London

LORD ATTLEE, the first socialist Prime Minister to be presented with an effective majority in Parliament, senses now “a mood like 1945.” The mood that gave him that majority came at the end of a world war. Today there is affluence, and the times are not comparable. Yet Attlee is probably right. The mood of 1945 was generated by the breaking of traditional class barriers; it was a reaction against the socially unoriented politics of the Conservative past (which at that time seemed to servicemen to have made the whole mess both inevitable and potentially meaningless). Similar elements seem to be present in the mood of Britain today.

Constitutionally the making of Sir Alec DouglasHome has an affinity to 1649, when Cromwell’s Rump Parliament dispensed with the House of Lords. Now the making of Sir Alec seems likely to have disposed of the Lords finally. Macmillan, who as a former Prime Minister has a right to an earldom, stays in the Commons. Home has come down. Altrincham has come down. Wedgwood Benn has come down. Hailsham too has chosen to come down. A great football hero of long ago, Sir Wavell Wakefield has gone up instead as a baron, not so much for the political contribution he can make to the Lords as for the contribution he makes to the Commons by the deed to Hailsham (Quintin Hogg) of the safest Tory seat of all.

This, incidentally, leaves Britain with virtually a one-chamber form of government and one tending toward the presidential model. But, more important for the present, it may also be seen as a necessary corollary to the repudiation of class as a prime political force. The Daily Express summed up its hopes in a neat, three-word, front-page banner headline: “Call Me Mister!” Thus the significant question is whether these extraordinary developments portend continuing rightwing rule or a general renunciation of the hereditary principle and, in the words of John Freeman, editor of the New Statesman, “unearned privilege.” Perhaps it was unfortunate that Sir Alec in order to be elected had to keep the Commons waiting, and that the first available seat for him should be in a Perthshire constituency of lairds and tenant farmers. Sir Alec himself is a great landowner. At Kinross even his Liberal opponent was a local laird with 7000 acres. Other landowners in the area have 70,000 acres and more.

Yet if anyone in politics can overcome such apparent handicaps it could be Douglas-Home. He has made an immediate public impression of cool charm and tough ability. He has revealed a wit as quick as Harold Wilson’s, and happier. His answer to Wilson’s taunt about his ancient earldom — “Come to think of it, I suppose he is the fourteenth Mr. Wilson” — is still being quoted.

Prosperity is not enough

But what is the former earl’s social purpose? That may sound ridiculously portentous. Yet in the Britain of 1964 it becomes a vital question. In seeking parallels with 1945, one remembers that the mood that put Attlee into office toppled a party led by the greatest orator, the greatest wit, the greatest Englishman of his time, the warwinner, Winston Churchill.

Now that the British economic miracle seems to be a fact, it is clear that prosperity is not enough. According to the polls the issues this winter on which Labor is ahead are these: pensions, labor relations, housing, roads, and only after these issues, economic affairs. On education and international affairs there seems to be little choice between the two parties.

The first act of Sir Alec’s government, before Parliament could even reassemble, was to accept in principle the report of the committee of economist Lord Robbins that has recommended a great increase in the availability of higher education — six new universities, upgrading of more than twenty other institutions to university level, five “Massachusetts Institutes of Technology,” a trebling of university places.

More is to be spent on schools, more on science, more on roads, more on electricity supply, more on housing. In this financial year and the next, public expenditure, already 45 percent of national income, is to rise 27 percent. There is, says Sir Alec, therefore no room for big tax cuts in the April budget. This announcement is calculated to spike the guns of the Labor opposition, which has with some justification claimed that the Conservatives have always managed to manipulate the economy so that an election neatly coincides with a giveaway budget, followed almost at once after victory by deflation. Sir Alec’s announcement fits the mood.

Maudling, who had considerable support in Parliament to become Macmillan’s successor, now has the chance to establish himself as the most successful Treasury chief of the post-war years. He has only to sustain the expansion his cautiously liberal policies seem to have generated.

Uneven affluence

Maudling’s, and the country’s, dilemma, however, is that in spite of rising profits, private productive investment has been slow to respond to expansion. This may actually be a consequence, in part, of an “incomes policy” that restrains a sharp rise in wages and salaries and, in part, of the unevenness of affluence.

The average wage in Britain is about $50.00 a week. A state retirement pension is $9.50 a week. Some five million wives work to supplement the family income, and the number is expected soon to grow to seven million. But young marrieds with children and older people are hard put to it to make ends meet. You cannot be affluent on $9.50 or $50.00, with an average 3.5 percent pay rise per annum. In 1961—1962, for instance, the average income increase was only 1.5 percent. Personal tax payments went up, though, 10 percent. Welfare contributions, deducted from pay, went up 12 percent. Rents went up 5 percent, fares 10 percent. The number of very rich people ($60,000 income), meanwhile, in 1961—1962 increased by 25 percent. A quarter of a million people rose, economically speaking, into the upper middle class (over $6000); several million into the lower ($3000 to $4000). There remained, however, ten million incomes below $1400 a year.

Douglas-Home’s greatest problem is that in this uneven Britain it is the middle classes who are leaving the Conservative ranks. They are not going over to Labor so much as over to the Liberals, who may double their vote in the next election but have no chance whatever of gaining more than ten seats. Just by taking votes, the Liberals could put the Socialists in with a crushing majority.

Also, affluence is regional, tending to peter out gradually after a three-hour journey from London. Sir Alec’s most significant appointment, therefore, may be of Edward Heath as regional industrial overlord. Heath is a “new man,” not out of the top drawer and Oxford. He made such a name for competence in the complex Brussels negotiations for British entry into the Common Market that when Macmillan became ill, Heath was for a time a runner for the premiership.

Regional development indeed could become one of the great issues of the future. For such development is almost bound to lead to greater regional political autonomy trade follows government — and may later, with the decline of the House of Lords and the increasing pressure of business in the Commons, have profound constitutional implications.

Is all this, however, enough to turn the tide for the Tories? One may fairly say that they run level with Labor now in their views on education, science, regional development, and roads, with economic expansion in their favor; but there are some significant differences in the political programs. The Tories promise planning, with private enterprise retaining the major role in industry; the state doing what the individual cannot; the individual paying, when able, for his special requirements of welfare, health, and security. Labor also promises planning, with state enterprise the major force; the individual removed from the need to pay the full price of welfare, except through taxation; further measures to redistribute wealth, through a capital gains tax and a tax on wealth; half-pay pensions; more public housing.

Wilson is doing his best to rid himself of the albatross of nationalization. He appears to be trying to substitute a new concept of socialism. This is hazy in detail, but is outlined in his pronouncement that under Labor it would be “a matter of principle that where new industries are set up on the basis of government-sponsored research, the profits should accrue in good measure to the community that creates them.” In the context of an enormous new government pension fund, requiring investment in growth industries, this theory seems to foreshadow a partnership between state and private enterprise. It presupposes also that the government will come to terms with the concepts of profit and differential dividends, to promote and reward efficiency, if it is going to buy large shareholdings in otherwise privately owned industry.

A disturbing element in Wilson’s thinking, however, is his open scorn for consumer goods and for the surge of sales of them to industrialized Europe which he contrasts with the deeper value of heavy industry and the sale of such things as “whole chemical plants” to Eastern Europe. In terms of trade, however, the value is actually all the other way. Sales to Western Europe, particularly of cars and consumer goods, have risen nearly 30 percent. They have become the prime movers of British recovery.

Wilson, of course, may be saying these things because “Rome is worth a Mass.” The left wing of his party has a deep traditional loyalty to old socialist values and to the brotherhoods of socialists everywhere, even when they are Communist. Realization of this may account in part for public uneasiness over Labor’s proposal to renounce Britain’s unilateral deterrent, although it is mixed with an equal uneasiness about the moral virtue of retaining the deterrent.

Friendly argument

Foreign policy, however, is likely to have less impact on the British public than home affairs as an election approaches, unless the cold war heats up again, or there should be a row with the United States. Several fertile fields of misunderstanding between the British and American Administrations are showing themselves. It is, of course, always easier to misunderstand a close ally than an opponent.

Britain backs the new round of talks on tariffs and trade with unusual fervor, supports the United States in Berlin with the usual sense of duty; but it does not support the multilateral-force idea, differs still with the United States on Europe, is disappointed in the United States over defense orders, and strongly opposes flag-discrimination by the United States in shipping.

Britain has agreed to enter discussions on the multilateral force without committing itself to participate. Douglas-Home’s cabinet is divided between those who see political advantages in joining and those who see serious military and financial disadvantages. In the British military view the MLF can add nothing to the strength of the alliance, but through the dilution of expensive resources might actually weaken the West substantially. It would certainly weaken Britain, making a farce of what is left of its “independent deterrent.”

With Skybolt gone and Polaris not yet arrived, the British have pinned their defense hopes on the TSR-2 bomber, a most sophisticated plane with batlike radar for safety in low-level supersonic attack, bombaim accuracy measured in inches, television for reconnaisance, and high-level nuclear capability as well. It has cost more than a billion dollars to develop. It looks as though only one hundred might be built.

The bitterest blow was the defection of Australia, now a captive customer of the United States, or so it seems to Britons. The TSR-2 was designed in the first place as much for Pacific jungle security as for European deterrence. With Europe and Canada already in the orbit of the United States, it was hoped that at least Australia would chip in and share the costs of British independence instead of buying the TFX from the United States.

The very future of the British air industry is also seen to be involved. In the fight for markets, even for small airliners like the BAC-111 and the Trident, where before, Britain with the Viscount was supreme, Britain now sees its industry in some danger of being pushed out of business by American competition.

Agreement with France

Britain meanwhile has teamed with France to build the supersonic Concorde. It has also teamed with France in space (Europe’s first multistage rocket blasts off early in 1964 from Woomera). It is cut off from France in nuclear independence only by its own continuing “special relationship” with the United States. But remarkable developments may be expected this year in the French attitude to the Common Market. A new British approach to European unity can therefore be expected, in spite of the resounding denials of the politicians (who know the idea of “Europe” cannot win an election).

Ironically, Britain’s aims in Europe have been opposed in the past by the United States, while considerable U.S. backing was being given to France. Yet it has been the aims of France that have proved in the end most completely irreconcilable with American policy. Today Britain’s objective is exactly the same as it has been: to fashion a single European industrial and commercial market with some, but only the minimum, political content. The United States has steadily opposed this because it would erect a larger and more cohesive area of economic discrimination against the United States without providing any political advantages. After Brussels, will the United States continue to oppose it?

The only alternatives to a British “Europe” in the context of 1964, some Britons think, will be either an Anglo-French agreement, tending inevitably toward a more independent Europe, or American initiative to found an Atlantic community.