London

THE supreme task of Britain’s African policy, as Prime Minister Macmillan, Lord Home, Mr. Macleod, and Mr. Sandys see it, is to ensure that Africa is not split in two, roughly along the line of the Zambezi River, with a black Africa to the north, a white Africa to the south, and an armed border between.

For this reason. South Africa, outside the Commonwealth, is a potential threat to British government policy. South Africa’s resignation immediately sharpened the fears of what would happen if Sir Roy Welensky, faced with the ultimatum of an African nationalist majority in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, were compelled to take Southern Rhodesia out of the Federation and join forces with South Africa. One half of the line would then be established.

Multiracialism in Africa

At the same time, South Africa’s isolation has made a peaceful solution to the African problem possible. For what happened in March at the Commonwealth prime ministers’ conference in London has been taken as a clear victory for multiracialism, and it is not African nationalism that causes most anxiety but African racialism. When Diefenbaker of Canada, Nehru of India, and Tunku Abdul Rahman of Malaya took the lead with Nkrumah of Ghana in opposing membership for South Africa while it practices apartheid, they served notice on all African states coming into independence that their qualification for membership is also multiracialism.

Deliberately underlining this, Macleod immediately flew to Tanganyika. After a day or two of negotiation with Julius Nyerere, he announced self-government for the former trust territory in May and complete independence as of December 28. While Europeans applauded and Africans, Asians, and Arabs jumped in the streets for joy, Nyerere made a speech of which this was the peroration: “We have no great pretensions for Tanganyika, which we know in population is a small country and poor in resources. But we do most genuinely believe that we have great lessons to teach, and most particularly in our own continent of Africa, by virtue of the tolerance and fellow feeling that prevail in our communities.”

Nyerere had been made aware that, while the British are sympathetic to his dream of a federation of Tanganyika, Kenya, and Uganda, there is one essential condition to it — acceptance of a similar multiracial political concept by his neighbors. There has been desperately little sign of it so far in Kenya.

In such volatile conditions, the role and influence of the Commonwealth, although tenuous, assume awesome importance in British eyes. Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, and the Caribbean Federation will come into the Commonwealth in succession. They will join Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Malaya, Cyprus, Ghana, Nigeria, and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. In race relations, everything may be gained by Commonwealth unity and vitality, and almost everything lost without it.

It is an understanding of this conviction, and what follows from it, that Great Britain has most wished to receive from the United States Administration. One thing that has followed directly is the new stiffness in Britain’s lonely European policy. And on matters concerning Europe, Britain and America have been simply and completely out of touch,

Europe and the Commonwealth

It is possible to prove that Commonwealth preferences mean less and less to Britain. In 1960 Britain’s sales to the Commonwealth rose 6 per cent; those of its competitors, 28 per cent. The major gainer was the European Common Market. But Britain cannot now close the door of trade on the Commonwealth.

Britain gives free entry to almost all the exports, agricultural and manufactured, of these developing countries. The European Common Market allows free entry to raw materials and a few agricultural products, but no manufactures. A recent United Nations survey showed that in the next twenty years, even assuming maximum aid, underdeveloped countries will have to increase their aggregate exports from $19 billion to $50 billion. Of that total, $15 billion will necessarily consist of manufactures. Even if race relations were not involved, every available door would need to be opened.

It was made reasonably clear early this year that if British membership in the Common Market and acceptance of its political implications were the price asked for opening Europe to the Commonwealth, Britain would be prepared to pay it. (Other members of the European Free Trade Association would, of course, also have to be included.) But for Britain to limit its trade with the Commonwealth, as France demands, is an impossible price to pay. With no effective support for its own solution — associate membership with its own home market kept freely open to the Commonwealth — Britain’s dilemma is real and painful.

The United States has appeared to accept a Europe of two trading groups, united in and around the North Atlantic alliance, as a reasonable improvement on a Europe of eighteen separated nations. To Britain, however, it is not an improvement; it is a setback.

In the market of the Six, until 1959 Britain competed on equal terms with all. But it does so no longer. Yet, it begins to look almost as if, for Britain itself, economic growth and the Six are synonymous. Britain’s trade with its partners in the European Free I rade Association has increased relatively little. Britain’s trade with the Common Market has increased 7 per cent. Inside the Common Market, across the diminishing frontiers, trade among the six partners has increased by 25 per cent.

The need for economic growth

Last year’s figures show the British predicament in a dramatic light. There was a delicit of trade of more than $1 billion. To pay for its overseas aid and for its NATO commitments, Britain’s target is a surplus of $1 billion. There was no run on the pound in face of the $2 billion gap between need and performance only because a vast quantity of money poured into Britain. The money was drawn by the magnet of exceptionally high rates of interest, the continuance of which would be enough to make economic growth virtually impossible.

Growth there must be. Exports must leap forward. Sir Roy Harrod proposes the reimposition of controls on imports, pointing out that Britain’s liberalization policy has brought a 70 per cent increase in imports of manufactures in two years. NATO expenses weigh heavily in the balance of left-wing Labor support for unilateral disarmament. But most economists urge, in their varying forms, more competition, better directed investment, an attack on monopolies, acceptance of the aim of growth, and the reform of taxation. There is full employment in Britain, and increased individual productivity is the only way to increased output.

Auto slump

The car industry closed a record year with a slump. The major cause was an awesome fall in sales in the American market. In February, shipments to the United States totaled 800, against 18,000 last year.

The New York automobile show and the Kennedy Administration’s policy for growth have given hope of a considerable improvement this year. But to maintain its own growth, the British industry must make 1.5 million cars (output in 1960 totaled 1.35 million) and do more than regain its American market. It will have to find additional export markets for at least another 100,000 cars. That means a 20 per cent increase in all other markets combined. There seems to be but one market that would offer any hope of a sufficient boom, and that is the Common Market.

German revaluation has given British makers a temporary advantage, for it has at least wiped out the effects of tariff reductions on German car prices in Europe. The advantage will, however, be wiped out in turn by the further internal tariff reductions planned in the Common Market for this year, bringing the total cuts there down to 40 or 50 per cent. Manufacturers are planning for expansion on the assumption that the political side of their marketing problems will be solved during this year.

Further pressure for a solution will be brought on the government, because all the new car factories are being built in areas of relatively high unemployment — and to government orders. Rootes, for example, is going to build a new minicar and has been persuaded to do so in Scotland. Unemployment there is from three to six times the national average, ranging from 3.5 to 11.9 per cent. The British Motor Corporation is building a new plant, with jobs for 4000, at Llanelly in South Wales, where 5.7 per cent of the people arc registered as out of work. Rover will have jobs for 5000 at Cardiff. Merseyside is promised a car plant too. These are “development districts,” and they place in the car industry their main hope for breaking through at last to their share in the nation’s prosperity.

Two things prevent the government from allowing the car industry to make progress in the home market, as it could for a year or so: the paramount need for exports and the continuing lack of the necessary new road system. But at least economists in government have now grasped the importance of road communications. In the last ten years, the ton mileage of goods transported by roads has increased by 48 per cent. Ten million vehicles are now in use. Plans for the construction of roads costing £200 million (one third of what motorists, as motorists, annually pay in taxes) are in hand.

London’s traffic problems

London has few really major projects yet. Parking meters spread like mushrooms, it seems, overnight to fresh streets, followed by a specially recruited corps of traffic wardens who are a good deal more inflexible than the police. Yellow lines are painted along the gutters in streets where no stopping is allowed at any time. Clearways, where waiting is forbidden in working hours, are scheduled. The police tow away two hundred cars a day. But the London County Council’s road program envisages spending only about ten pounds per vehicle in the London area in the next five years.

London does have one exciting development under way, to which it seems either pathetic or irreverent to give the name “the Piccadilly-Knightsbridge underpass.” This involves the reconstruction of Hyde Park Corner, Europe’s busiest traffic circle, and alterations to Park Lane, Marble Arch, and the Hyde Park carriageway. Out of the changes, London will get an enlarged Speaker’s Corner, where, near Marble Arch, the art of openair oratory is given legal sanctuary. Hyde Park Corner itself will become a miniature park, with lawns, shrubs, flowers, and benches, and the processional route from Buckingham Palace through Wellington Arch to Marble Arch will be splendidly enhanced. From Westminster to Bayswater and Kensington, there will be almost a single park.

The green belt

For London, in spite of the motorcar, sees itself increasingly as park land. A shock ran through the nation when, one hot summer’s day in 1959, a man was arrested for loitering and causing an obstruction when taking the air on the sidewalk outside his own front door. In the East End a green belt a mile and a half long is now being run through Stepney and Poplar from the docks to Victoria Park, the great place for mass meetings of strikers, and a park as big as Hyde Park has already been laid out for the people of North Camberwell.

But it is in Charles I’s Richmond Park that is to be found the curt notice that seems somehow symbolic of both the strength and weakness of the British sense of discipline in the world today. Here deer, sheep, motorists, horsemen, hikers, picnickers, and dogs mingle absolutely freely. A notice at the gate says: “Dogs May Not Chase Deer.”In Richmond Park, this notice is sufficient.