London

THE need for a settlement “at the Summit” is foremost in the thinking of large numbers of Britons this spring. Pressure for a Summit conference is one of several notable developments that seem likely to change the shape of the year. The others are the balancing of fears between slump and inflation, a fresh flowering of hope in the British Commonwealth as an expansionist entity, and the safe production within the hydrogen-power machine at Harwell of pulses of heat as hot as the sun.

Prime Minister Macmillan’s cautious initiative in his replies to Bulganin is the product of the very best political advice. That advice, in brief, is to keep in step with President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles and if possible at least one pace ahead. Britons now judge each step, and each statesman, by the single criterion of how far each has advanced the West toward the Summit.

One immediate result has been a sharp deterioration in Anglo-American relations. Dulles has lost his last supporters outside the reluctant ranks of officialdom. The jokes about the President’s golf grow more bitter. Remarks by columnist Joseph Alsop — “London is a city that all but stinks of defeat” and “They hunger for negotiation-just-for-negotiation’s-sake” — have stung the British to a fierce resentment.

There can be no denying, however, that there exists in Britain a pressure for peace that is reminiscent of the thirties. At that time millions signed the Peace Ballot, and Oxford undergraduates passed a resolution that they would rather not fight for King and Country. (And both misled and encouraged Adolph Hitler.)

Today one does hear alarming phrases like this: “After occupation, life goes on. After an H-bomb, it ceases.” Bertrand Russell, on the philosophic fringe, has been joined by a bluff military expert, Commander Sir Stephen King-Hall, in a demand for unilateral British renunciation of nuclear weapons. Both on the Conservative Right and on the Left there has been concern about the wisdom of allowing United States aircraft to fly in British air with H-bombs. This has been augmented at times by a demand to Macmillan to “provide the leadership that President Eisenhower ought to be showing but is not.”

The Labor Party is split more deeply and seriously than the Tories. It offers as its official policy a temporary halt to tests of bombs, but no more. Hugh Gaitskell has had to get tough to limit the rebellious activities of a “Victory for Socialism” group that wants much more and has threatened to become a party within the party. Bevan, strangely ineffective, has given Gaitskell his hand. But not his heart.

Analogy with Munich?

Macmillan no doubt sometimes looks uneasily back to Munich. Chamberlain in 1938 confused surrender and the seeds of war with “peace in our time.” One recalls that at the time he was brought out on the balcony of Buckingham Palace by the King and Queen to share the cheers of multitudinous Londoners.

Today, of course, the British deny any possible analogy to Munich. Then there was no AngloAmerican alliance. Then a single dictator quite openly threatened to extend his frontiers by the threat of military powers. Now, the British claim, even power itself has changed. The threat is different. And, in spite of alarms, the Anglo-American alliance is a fact. American airmen are in Britain; American rockets on the way. Britain itself provides extra H-bomb power for the alliance. It spends proportionately more on defense than any other United States ally. The Government has not been pressured aside from its predetermined course.

But Macmillan, while aware that no crowd these days would gather outside the palace to cheer if he traded West Germany, say, for “peace in our time,” is well aware also that the British electorate would almost certainly put back in power a Government that had led the way to a settlement which genuinely relaxed world tensions. This is the one issue that really stirs the electorate. Therein lies Macmillan’s greatest, perhaps only, chance of turning the now ebbing tide to victory in 1959 or 1960.

The distrust of Germany

Germany, meanwhile, is not exactly popular with the British. Distrust goes deeper than the dispute over the £50 million that the British claim the Germans ought to pay toward the cost of supporting British troops on German soil. But the fear that Germany may take over Western Europe through the six-nation Common Market is for the moment overshadowed by another: that France will smash the Free Trade Area scheme altogether, as it smashed the European Defense Community, with serious repercussions to the whole free world.

French objections make it doubtful that the British plan for a ring of industrial-free-trade nations around the Common Market, linking it to a wider world, will ever materialize. The British say the involved French counterplan is unworkable. And they are afraid that the Common Market alone could become a divisive rather than a uniting influence, forming a new protective bloc, cut off from its neighbors and dominated not by France but by Germany.

Commonwealth trade

Concern over Germany and France helps turn Britain’s thoughts to its own Commonwealth. The Commonwealth trade conference, fixed for September, assumes much more significance than it was originally given. It is now seen to offer a possible hedge against delay in setting up a European Free Trade Area, or failure to promote it, and also against an American recession. A trade recession produced the Ottawa Agreements of 1932, which set the pattern of Imperial Preferences. Although they have been whittled down and renamed, they continue to this day. The Commonwealth can be a force for stability.

Whether the Commonwealth can be turned into an expansionist force remains to be seen. The odds at present seem to be against that. It is true that 40 per cent of Britain’s trade is still done with the Commonwealth. But the trend of trade is in the other direction. Trade has expanded most since the war between manufacturing countries. The United States has become Britain’s best single customer. Industrial Europe also claims a continually increasing share.

The British consumer’s own preferences underline the trend. Since 1953 the average Briton’s spending on automobiles has increased 50 per cent, on record players 108 per cent, on electric shavers 103 per cent, on washing machines 61 per cent. Spending on food has gone up less than 2 per cent per annum, on housing less than one per cent, on drink and tobacco between 2 and 3 per cent.

Britain’s greatest export trade is in machinery, automobiles, household gadgets, radios, aircraft, and steel. (And whisky.) It is hard to avoid the conclusion that expansion still depends upon the mutual trade of the industrial countries.

“Don’t force us to choose between Europe and the Commonwealth,” pleaded Reginald Maudling in Paris. But in fact there may be no choice possible. Exclusion from Europe would seriously weaken Britain and consequently the North Atlantic alliance, whatever happens to Commonwealth trade.

The riddle of the budget

Economically Britain is now in its usual position of paradox. Official opinion is neatly balanced between the fear of a slump and the continuing fear of inflation. The balance was reflected in Heathcoat Amory’s April budget. This was presented to a Parliament containing as many as five recent Chancellors of the Exchequer. There were Thorneycroft, who resigned; Macmillan, who was promoted; Butler, who had had enough; Gaitskell, who was defeated; and Dalton, who was indiscreet. None successfully solved the riddle of the economy.

Thorneycroft may claim to have done more than anyone else to steady and then to strengthen the pound, even if in his term he achieved only stability. He emerges after his resignation a very much stronger Tory figure than he seemed before it. He is adamant that Britain’s prime need is a stable currency, that this will in time produce greater individual benefits than subsidized welfare, and that a definite limit must be put on government spending.

Amory, succeeding him, has agreed to more government spending than was estimated last year. But Thorneycroft’s gesture has focused a dazzling light on the high cost of government and the relation of that high cost to the value of money. Even socialists have had to admit that in the future, planning and controls will not be enough but that cuts in state spending will have to be made. Socialists would make them in defense.

The government is still intent on proving that an inflation, even if provoked by the continual increase of wages in excess of output, can be overcome by orthodox monetary means without producing a slump. It appointed a Council on Wages, Prices, and Productivity which infuriated trade-union opinion by heartily endorsing that conclusion.

Unemployment slowly increased (to 2 per cent) throughout the spring. But permanent officials of the Treasury have recently put forward a confident view that “the scope for more efficient production has been much increased by the extra capacity installed in the past three years.”

But more people, notably among trade unionists, are beginning to wonder whether perhaps inflation was not the goose that laid the golden eggs. Is it victory that has been achieved, or execution? Certainly the “extra capacity” cannot be used unless there is an increase in effective demand.

The disturbing thought is that in Britain’s circumstances an increase in demand has got to come from overseas. Were it to come from the home market it might unbalance Britain’s trade again and cause another run on the pound.

Americans thus may be well advised to expect as close and critical an appraisal by Britain of American trade and economic policy as of American diplomacy. The recent phase of difficulty in Anglo-American relations, which has lasted longer than most periods of friction in the past, may by this token be extended a little longer.

For four months the United States recession had no visible effect on Britain. Even British cars went on selling merrily in America. This was indeed fortunate, for a reflected slump on top of everything else could have split the alliance.

Nuclear power

Americans may be surprised to learn that they have been accused of being ungenerous — not in cash, but in kindness. Some very hard things were said of the United States over the simultaneous Anglo-American release of information on joint progress toward useful thermonuclear power. The British believed they had achieved a “first” but had been denied credit for it.

That the letters in “Zeta” stand for Zero Energy Thermonuclear Assembly, describing a machine that was never intended to produce H-power, did not do so, and has not done so yet, has mattered not a bit. Zeta was and is the biggest piece of experimental thermonuclear hardware in the world. It first produced pulses of heat hotter than the surface of the sun (proving that H-power certainly will one day be practical) on August 30, 1957, three months before similar temperatures were reached in a much smaller machine and in pulses a thousand times shorter in duration at Los Alamos.

This record, the British felt, deserved more than a short acknowledgment between parentheses in the final sentence of the final paragraph of the last of the United States technical papers released on January 24.

Zeta, as a morale raiser, is Britain’s Sputnik and Explorer combined. The British may not be in the space race, but they are convinced they are the prime movers who before long will bring the world the immeasurable benefits of inexhaustible energy from the drops of water in the oceans.