London

THE memory of Sir Winston Churchill as the greatest Englishman of our age permeates the political scene in Britain. The nation feels that it is time for rededication. Prime Minister Harold Wilson has called on the British to recapture now the spirit of Dunkirk in 1940, when every ship and boat that sailors in and out of uniform could lay hands on set out under Churchill’s direction to rescue the army that had been pushed off the continent of Europe.

Wilson was it member of the Labor government that supplanted Churchill in 1945. That election caused Churchill for almost the only time in his political career to show deep bitterness. The great man felt that at the moment of his and Britain’s greatest achievement the nation had rejected him.

This was, however, a misreading of the situation. The vote of 1945, a decisive part of which came from those who had gone to war, was a rejection, instead, of Neville Chamberlain. The British people did not know Churchill as the leader of the Tory Party, but only as the leader of the nation. For ten years before 1939 he had been in a political wilderness. On the great foreign policy issues of the day he had been as much in opposition to Chamberlain as the Socialists had been. The voters probably did not vote for socialism so much as against the Toryism of the Depression and of the slide to war.

After six years of the Labor government, the electorate returned Churchill in his own right. He fought on the platform “Set the people free.” This is what the British remember him for, this and his qualities of resolution, gaiety, energy, toughness of character, and humor. “Never give up: never, never give up”— the voice of the man rings on; prose writer without peer, who on his passport called himself “journalist”; a historian, descendant of Marlborough, painter, and greatest House of Commons man of all.

In his passing Churchill may have served the nation as he did in life, toughening its fiber, raising its spirits, defying pessimism. This certainly is what the British people need at the moment. So it is not mere political opportunism or emotional coldness that has caused Wilson to consider the political implications of the event and even its bearing on the time of an election.

The trade gap narrows

Churchill’s death coincided with a reversal of the economic fortunes of the government, as well as a drastic setback in the by-election that forced out Patrick Gordon Walker as Wilson’s Foreign Secretary. There are strong practical and emotional arguments for holding a spring election. Exactly at the end of Wilson’s “hundred days,”within which he had promised dynamic action, the trade gap suddenly narrowed. Imports stopped rising. Exports grew by 4 percent.

The improvement was in fact expected. Sir Reginald Maudling, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Tory government, had forecast it before he left office. It was indeed the probability on which he based his whole seemingly casual economic policy. But there may be even more dramatic developments to come. The 15 percent import surcharge imposed by Wilson has yet to be fully reflected in the statistics.

The trade gap may possibly be removed altogether. Economists would consider this an illusory success, since the trade gap would come back again if the import surcharge were removed. But the people might see the temporary improvement as ample justification for Wilson’s at first unpopular actions.

What is more, Minister for Economic Affairs George Brown’s campaign against price increases is having considerable success with the public. Prices are rising still. They likely will rise even more before the year is out. But someone is at last visibly trying to do something about them. Although higher personal taxes are on the way, nobody will have less in his pay envelope on that account until after the first week of April. Meanwhile, employment is full and investment is high.

The British have not yet actually begun to pay the full price of Labor’s policies. These must bite soon, and it is a bite that could hurt. Since help from the Liberals could become more important as the strain caused by the slenderness of an absolute majority begins to tell, the influence of the Social Democrats in the Labor government is increased at the expense of the Marxists.

In a crisis, the British people always tend to firm up behind the government in power. Since Britain’s current crisis obviously requires radical answers, the people may well prefer a radical party to handle it. And the very slenderness of Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s majority (now three, if the nine-man Liberal Party votes against him) tends to keep His strongest critics within the Labor Party quiet. The Prime Minister has successfully convinced the people that his economic problems were handed on to him by the Tories; and Maudling has been unwise enough to claim that Wilson’s solutions too were inherited from the Tories.

The most dynamic left-wing party members find themselves in positions of nonpolitical responsibility. For example, Frank Cousins resigned from his job as general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union to take charge of the newly created Ministry of Technology. With the help of Lord Snow, whom Wilson appointed parliamentary secretary to the technology ministry, Cousins has to build up this department from scratch.

Meanwhile, whether by accident or design, the two economists most disliked by the Tory Party and the Tory press — Nicholas Kaldor of Cambridge and Thomas Balogh of Oxford — have been brought in as advisers, almost, as it were, to take the lash of criticism in place of the two economics ministers — George Brown, and James Callaghan, Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Brown has gained in stature in the House of Commons. He is firm, resolute, and commanding in debate, and he has established himself without question as the senior partner of the two. As Deputy Prime Minister, he has shown that if it were necessary, he could take over from Wilson.

The Tory leadership

The Tories for their part have not yet come up with an obvious alternative leader. Former Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home has retained his position as party leader through Wilson’s first hundred days without ever commanding either the House or the public, so that most observers have felt his hold on the leadership to be tenuous. But who could replace him with as much success?

Maudling is likable; he is intellectually brilliant; but he is an unlucky politician. By claiming the credit for Labor’s financial measures, which in some cases have damaged Britain’s image in Europe and the Commonwealth without assisting at all in the solution of basic economic problems, he removed the sting from most later criticisms.

Edward Heath, put in charge of policy making for the Conservative Party, is gradually gathering support. He is the only leading Tory who can claim to be a man of the people. Of the fifty-five Cabinet ministers in the various Tory governments since 1951, twenty-one went to Eton, seven to Harrow, and four to Winchester. Heath attended a grammar school, which is socially one rung below a public school, although it is a rung above the new comprehensive schools that Labor seeks to make the national norm.

The democratization of Britain is, of course, essential to the solution of its economic problems. Barriers of class are barriers to growth. But it is doubtful that it has yet been generally understood, either in London or in the United States, how truly serious the current problems are or how deeply they challenge basic philosophies among liberals and left-wingers, too.

A crisis of prices

To put the situation in perspective, however, it is necessary first to note that in spite of its “crisis,” Britain produces more than it ever did before in its history. Its exports, although marginally insufficient, also stand at record levels. Unemployment is virtually nil (statistically, 1.4 percent).

Yet before the balance of payments can be changed, attitudes of mind have to be changed. Britain’s is essentially a crisis of prices: therefore, it is a crisis of productivity. But politically, both on the left and the right, the “productive society” is suspect. It is even openly opposed. While Tories, through the barriers of class and their concentration on the values and virtues of real property, have denied to millions the sense of personal progress that is the necessary spur to productivity, Labor intellectuals have cried constant shame at mass consumption.

The BBC recently showed at a peak hour a television commentary on waste in the United States that ended with an awful apostrophe upon “this society of consumption and excretion” and the fading closeup of the oversized head of a plaster pig. This idea that waste and greed are the nasty necessities of any productive society is now widely held and deeply felt in Britain.

However, such attitudes will have to be changed; for unfortunately the bromides about Britain’s capacity to pull through are unlikely to effect a cure. Certainly a return of confidence will bring a return of money to the City of London. But neither will balance Britain’s payments.

Production must go up, costs down

To do that, Britain’s currency first would have to be revalued, either through an alteration in the exchange rate or through a great surge of fresh productivity; or through both. Britain’s production has got to go up. At the same time, and more important, Britain’s unit costs have got to go down. There are alternative ways of doing this, but no alternative to its being done.

The evidence that this is so may be summed up in the following figures. Since 1945 British prices have been inflated at a rate in excess of 3 percent per annum. Since 1958 they have risen nearly 20 percent, while America’s prices have 8.5 percent. Since then British export prices have risen nearly 12 percent, while America’s have risen 7 and France’s barely 4. Last year, earnings in Britain rose 8 percent, output perhaps 2 percent. In January 3500 separate prices were raised further still. Fares and freights were hiked; the price of gas was raised; so were interest rates. And notice was given that taxes will also go up.

Clearly if it were allowed to develop, this crisis of prices (and thus of the exchanges) could have serious and far-reaching repercussions. If no other way were to be found to slow down the rise of prices and wages, Britain could suffer heavy unemployment. The amount of unemployment necessary actually to reduce prices would be catastrophic.

But Britain is responsible for some 10 percent of all the world’s import trade. A heavy fall in British buying, either for the above reason or through the 15 percent import surcharge, when rates of growth are slowing down anyway, could be very damaging. Impetus could also be given to President de Gaulle’s efforts to insulate Europe from the full effects of Anglo-American economic and financial policies. De Gaulle, having achieved an independent agriculture, aims now at an independent currency reserve.

The diminishing market in Europe

Wilson aims instead at closer total relations with the United States. Yet Britain cannot ignore Europe. It is the fall in British exports to the Common Market that has been the prime brake upon British exports as a whole. Until 1963 Europe had been Britain’s biggest and fastest growing market. Now Britain is slipping. And as the European market gets gradually freer internally, the terms of trade there for Britain are worsening. It is not too much to say that British trade with Europe must be improved or Britain’s payments problems are insoluble.

If, as one hopes, calamity is avoided, recovery in Britain thus is likely to take longer than we have been led to believe.

Labor realizes that recovery depends on a recovery of productivity. George Brown has initiated his “incomes policy” — he thought so much of the signing of the initial statement of intent to match pay with productivity by government, unions, and employers that he held the ceremony under the chandeliers of stately Lancaster House, St. James’s, with two hundred guests and twenty television cameras, as if it were a new Magna Charta. He has attacked price rises. He has appointed a price watchdog, a price review board, with teeth.

New machinery and less lethargy

Labor sees that it has to “change the mood of the nation.” Wilson has coined the slogan “a society with a purpose.” But even if the purpose of rapidly increasing productivity in the consumer industries were understood, the job would not be easy.

Long years of social stagnation have produced a people who, although many have genius and most are orderly, decent, and hardworking, now spend almost half as much again on smoking and drinking as they do on housing. Many prefer their leisure to more money.

The British condition is in some ways exemplified by the difficulties in the London docks, although dockers tend to see themselves as a race apart. Exports have been held up, often for two or three weeks, awaiting loading onto ships. Ships have sailed without cargoes. As many as 150 vessels at a time have swung at anchor in the tideway without stevedores to work them. The Communist Party, which has strong influence in the docks, has been able virtually to “blockade” Britain through sporadic strikes and a ban on weekend working.

But members of Cousins’ transport workers union actually have been working fifty hours a week. They have been reluctant to work weekends too merely out of patriotism. They do not need the weekend money. Also, in many places they work in conditions of almost Dickensian squalor. London docks have barely a quarter of the mechanical handling equipment that Rotterdam enjoys. Baths are as scarce as steady jobs. The answer for the docks is the same as the answer for Britain: dignity for the employees, more power, more machinery, computer control techniques, and new road, rail, and helicopter communications.

This is expensive. Britain’s dilemma indeed is that it cannot afford to do it; yet it cannot afford not to do it. And to do it also requires the acceptance nationally of the sort of society that will be produced by more power, more machinery, more roads, more computers, and more and more production.

Wanted: a sense of purpose

One must not exaggerate it, but the present malaise is accompanied by a rapid increase in crime, and particularly in crimes of violence. Criminals have taken to carrying guns and to using them. Teen-age hoodlums have a fashion of carrying shotguns around with them, and in gangs they use them. Imports of shotguns from abroad were 25,000 in 1963, and almost 50,000 in 1964. All kinds of guns require licenses in Britain. The real trouble is that the guns used by gangs are not bought but stolen, or imported illegally.

Abolition of the death penalty has nothing to do with the rise in crime or the increase in the use of “shooters.” But its opponents will certainly link the two. Meanwhile it is to be expected that the demand will increase for the police to be armed in future with more than a truncheon and an air of authority.

Young British athletes last year won a record number of medals at Tokyo. The re-export of pop beat music by such as the Beatles has become a significant factor in the invisible trade. An Oxford woman scientist, Dorothy Crowfoot-Hodgkin, won the 1964 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Jenny Lee. Nye Bevan’s widow, is a vigorous “secretary for leisure.”

Yet in a serious although marginal sense, it is true that the government must restore a sense of purpose to British life, to give back to the British that feeling of quality in living that many have lost, and at the same time transform Britain into a society of mass consumption and mass production.