London

on the World Today

IAIN MACLEOD, now leader of the House of Commons for the government and a distinguished man, apologized to lobby correspondents: ‟The tremendous issues in the world today . . . are inevitably much greater than the legislation that is to come before the House.” For Britain is going through a minor revolution in home affairs but a major one in foreign affairs. Its position in the world has abruptly changed.

Although powerfully armed with its own nuclear weapons, its garrisons everywhere, from the Rhine to Hong Kong, are all below strength. Its empire has largely dissolved into a Commonwealth of independent slates. Though Britain is still one of the six richest countries in the world, its economic growth is declining. And on the continent of Europe a superpower is rising which Britain must join or to which it must take second place.

What made application for membership in the European Common Market possible, where it had been previously considered impossible, was the speech by President de Gaulle last summer setting strict limits to its supranationalism. What has made the Common Market attractive has been the knowledge that neither France nor West Germany has suffered noticeable dimination of influence as a consequence of membership; rather, they have gained. What makes it urgent is the market’s considerable growth record.

What the Commonwealth may lose

The government has concluded that Great Britain might as a member emerge as more influential and better able to sustain a Commonwealth for which Britain is still the largest market and the greatest source of capital. Britain, because of its existing ties with the European Free Trade Association — the Seven — might also enter as leader of a majority group. If its worldwide trading links could be retained largely unimpaired, Britain might become, too, the front-runner for something approaching an Atlantic community, expanding everywhere the area of freer trade.

But reactions in Europe and the Commonwealth throw doubt on the full validity of this concept. Most E.F.T.A. countries may have to associate with the Common Market on lesser terms than membership. And three main elements in the cohesion of the Commonwealth, the very elements that give form and meaning to the intangibles, may have to be sacrificed. These three elements are free entry for Commonwealth citizens into Britain; free or preferential entry for Commonwealth goods (under the Ottawa Agreements of 1932); and regular, although infrequent, consultations between chief ministers.

The government could produce good reason for introducing control of immigration: a rapidly increasing and unplanned flow, which brought last year 100,000 West Indians, 50,000 Irish, 15,000 Indians, and many thousands from Pakistan, Cyprus, Africa, and elsewhere, almost all without prospective jobs, and a few with criminal records. But such control has two strikes against it. It almost inevitably assumes the shape of a color bar. And when Europeans get the same privileges of entry, it must mark the end of a special personal relationship between citizens of the Commonwealth.

Similarly, no arrangement in trade or in politics can be imagined that puts the Commonwealth in second place to Europe. Indeed, while Commonwealth ministers meet infrequently, Europe is to have a supercabinet in regular sessions, supported by an international civil service, framing joint policies. This would reduce Commonwealth consultation to insignificance.

The government’s determination to ‟safeguard Commonwealth interests” is real and deeply felt. But by offering in exchange for the sacrifices simply a bigger share of a greater and richer European market, the government opens itself to the charge of seeing the Commonwealth’s interests in a strictly materialistic light.

Macmillan’s home policy

The same shadow of the charge of materialism hangs over Macmillan at home. He is still undoubtedly in control of the government. But, while he has recently strengthened his government and its program, his party is still referred to as a party with a strong policy but no strong philosophy.

The origin of much of Macmillan’s policy is contained in the book he published in the 1930s, The Middle Way. At the time, he advocated a ‟comprehensive scheme of national planning,” to be developed by a National Economic Council and used for guidance rather than compulsion; and Selwyn Lloyd, in 1961, was set the task of establishing a National Economic Development Council for just this purpose. The book foresaw the reduction of class differences through universal primary education in state schools; and Sir David Eccles. Minister of Education, has been advocating just this. It saw economic justice in terms of full employment, which now exists; high wages, which exist; and continuous growth, which does not vet exist but, through planning and union with Europe, is triumphantly promised.

There is nothing much wrong with this policy — the loud public demand for planning was the big political phenomenon of 1961 — but there may be something missing, and this may be the reason why Macmillan is never allowed to forget the phrase he once threw away as an aside, ‟You never had it so good,” and why Selwyn Lloyd, fighting for a ‟pay pause,” the urgent need for which is obvious, finds himself faced with opposition that he cannot understand.

White-collar march

The public is convinced that Britain is really two nations. The government denies that this is so. The two nations that the public sees are no longer anything so simple as Capital and Labor.

If they must be labeled, they are rather Owner and Earner: those who make their money, and those who earn their money; the taxed, and the untaxed; those who do not need a salary, since what their property or business does not provide free for them, capital gains will provide practically free, and those who must have income, since they have nothing else. The division runs through national life from top to bottom.

So the ‟white collars” have been marching in Whitehall with placards denigrating the Chancellor. Teachers have been marching, too, in fury against the ‟pause.” even though it was not applied to them (they were allowed a raise of 14 percent). Distinguished actors and star vaudeville performers have been on strike. Militant millions now bring up the rear. For the first time, those who used to be ‟the classes” have achieved a kind of unity in their opposition to Mr. Lloyd. Theirs is not so much an attack on the pause as, in their view, on injustice.

A pause to them means not a policy but the absence of one. Sooner or later, it is bound to be broken, as it was in 1948 and 1949, when Sir Stafford Cripps tried unsuccessfully in exactly the same way to stave off devaluation. This time, in spite of the strongest government pressure, the pause was breached almost immediately by the electricitysupply industry. The government can influence but not direct this nationalized industry under the present British law. When it was threatened with a Christmas power stoppage, the electricity council gave the power workers a 5 per cent raise dated January 1. Chairman Sir Robertson King claimed that this particular raise was noninflationary, since it will be earned by extra productivity.

The government itself has to make exceptions, It has to break the pause whenever, as in the case of the National Fire Service, it is urgent in the national interest to attract labor. It can be reasonably argued that such breaches do more good than harm. A serious danger arises, however, when, as is happening now, the most powerful unions are encouraged to back up their arguments with a direct threat, declaring that they are prepared to press pay demands to point up inflation and devaluation unless the government adopts their kind of planning.

The traditional planners, trade unionists and socialists, balked when asked to join Lloyd’s new planning body, because the National Economic Development Council would have control only over wages and salaries. The government has shown that it will try to enforce a pay freeze in cases where it is the direct employer and whenever such a freeze is essential. But if the unions join the council, they will have to enforce the freeze too. Control over labor would then be complete. But no counterbalancing control of wealth, no pause for conspicuous spenders, has been offered.

Mr. Lloyd undoubtedly believes that no question of justice or injustice is involved. But the majority of voters now disagree with him. It would seem a situation made for Hugh Gaitskell, a planner armed with all manner of ready-made controls, including the capital-gains tax.

Gaitskcll and labor

Mr. Gaitskell’s stature as a statesman has increased since the last election. He is, however, preoccupied with the problem of power within his own party. He did win a resounding victory at his last party conference, reversing the votes for unilateral disarmament and re-establishing both the authority of the Parliamentary Labor Party and his own authority within it. Yet the left wing believes that there exists a great body of opinion only waiting to be roused on behalf of full-scale socialism. Gaitskell knows this is just not true.

The party, meanwhile, is seen to be split on almost every topic, from the Common Market on down the line. It could be this lack of a clear policy that most discourages the voters. Or it could be simply that the party, as it is organized, is associated too strongly in the public mind with nationalization and government control.

The British public today acts as if it would dearly like to give its votes to a party that does not exist, one that, offering to combine freedom with planning and both with manifest economic justice, had the power to form a government.

London’s new homeless

The problem of the new homeless of London has transformed this puzzle of planning, freedom, and compulsion into human terms. These are not problem families, not poor, not unemployed, not ill-adjusted. They are well dressed, well fed, but desperate. Every week, forty-five or fifty families are out in the streets looking for a place to live. Most of them can be found temporary shelter as a family unit. But, on an average, nine families a week have had to be split up and scattered in workhouses and shelters. The total of homeless has now reached 3200.

A crash program of mobile homes on vacant lots is bringing hope to them. Ordinarily, their problem stems from the fact that the place they were living in was sold. There are no vacant houses. Looking around, some find they have ‟too many children” to be welcome in furnished rooms.

These desperate people cannot get a subsidized apartment through the London County Council because the L.C.C. has a waiting list of 52,000, and 28,000 more are waiting to be put on the waiting list. There are 150,000 additional people still on local borough waiting lists in Greater London.

The L.C.C., Socialist-controlled for twenty-six years, blames the situation on the Rent Act that decontrolled the rents of private apartments. The government blames the L.C.C., which it says has all the powers and the money to solve such a problem. The public is disturbed and puzzled, and blames both.

To what extent is the problem caused by the large-scale subsidizing of rents? How many families that could afford a home of their own nevertheless stay on, reasonably enough, in the inexpensive and splendid new L.C.C. apartment blocks, making no room for those in genuine need? A sound guess is 5000 families.

Why are so many office buildings, yet so few private apartment houses, being built? Is it because there is a vast profit in offices but no profit in apartments, unless they are very expensive? Has the L.C.C., in planning a smaller London, reducing the population in its own area from 3,500,000 to 3,100,000 (and in Greater London from 8,500,000 to 8,150,000), and sending a quarter of a million Londoners out to new towns in the countryside, planned more for what people ought to want rather than accommodated what they do want? The answers the public arrives at may directly affect not only the next elections but the future of Britain.