress, even with a decisive election approaching, seems to have had much political effect. There was no spark at all in the closing session of what Aneurin Bevan dubbed the “ Squalid Parliament.” The last debate, on Nyasaland, fizzled out slowly with two brief sputters of rebellion against party discipline. The general belief in Westminster was that, whichever party should win the next election, the Government returned will have only half the Tories’ present majority of sixty, and the conformity that members now find so irksome will have to be more rigidly enforced than ever.

The polls still give Prime Minister Macmillan the edge. But if for economic reasons he postponed the election he might have called last May — a British prime minister can choose his time within the maximum five years — it must seem to Macmillan that there is no justice. His efforts have helped preserve the peace; now there is also plenty. What more do people want? It is an unanswered question in London as elsewhere. Yet it is perhaps among the very ingredients of Macmillan’s success that one can see a natural cause of disenchantment.

The age of plenty

This has been “the year of the millionaire.” Commercial television companies, after only four years of existence in the original home of state broadcasting, have made $60 million in profits. Max Joseph, a London real-estate owner, is reported to have netted personally more than $11 million in cash when he sold his controlling interest in the Lintang property company. The sterling role of honor includes the names of Isaac Hillman, Frank Rind, Felix Fenston, Charles Clore, and probably twenty others. Most of the millions have been made through property deals and capital gains. And there is no capital gains tax in Britain.

But this has also been the year of stability. Lord Cohen, Sir Harold Howitt, and Professor E. H. Phelps Brown, the “three wise men” of the advisory Council on Prices, Productivity and Incomes, have given their opinion that Britain has “escaped from the inflationary spiral.” If it seizes the present opportunity, they say, it can hope to keep from getting caught up in it again.

It is further hoped that this is to be the year of the wage freeze. Everyone now knows that seizing the opportunity means curbing further increases in earnings. The brakes are already on. Wages in future must be like a glacier — always slowly on the move, yet withal frozen.

This is the year of peak wages. On the average, for a man over twenty-one, that peak is exactly $36.80 a week. Could it be the coincidence of the year of the millionaire with the year of the $36.80, and of both with the year of debt, that explains the unease, the churning moral qualms of this otherwise prosperous England?

It is as if people in England were not at all sure that they like the society they are creating. Back comes an old worry that the big rewards still are the exclusive perquisites of ownership. And ownership remains extremely unevenly divided. The top 10 per cent own 75 per cent of Britain’s capital. Only 7 per cent of the families own a business or a farm (compared with 17 per cent in the United States); only 22 per cent own their homes (compared with 45 per cent); only 4 per cent own other land or buildings (compared with 14 per cent).

The Tory slogan of “ a propertyowning democracy” has not yet been translated into fact. And since the important thing about justice is not simply that it be done but that it is also seen to be done, there seems therefore to be a weight missing from the scales.

These days it is the Liberals who really seem to take the Tory slogan seriously. They firmly believe it may be the trump card, that, while it cannot win them the game, can keep them in it for at least another round. Their maximum hope when the election comes is to win fifteen seats. But were they to do so, and were the two big parties in stalemate, they might have a chance at last to try in earnest to change the thought of England.

Not all Liberals realize it, but it is a very big change indeed that their leader, Jo Grimmond, is demanding. For the spreading of ownership on an effective scale requires much more than copartnership in industry and profit sharing. As economist Colin Clark has pointed out, it requires “deproletarianisation.”

Ownership by the people instead of for them cannot easily be accomplished unless the unproletarian family, in Clark’s opinion, “expects to pay an economic price or rent for its house ... to pay its own druggist’s bills, relying on insurance ... to provide for old age through its own savings and superannuation, not through State pensions.” Ownership appears to require the substitution of fair payments for fair shares. This is too much to expect.

Gaitskell’s plans

Hugh Gaitskell could not, even if he wished, campaign for a fairer distribution of wealth through a wider distribution of ownership. He is committed to a sort of socialism. He sees no particular great cause there on which to fight the next election.

Gaitskell’s major positive plans are for a 25-per-cent tax on capital gains, the purchase by the state of common stock in up to 600 of Britain’s private industrial companies and corporations, more welfare, higher state pensions, and government aid for sports, the theater, art, music, and public parks. The first, and stability, will cut the millionaires down to size. The second, he says, will cut the state in on capital gains.

Socialism, understood as the nationalization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, has not disappeared altogether from Labor thought. Gaitskell is aware of competition from Frank Cousins, left-wing leader of the Transport and General Workers, the union that produced Ernest Bevan. And what is going to be decided soon is not only whether the Tories will have a third term of power but whether Gaitskell or Cousins is going to inherit the Labor Party.

No Tory Government has ever won the election three times in a row. A failure by Gaitskell to win next time, when history is on his side, would almost surely mean the end of his leadership. And Bevan, surprisingly, has become Gaitskell’s ally.

Labor’s attack on violence

Labor’s main effort is being devoted to an attack on the present Government as having shown itself to be in bond to violence.

The Macmillan Government’s foundation, the argument goes, is Suez; its basic dogma is that the use of force there was 100 per cent right. Its agents have since continued to employ force: in Cyprus; in Kenya, where eleven hard-core Mau Mau prisoners were beaten to death after refusing to work: and in Nyasaland, where the Devlin Commission of eminent and conservative jurists found that there exists a “temporary police state.”Few of the violent agents have been punished. No responsible minister has resigned when improper violence has been uncovered.

This argument may well have a strong impact. Britain’s conscience is stirred. Particularly in its newfound wealth, Britain today feels a little ashamed of the underdevelopment of its remaining underdeveloped colonies and at the same time proud of its record, begun by a Labor Government, with India, Pakistan, and Ceylon, of returning subject peoples safely to independence.

Britain’s leaders

The shame and the pride are somehow part of one another. And at the center of each in 1959 is the same man, Alan Lennox-Boyd, Colonial Secretary. He is the main target of the Labor Party’s fire, but he is also the main source of strength for the Government’s counterblast.

Under his secretaryship, the Government can point to the solution of the apparently insoluble problem of Cyprus, the independence of Malaya and Singapore, the beginnings of independence for a Federation of the West Indies, the development of free Ghana, the emergence of free Nigeria, the end of the Mau Mau in Kenya, and considerable progress in Tanganyika.

Lennox-Boyd is sometimes spoken of as a man who would like to return to private life and who might have resigned already had his resignation not seemed to the Tories like a plea of guilty. But he is also spoken of as a future prime minister.

Iain Macleod, Minister of Labor, is also a candidate for high office. And in the background, quietly, safely, shyly, Chancellor of the Exchequer Derick Heathcoat Amory works away fashioning a ladder of his own. No Chancellor has had a greater success, judged by results.

There may be some argument as to the exact proportion of the credit for these results that must be accounted to Heathcoat Amory’s prudent management and to the renewed confidence in British finance that it has certainly produced abroad. But there can be no argument about the separate part played by the revival of business in America.

New markets

Even if the British and Americans were kicking and struggling, events would conspire to bring them ever closer. The United States now is Britain’s biggest customer by far. For instance, one quarter of the total British output of automobiles is now sold in North America, and the same quantity is divided among all the other markets of the world put together. Without this development in British trade there undoubtedly would be little prosperity in England today.

And now events in Europe seem likely to tie the knot more firmly, provided that a continued inflation in America at a time of stability of prices in Britain does not bring about a revival of protectionism in the United States. For, at the moment, western Europe appears to be split in two. One half looks inward. The other half, as a consequence, must look outward.

The Six — France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Western Germany, and Italy — are proceeding with their Common Market. They may become the Eight, with the addition of Greece and Turkey. Already fundamental changes in the direction of investment and trade are taking place.

Britain, with Scandinavia, Switzerland, Austria, and Portugal, is in process of founding a Free Trade Area of the Outer Seven, to be completed in ten years. The avowed purpose of this second market is to bring about an eventual union of the two areas. Its headquarters will be in Paris instead of London, as a gesture to the Six. But, unfortunately, neither of these two actions guarantees a union. The Common Market and the Free Trade Area remain two quite different, and opposed, conceptions.

Each of the Six meanwhile gains access to a new market three, four, or live times its own size. Britain, with 50 million out of the total 88 million population of the Seven, enlarges its home market by less than 50 per cent.

The saving fact for Britain is that by virtue of its lower prices and the fixed exchange rate with the dollar it has in practice almost free access to another market that is in terms of wealth eight times as big as its own — the United States.