London

IT IS difficult to decide which is the real Britain today. Is it the Britain of the incandescent young — loud, leggy, amoral, and yet in a way asexual, changeable, vital, fashionable, untidy, and rich? Or is it the Britain of the solid trade union leaders — all astonishingly like Peter Sellers’ shop steward in I’m All Right Jack — meaningless these days on the steps of the Ministry of Economic Affairs as they “negotiate” in the context of an old-fashioned socialism.

The young are led by a group whose prosperity is based entirely upon the disc and the photograph. These naturally have worldwide markets. Success inevitably brings wealth on a scale and at a speed that are quite without precedent and wildly disproportionate to talent or to value. The engaging Herman of the Hermits is a millionaire in his teens. Jean Shrimpton, a photographic model, is flown from London at great expense to shock the matrons of Australia with London’s thigh-length skirts. It seems splendid but crazy. It is untypical. Yet it is not unrelated to the general condition of the country or even to politics.

There is a powerful undercurrent of socialist thinking among students. But the ideas of socialist students flow far to the left of Prime Minister Harold Wilson and his government. Indeed, Labor has disowned and disbanded its former Young Socialist League. Either way, from left or right, Wilson has yet to win the very young.

Wilson is otherwise the most successful politician, in a personal sense, that Britain has seen for some time. Throughout the winter months so far he has run well ahead of his party in popular esteem. At one point the polls suggested that he had almost 70 percent of the electorate on his side. An election at the end of November might well have put Labor back into power with a majority of 200, and in such a landslide, Tory leader Edward Heath could conceivably have lost his own seat.

Wilson has introduced presidential-type government to Britain. In his cabinet he is not first among equals. He is first. He and his ministers are advised not only by senior civil servants, as tradition dictates, but also by a brain trust from outside. He has used television to project himself as a man above the daily political battle, a national rather than a party leader. And he is a formidable performer on television — cool, quiet, occasionally eloquent, convincing to liberals, and plausible even to conservatives.

Tactical success in adopting this presidential kind of method has put Wilson’s new power rival, Edward Heath, at a disadvantage, because it somehow has forced him to fight a permanent campaign. Instead of being merely Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, he has been cast as a kind of antipresident. If Wilson’s success continues, the Leader of the Opposition in British politics could in the end come to bear to the Prime Minister a relationship similar to the relationship that the Senate Minority Leader in the United States bears to the President.

Action at any price

Things have not been going all Wilson’s way, however. Like Soviet socialism (and Yugoslav socialism and Polish socialism), Wilson’s socialism has run head on into an extreme crisis. And his image is to some extent clouded by Rhodesia. Wilson has spoken of Rhodesia as “my Cuba.” The phrase is significant. It has been true all along that success with Rhodesia would transform his future potential as a world figure, while failure could at any time bring catastrophe; but the use of this phrase reflects Wilson’s major weakness. He is not an original: he is a copy.

Sometimes he has been Kennedy. Sometimes he is Johnson. Once he was Lincoln. He mines Washington for phrases. But he has yet to copyright a “Wilson touch.” Most people believe his intentions are good, but few know quite what he stands for. His own recipe for successful government is to head down the right road and “get the stagecoach rattling along at a great speed.” This, he says, produces confidence. Any action is better than no action, even the wrong action — it can later be rescinded.

Wilson is an economist, and if there is one held in which this method cannot be expected to work, it is surely the economic. Yet the method has been pressed into service. The aim is announced — fair shares, social justice, and an ever expanding economy. Action starts in many directions — a tariff surcharge, massive borrowing, increased taxes, heightened interest rates, increased government expenditure, cancellation of expensive British aircraft projects, stiffer control of the exchanges, a reduction of investment by Britons abroad, rent control, housing subsidies, a ban on “inessential" building, an “incomes policy,” the assumption of power to influence wages directly from Whitehall, and so on.

The result, as it turns out, is not confidence, but crisis. The British economy in general has been in a state of chronic crisis for more than twelve months. Britain’s international payments may not be in balance before 1967. In five years after that it somehow has to pay back debts totaling more than all its gold and currency reserves. That can be done only out of surpluses.

Yet the significant crisis is not that of the economy. It is the “crisis of socialism,” which also appears to be almost worldwide. Because consumption cannot be planned, a consumer society cannot be “planned” in the old sense of the term. Because a consumer society must be based on choice, there has to be some freedom of prices, since prices are the machinery of choice. Because there has to be some freedom of prices, there has to be more freedom for investment. And because there must be more freedom for investment, there has to be more attention to profits. Wilson’s Britain is in trouble mainly because its whole philosophy is based on the concept that profits are immoral, and to assure social justice, basic prices should be subsidized.

No warmth in the home

There is a touch of high comedy about the sort of tangle that the confrontation between this philosophy and current events has produced. After the first cold spell of the winter, the government ordered the nationalized power industries — and urged the private oil industry — to suspend all advertising. This advertising has been keyed to producing a warmer Britain by selling British householders on central heating. (Only about 12 percent of Britons enjoy the luxury of total or even partial central heating.) Success of the campaign, however, spoiled the National Plan.

Too much electricity and too much gas were being used. An ordered series of area blackouts was started. Voltages were lowered. And because it is impossible to ration the amount of gas individual householders use, several of Britain’s big automobile firms, big users of gas, were cut off from their supplies altogether, and thousands of men were sent home for several days of enforced idleness.

Both the Electricity Board and the Gas Board had earlier asked to be allowed to put their prices up so that they could earn the required amount on their capital. Both had been denied permission to do so. But the consequence of power being priced below its economic level was, naturally, a very buoyant demand for it. This increased demand compounded the effect of the advertising campaign for warmth in the home.

Nor is the tangle yet unraveled, for denying the power industries permission to raise prices helped to keep the national price index steady, but success in keeping the national index steady accompanied total failure to hold national wage rates steady. Thus demand in general throughout the country has been inflated. Pay has risen at an annual rate of more than 10 percent, but prices have hardly risen at all recently. There is, therefore, more money to spend.

Chancellor of the Exchequer James Callaghan has warned that he may need to put up taxes. The standard rate of income tax already is at 41.25 percent of income, rising to 92 percent.

Cheap housing too costly

Similarly, subsidized rents for local government public housing are further distorting the economy. For one thing, people naturally go where there is cheap housing. There is most housing, cheap or otherwise, in the southeast of England, and the drift to the south is therefore exacerbated. For another thing, where the price of any item is uneconomic, it becomes difficult to balance supply and demand. With the price of housing uneconomic, it becomes impossible to do so. Where the scale of public housing is modest, the difficulties can be handled. Where it is large, they cannot be; the result is a housing shortage and a long list of unsatisfied applicants down at the town hall.

Richard Crossman, a powerful, intelligent, and active Housing Minister, means to break through by the sheer massiveness of his building program. Yet it seems doubtful that he can in fact succeed, for the simple reason that a building program so huge that it must meet the full demand for housing, whatever the price of it, may be beyond the strength of the British economy.

Similarly, efforts to solve the traffic problem of the southeast of England by cheap rail travel seem doomed to failure. Commuter trains are already overcrowded. A rail program so big that it could meet the full demand for travel, and at subsidized prices, is quite beyond the strength of the economy today.

Wilson’s socialism meets the same challenge in another form in its attitude to investment. Public investment has been sustaining Britain’s full employment. Private investment has been deterred. Yet private investment is vital to the economy, since private enterprise is responsible for the productive half of the economy and for almost all of Britain’s considerable exports.

Strange bedfellows

The puzzle is personalized in the baffling behavior of Frank Cousins as Minister of Technology. The theory behind the formation of his ministry is that planning will produce technical innovation more successfully than profits. Perhaps it may do so. But it has not done so yet. More than half of Britain’s sciencebased industry is, in fact, now American-owncd.

But what is baffling about Cousins is that he has never backed the “incomes policy” run by his colleagues Callaghan and George Brown, and masterminded by Wilson. He remains general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, on leave of absence. And the TGWU has become an implacable opponent of wage restraint.

Cousins, the socialist, thus finds himself lined up for the present with Enoch Powell, the archapostle of free enterprise. Powell argues that wage restraint will never work just because you can never expect a union leader to settle for less than he knows is justified, either by the high demand for the skill of his members or by the union’s power.

Powellism is gaining strength, perhaps because there is as yet no such thing as Heathism. Powell has been made shadow Defense Minister. (Heath is a shadow Wilson.) Here again Powell has shown his individualism. Equating power with responsibility, he sees Britain relinquishing responsibility in the Pacific and in Asia, and possibly in Africa, where soon it will have no power. He is not afraid to say so.

Britain alone among America’s allies has 150,000 men under arms overseas. It is not getting out of any of its bases in a hurry. But in the long term, according to Powell, the facts of economics and logistics strongly suggest that Britain will turn exclusively to its own defense. And that means, of course, to Europe. But at the same time, the pull of America is increasingly strong. Wilson is not really prepared to “join Europe” on Europe’s terms, although Heath would be. If he were asked, Wilson would prefer to join America. And it may prove to be the case that there is no answer satisfactory for Britain except an Atlantic union.

In this context the wild and woollyyoung probably do reflect the nation as a whole. The essential thing about them, besides their belief in inequality — the Earl of Snowdon, the millionaires of pop, the multiplying of gambling casinos — is that they are international. From their accents to their influence, indeed they are transatlantic.