Part 24
We have seen how the present political alignment in Britain has developed out of the political and economic circumstances of the years since 1939. What of the future?
The Conservative government since the end of 1955 has been engaged in a gigantic political gamble. It has instituted a series of economic measures to restrict home spending. These measures are highly unpopular with the new working class from whom the party has obtained surprising support in recent elections. At the same time the Tory cabinet has not provided as much relief from taxation as the old middle class, its strongest supporters, demanded and expected after the electoral triumph of May 1955. These are calculated political risks. The calculation is that by the next general election, in 1959 or even 1960, the drive to expand British exports will have succeeded in establishing a new prosperity more firmly based than that of the boom years 1954 and 1955.
To attain this objective the Conservative government will have to perform a feat of political tightrope-walking beyond the aspirations of ordinary politics. The new prosperity can be achieved successfully, from the political point of view, only if the measures taken to attain it please the old middle class without offending Conservative voters in the new middle class and the new industrial working class. This will mean budgets in 1957 and 1958 that will relieve financial pressure upon the first of these groups without alienating the other two, whose interests are mutually antagonistic. It will mean that Britain's defense commitments must be reduced and adjusted to the extent that the savings will cut taxation of the old middle class but not to the extent that the reduction of defense construction will affect the employment of either the new middle class or the industrial working class.
This book was completed before the government's course was run. If its policy succeeds, then Harold Macmillan must be accorded a place in history not far below that of the greatest workers of political miracles.
Had there been a general election in the winter of 1956-7, the Labor Party would have won, although its majority would probably not have been so large as its enthusiastic tacticians predicted. The party should be able to appeal to the electorate at the next general election with greater success than in 1955, providing certain conditions are met.
The big "if" facing the Labor Party concerns not abstruse questions of socialist dogma but the oldest question in politics: the conflict between two men. The men are Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party, and Aneurin Bevan.
Nye Bevan remains a major force in British politics. He is the only prominent politician who is a force in himself, a personality around which lesser men assemble. Like the young Winston Churchill, he inspires either love or hate. Untrammeled by the discipline of the party, he can rally the left wing of the Labor movement. Simultaneously he can alienate the moderates of the party, the undecided voters, and the tepid conservatives who had thought it might be time to let labor "have a go." If the next general-election campaign finds Bevan clamoring for the extension of nationalization in British industry, beckoning his countrymen down untrodden social paths, lambasting Britain's allies, and scoffing at her progress, then the Labor Party will be defeated.
I have known Aneurin Bevan for many years. For the weal or woe of Britain, he is a man born to storm and danger. A sudden war, a swift and violent economic reverse would brighten his star. In a crisis his confidence, whether that of a born leader or a born charlatan, would attract the many.
Barring such catastrophes, a reasonable stability in government is to be expected. The Conservative majority in the House of Commons after the 1955 election probably was a little larger than is customary in a nation so evenly divided politically. Despite the rancor aroused by the Suez crisis, there seem to be reasonable grounds for predicting the gradual disappearance of Tories of the old type and of the belligerent Labor leaders surviving from the twenties. The development of a national outlook by both parties seems probable.
Americans need not be concerned over the fission of the British political system into a multi-party one capable of providing a government but incapable of government. Stability means, of course, that British governments will know their own minds. In the complex, hair-trigger world of today this is an important factor. It is equally important in charting the future course of Britain. Nations that know where they want to go and how they want to go there are not verging on political senility.
This political stability is vital to Britain in the years of transition that lie ahead. For it is in British industry that the greatest changes will take place.
Britain is moving in new directions, economically, politically, and socially. The base of this movement is industrial--a revolution in power. The world's most imaginative, extensive, and advanced program for the production of electricity from nuclear power stations is under way. This magnificent acceptance of the challenge of the nuclear age is also an answer to one of the key questions of 1945: how could British industry expand and British exports thrive if coal yearly became scarcer and more expensive to mine? The answer is nuclear energy, 5,000 to 6,000 megawatts of it by 1965.
The program for constructing twenty nuclear power stations in Britain and Northern Ireland is the most spectacular part of the power program. As coal will be vital to the economy for years to come, more economic and more efficient mining methods also are regarded as a matter of national urgency.
Throughout the nation's industrial structure there is an air of purpose and enthusiasm. Five huge new steel plants will be started in 1957. An ambitious program of modernizing the railroads and the shipbuilding industry is well under way. The new industries that have developed since 1945 and old industries now delivering for the export markets are pushing British goods throughout the world: radar, radioactive isotopes, electronic equipment, sleek new jet aircraft, diesel engines, plastics, detergents, atomic power stations. All are part of Britain's response to the challenge of change.
To fulfill present hopes, production and productivity must rise, management must grasp the changed position of Britain in the world. From the courted, she has become the courter, competing for markets with Germany, Japan, Sweden, and the United States. Such competition existed in the past, but now, with the cushion of overseas investments gone, such competition is a true national battle. There is plenty of evidence that a portion at least of industrial management in Britain fails to understand these conditions. Such complacency is as dangerous to the export drive as the unwillingness or inability of the industrial worker to grasp the export drive's importance to him, to his factory, to his union, and to his country.
Due emphasis should be given to such failings. But we must not forget that the British are a great mercantile people, eager and ingenious traders ready, once they accept its importance, to go to any length of enterprise to win a market. It is also wise to remember that, although circumstances have made the British share of the dollar market the criterion of success, the British do extremely well in a number of important non-dollar markets.
The attitude of the industrial working class to wage increases is a factor in the drive to boost the exports on which the nation lives. The modernization of British industry to meet the requirements of the nation's economic position, alterations in management and sales practices, higher production and productivity will not suffice to win export markets if the wage level in industry continues to rise. A steady rise will price Britain out of her markets. Should this occur, the question of whether organized labor is to take kindly to automation will become academic. The country cannot live without those markets.
Early in September of 1956 when the world was worrying over the Suez Canal, _The New York Times_ carried a news item from Brighton, the English seashore resort, that surely was as important to Britain as anything Premier Nasser or Sir Anthony Eden or Mr. Dulles might say.
The Trades Union Congress, the dispatch said, had rejected the Conservative government's plea for restraint in pressing wage claims. The final paragraphs of a resolution passed unanimously at the eighty-eighth annual conference said that the TUC " ... asserts the right of labor to bargain on equal terms with capital, and to use its bargaining strength to protect the workers from the dislocations of an unplanned economy.
"It rejects proposals to recover control by wage restraint, and by using the nationalized industries as a drag-anchor for the drifting national economy."
These phrases reveal the heart of the quarrel between the TUC and the government. The Conservatives are belabored for not carrying out a Socialist policy--i.e., a planned economy--but restraint on wages is rejected.
The resolution represented a serious check in progress toward a national understanding of the country's economic position. It ensured, I believe, another round of wage demands by the unions, protracted industrial disputes, and, eventually, higher costs for industry and higher prices for foreign buyers.
The constant bickering between union and union, between unions and employers, and between the TUC and the government should not divert us from the qualities of the British industrial working class. It is highly skilled, especially in the fields of electronics and the other new industries now so important to the export trade. Its gross production and productivity are rising. It is, once aroused, intelligent and energetic. The nation is essentially homogeneous. There is obviously a wide gap between worker and employer in Britain, but it seems less wide when we compare it with the French worker's hostility toward his boss.
But of course the industrial worker is only one unit of the industrial system. Working with him are hundreds of thousands of engineers, technicians, planners, and managers--men of high quality, imaginative, daring, and resourceful. Together these two groups operate industries that are rapidly recovering from the effects of the war and the frantic post-war period in which all machines had to run at top speed, regardless of repairs, if Britain was to make enough to live.
If Americans understand that in a smaller country industry will be on a smaller scale than in the United States, they must concede that the steel plants in Wales and the North, the hydroelectric power system built in the fastnesses of the Scottish Highlands, the new nuclear-energy power stations now nearing completion are impressive industrial installations. British industry in the physical sense is not a collection of obsolete or obsolescent factories and rundown mills; new plants and factories are appearing with greater frequency every year, and the emphasis is on the future.
A journey through the busy Midlands provides the proof. Everywhere one sees new construction for industrial production. The rawboned red brick factories, relics of Victorian England, are silent and empty; many have been pulled down. The main problem for Britain is not the modernity of her industrial system but the lack of modernity in the outlook of her industrial workers.
The judgment may seem too harsh. It is manifestly unfair to place the entire burden of progress toward a healthier economy on one element in the economic situation. Certainly British capital in the past and to some extent in the present has been singularly blind to the country's new situation and unenterprising in seeking means of adjusting itself to this situation. The price rings and monopolistic practices have sustained inefficient factories and restricted industrial enterprise.
Nevertheless, it is my conclusion that today the industrial owner and manager understands the nation's situation and the union leader does not. The TUC has attained great influence in the realm. The industrial worker has won living standards undreamed of a generation ago. Nonetheless, there is a dangerous lack of tolerance in labor's approach to management. This carries over into labor's approach to government. It is a highly unrealistic attitude in which organized labor clamors for the adoption by a Conservative government of a system of economic planning which that government was elected to end.
As we have seen, thousands of the Tories' strongest supporters are angry because they regard the government they elected as pseudo-socialist.
This contest between labor and capital is involved and sharply partisan. Viewed from the outside, it may seem an insurmountable obstacle to British progress. But to accept that view is to ignore the most important, the most enduring of all the country's resources: the character of the British people.
From the time of Charles II on, visitors to Britain have been struck by the way in which the character of the British people has allowed them the widest latitude for internal differences, often carried to the very edge of armed conflict, and has yet enabled them to maintain their political stability.
There is a lesson in recent history. Imposing forces within the kingdom reached a pitch of fanatic fury over the Ulster question shortly before World War I. Great political leaders took their positions. The Army was shaken by rumors of disaffection. Officers were ready to resign their commissions rather than lead their troops into action against the turbulent Ulstermen. The Germans and others watching from the Continent concluded that the heart of the world empire was sick. Yet what was the outcome? Finally aware of the magnitude of the challenge presented by German aggression in Belgium, the country united instantly. The leaders composed their differences. The Army closed its ranks. The officers went away to fight and die at Mons and Le Cateau.
The lesson is that the British, because of their essential homogeneity, can afford a higher pitch of internal argument than can other nations. Indeed, the very fury of these arguments testifies to the vitality of the nation. It means a country on the move, in contrast to the somber, orderly, shabby dictatorship of Spain or the somnolent French Republic where the great slogans of the past have been abandoned for the motto "We couldn't care less."
Those who admire the British accept British character as one of the strongest arguments for their nation's survival as a great power. But before we go too far in endorsing this view we must note that there are bad characteristics as well as good ones. We know that the British society is changing. Is it not possible that in the process of change some of the characteristics which made the nation great are disappearing?
Mr. Geoffrey Gorer tells us that the British have become a law-abiding nation dwelling in amity and honesty under British justice. In some aspects of civil relationship this is true. Visitors to Britain only a century ago were alarmed by the behavior of British mobs. The cockneys of London pulled the mustaches of a visiting Hungarian general and shouted rude remarks at their Queen and her Prince Consort. From medieval times the British working classes have been long on independence and short on respect. The uprising of the _Jacquerie_ in French history is balanced in British annals by the dim, powerful, and compelling figures of Wat Tyler and John Ball.
Has all this changed so much? Have the turbulent, violent British really become a nation of sober householders indifferent to their rights or to those at home or abroad who threaten them? Superficially the answer may be yes. Basically it is no. The present strife between organized labor and the employers is only a contemporary version of a struggle which has gone on throughout its history and which is world-wide. It is when this struggle is submerged that it is dangerous. Despite all the damage it is doing now to the British economy, dissension in the House of Commons and in the boardrooms of industries is preferable to wild plots laid in cellars.
When we consider the heat with which these debates are conducted we must also take notice of one sign of British stability: partisan passions, either in industrial conflict or in political warfare, never reach the point where the patriotism of the other party is impugned. The Conservatives do not label the Socialists as the party of treason. The patriotism of Hugh Gaitskell is not questioned by Harold Macmillan. Ultimately we come round to the realization that, despite the bitterness of debate, the central stability of the state remains.
Much of this stability may result from the existence of the monarchy at the summit of British affairs. All public evidence indicates that the Crown is nearly powerless in modern Britain, yet it represents an authority older and higher than any other element in the realm. It may be the balance wheel, spinning brightly through the ages, that insures stability.
"At the heart to the British Empire there is one institution," Winston Churchill wrote twenty years ago, "among the most ancient and venerable, which, so far from falling into desuetude or decay, has breasted the torrent of events, and even derived new vigor from the stresses. Unshaken by the earthquakes, unweakened by the dissolvent tides, though all be drifting the Royal and Imperial Monarchy of Britain stands firm."
It can be argued that the excessive interest of the British people in the monarchy and the expense and labor involved in its upkeep are characteristics ill suited to Britain in her present position. This interest reflects the national tendency to dwell fondly on the past, to revere institutions for their historical connections rather than for their efficiency or usefulness under modern conditions. Serious criticism of this well-defined trait comes not only from Americans but from Australians, Canadians, and other inhabitants of newer nations. We look forward, they say, and the British look back.
There is some justice in the criticism, but perhaps the error is not so grave as we may think. Obviously, it is impossible for a people living in a country that has known some sort of civilization from Roman times not to be impressed by their past. A tendency in the same direction marks contemporary American society. Just as we are struck by the Londoner's interest in Roman relics dug up in the heart of his city, so European visitors note that an increasing number of Americans are turning to their own past. All over the East the fortresses of the French and Indian and Revolutionary wars are being reconstructed and opened to tourists. National attention is given to attempts in the Far West to re-create for a day or a week the atmosphere of a frontier that passed less than a century ago. Half-forgotten battles and generals of the Civil War are rescued for posterity by the careful labor of scholarly biographers and military writers. This does not mean, however, that the United States is looking back in the field of science or invention.
Similarly, British preservation of old castles or folkways is not a sign that the nation has turned its back on the twentieth century. The boldness with which the British accepted the challenge of the nuclear era in industrial energy is a better guide to their temper than their respect for the past. What is damaging is not reverence for the past of Nelson or Gladstone, but the tendency of some of the middle class to mourn the recent past, the dear dead days before the war when servants were plentiful, taxes relatively low, and "a man could run his own business." These mourners are temporarily important because their resistance to needed change infects others. But the life whose end they bewail has been disappearing in Britain for half a century, and the generation now rising to power will not be plagued by these memories to the same extent. To those who matured in war and post-war austerity, modern Britain is a prosperous land.
The trappings of British society are much older than our own. But their interest in maintaining an unchanged façade should not mislead Americans into believing the British are returning to the hand loom. Reverence for the past is often advanced as one reason for the lethargic attitude of Britons toward the present. Certainly an awareness of history, its trials and triumphs, gives an individual or a people a somewhat skeptical attitude about the importance of current history. But in Britain those who know and care least about the nation's great past are the ones most indifferent to the challenge of the present. They are the industrial working class, and their indifference results from other influences.
Talking to the planners, technicians, factory bosses, communications experts, salesmen, and senior civil servants, one finds less complacency and more enterprise than in most European countries. In fact, it sometimes seems to the outsider that British society is a little too self-critical, too contentious. Obviously, it must change to meet the altered world, but self-criticism pushed to the maximum can ultimately crush ambition.
If we turn to modern British writing, we find sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and politicians pouring forth a steady stream of books analyzing the nation's social, economic, and political problems. One of the great men of the modern Labor Party, Herbert Morrison, thought it well worth while to devote his time to the writing of _Government and Parliament_. The intellectual leaders of Britain have turned increasingly to a minute assessment of their nation and what is right and wrong about it.
This preoccupation with the state of the realm is healthy. The complacency that was once the most disliked characteristic of the traveling Briton is vanishing. The British are putting themselves under the microscope. Nothing but good can come of it.
We hear from the British themselves confessions of inadequacy to meet the modern world and flaming criticisms of aspects of their society. As a nation they are fond of feeling sorry for themselves; indeed, someone has said that they are never happier than when they think all is lost. Such British statements should not be taken as representing the whole truth. The reforming element is very strong in the British character. Without its presence, the social reforms of this century could not have been accomplished.
Anyone who frequents political, business, and journalistic circles in Britain will hear more about mistakes and failures than about success. (The most notable exception to this enjoyment of gloom is the popular press, which since the war has made a specialty of boosting British achievements.) Similarly, any discussion of British character with Britons is sure to find them concentrating on negative rather than positive traits. Perhaps this is because they are so sure of their positive characteristics. In any case, the latter constitute a major share of the national insurance against decline.
Over the years the British trait that has impressed me most is toughness of mind. This may surprise Americans who tend to regard the British as overpolite or diffident or sentimental--aspects of the national character which are evident at times and which hide the essential toughness underneath.