Letter from Oxford

Our Series of Reports from Abroad Continues with A View of England

IT'S BEEN A mild winter here, and now in February some flowers are showing which shouldn't appear until April. For Britain in 1949, this is not simply a pleasant weather note, but economic intelligence of the first importance. A mild winter means lowered fuel consumption, which means more power for industry, which means more goods for export, which means more dollars, which may mean recovery from the edge of national bankruptcy. A member of the government said awhile ago that the coal-miners were the most important people in Britain today; and the weekly figures on the number of tons produced from the mines are followed almost as closely as communiques from the battlefield were followed a few years ago.

The communiques this winter have been encouraging. The country has been gratified to hear that it may survive, even though the news has come from Washington, in the quietly glowing report presented to Congress by the ECA staff here. The same figures, on production and dollar-earnings, were available before that in Britain: but they were made public by Sir Stafford Cripps, who always castor-oilcoats his good news. We're doing all right, he says in despairing tones, but we'll have to do much better. Salvation through work is his motto. His countrymen have heeded the summons so well that, if any European country is self-sustaining by 1952, it will be this one. Already, Britain is well enough along the road so that she is passing on a substantial share of her Marshall aid this year to her less fortunate Continental neighbors, in the form of unrequited exports.

So far, the inhabitants of what Mr. Churchill calls "this small and famous island" haven't been conscious of many of the benefits of their efforts. They are, in fact, considerably better off than most of the Continent. Food is rationed, but no one is starving. Clothes are rationed, but no one is ragged. Housing is short, but no one is living underground. There is inflation, but it is controlled, and its impact on the lower-income groups is lessened by food subsidies and price regulations. The currency is sound, and there will be a budget surplus this year. All who want to work, and some who would rather not, have jobs. Coal production, which was steadily declining before the war, has been steadily rising. Steel production is hitting new highs. The export target—150% of 1938—has been hit. The dollar gap, which threatened to become an abyss into which the nation would tumble, has been narrowed to a small gulf, across which the ERP has thrown a bridge which should last until Sir Stafford and the nation's managers and workers can fill it in.

All of this represents a substantial achievement. Some of the ECA staff in London call it miraculous. But, because life is still austere, and because it is difficult to view one's own position in perspective at a time when the horizon has narrowed, the British themselves have little realization of their accomplishment. An American journalist said the other day that they have achieved the miracle of making a socialist revolution dull. As they once acquired an empire in a fit of absentmindedness, so they now seem to be organizing a more civilized social life without noticing it. They have a national flair for the undramatic; they have a rooted suspicion of rhetoric, blueprints for the future, and any kind of posturing: yet it is possible that in this generation, as once before in another troubled time, England may save herself by her exertions, and the world—or part of it—by her example.

Those with a taste for irony in history can find much to contemplate in the spectacle of a socialist government coming to power for the first time at the moment when its country lacked the means to carry its program into effect. (Lord Keynes pretions dieted this twenty years earlier, and thought that America, which alone had the means, lacked the will.) The socialist vision was of a society in which the workers work less and be paid more; in which leisure, higher education, and the good things of life would cease to be the preserve of the possessing classes; in which the coopera- tive commonwealth would join with all na- tions to find peace and security. This was the vision which led a majority of the British electorate to vote Labour in 1945. They returned a government which found itself confronted by a society in which the workers had to work harder for not much more money if the nation was to survive; in which leisure was the prelude to disaster, higher education a luxury, and the good things of life marked for export only; in which the hostility of the ally to which it was ideologically linked threw it perforce into the arms and upon the mercies of the ally to which it was ideologically opposed.

Here, if ever, were the classic ingredients for cynicism, despair, and inner conflicts resulting in a crippling of the national will, from which men might have turned for salvation to a totalitarian solution. Edwin A. Bock '43, in his report from Europe in this space last November, suggested two conditions for 'hanging onto democracy and decent human behavior': ' (1) people with sufficient inner peace and freedom from want and tension so that they can be tolerant of others and go along with the majority sometimes when they disagree, and (2) people who are secure enough to make up their own minds and to act or to lead courageously within the orderly framework of a democratic system.' This will serve as a definition of the British. They are, most of them, neither cynical nor despairing. Their inner conflicts they have resolved well enough so that they have achieved a level of national activity, both industrial and political, which is the best guarantee against their turning to the totalitarian solution. They have been dismayed, but undeterred, by the double trick history has played on themthe election of a socialist government at a time demanding renewed national sacrifice, and the overturn of the world strategic situation demanding affiliation with capitalist America. Today, four years after the victory which nearly destroyed them, they are as tolerant, as decent, and as devoted to the difficult practise of democracy as any people in the world.

The real miracle of Britain is that, even while restoring itself in the world economy by prodigious effort, much sacrifice, and American aid, it has carried through the first installments of its quiet social revolution. The foundations of the new society promised in the socialist vision have been laid—and accepted by the bulk of the nation. With the passage next year of the bill to nationalize iron and steel, the government will have achieved a record for modern democratic parties by carrying out every major legislative item on its preelection platform. Coal, transport, gas, and power are already owned by the nation; the Conservatives will leave them in the nation's hands if they are returned to power, but will, they say, un-nationalize steel. By far the greater part of the economy remains in private hands; it is brought into the national plan for full production and full employment by means of fiscal policy and the various positive controls of licensing, allocation of materials, rationing, price ceilings, and so on. The Conservatives raise much hue and cry over these controls, but those of their leaders who have advanced from the 19th into the 20th century admit privately that if they were in power they would have to follow substantially the same policy.

It is in the field of welfare that the government has made real strides in bettering the condition of the people. The buffetings of adversity upon the national economy have been warded off by governmental cushions, and twisted by deliberate policy so as to nudge the social framework into closer accord with that for which the majority voted. Thus, food subsidies have helped the working-class family to meet the high cost of living; food subsidies plus rationing have given the whole population an adequate diet by eliminating under-nourishment at one end and overstuffing at the other. A steeply progressive income tax and high death duties replenish the national exchequer, and diminish those accumulations of great wealth which perpetuate the social inequality the government is pledged to abolish. Health in- surance and a comprehensive social-security scheme provide guarantees for every family against the economic disasters which, for the lower-income groups, used to accompany sickness and old age. The redistribution of the national income has progressed so far that middle-class housewives complain about the shortage of baby shoes, when the fact is that more baby shoes are being made now than before the war: the apparent shortage results from their increased purchase by working-class mothers.

All of this has not been accomplished without mistakes, difficulties, and sorrowful cries from the possessors of pocketbooks which used to be fatter. The Conservative Party has not yet found the answer to the problem which has beset the Republican Party for so long: how to formulate a policy which will appeal to a majority of the voters when a society is on the move, without at the same time deserting the conservative principles which give the party its appeal to its traditional supporters. The Tories, like the Republicans, have tried to solve the dilemma by saying that they will do everything that Labour is doing, but more efficiently, with fewer bureaucrats, and on reduced taxes. And the Tories, like the Republicans, are finding it difficult to impress the voters. They dramatized their own dilemma the other day by denouncing the high cost of the national health service, but then failing to vote against the appropriations: thus performing the difficult feat of simultaneously offending both the lower-income groups, who feared a cut in the service, and the higher-income groups, who wanted one. They have yet to win a seat from the government. Their leaders admit privately that they expect to lose the General Election next year. Some of the more thoughtful Labour leaders admit privately that they expect to lose next year, too: or at best to be returned with a greatly-reduced majority. Most political observers favor the latter view. The middle class has felt the pinch of the government's policies most severely, and it is likely that a considerable proportion of this vote which went Labour last time will swing Conservative.

Whatever happens next time, it is already clear that this country seems to have solved what may be the central political problem of this century: the reconciliation of freedom and security. There are certain tendencies here which alarm an American visitor: the national devotion to queueing, for example, and the quiet resignation with which some unnecessary restrictions and some unwarranted bureaucratic stupidities are accepted. Partly this is because the people are tired, after a decade of living in a garrison economy; partly because the tradition of law and order has produced a level of civility in both public and private life which sometimes makes an alien yearn for a little frontier yawping. But these are surface manifestations: below them runs undisturbed the Englishman's passionate devotion to the freedom to do what pleases him. There has been a physical constriction around this freedom: there are plenty of Englishmen who will tell you that, this being so, they have no freedom left. Most of them would not agree. They can still organize, assemble, petition, speak, write, publish, and advocate as freely as they like. There are still enough small rebellions going on to keep the currents moving in this society: wildcat strikes, Labour Party votes against the government, trade union refusals to accept Trades Union Congress decisions, the national outcry against Ernest Bevin's Pales tine policy which made him reverse it. The freedom of property to exploit weakness has been denied; the poor have willingly surrendered their freedom to starve, and the skilled worker his freedom to go jobless. The essential fact is that socialism has been invited into the parlor, and democracy has not been driven into the cellar.

An important result of this is that the British are with us and not with the Russians in the struggle for power which has split the world in two. There are, of course, sufficient strategic reasons to explain this, as well as sentimental ones; but there are also ideological reasons. Evidently the watershed of world opinion lies not along economic lines but along political lines. The British economy is, and will probably remain for a long time, mixed: with the tendency towards collectivism rather than towards individualism. But this economic tendency towards the Soviet Union rather than towards America is of small significance beside the political orientation, which is entirely towards freedom rather than towards regimentation. The British people carried on a long-distance love affair with the Russians during the war, and the Labour Party has a traditional distrust of American monopoly capitalism, but there is no question as to which fundamental concept of life they hold today.

Most of them would prefer being less dependent on America than they now are. There is a nostalgia for the good old days; and it is still wise, in discussion here, to include Britain among the great powers, and talk about the Big Three instead of the Big Two. Those who would like to see a new power relationship in the world are working, on the right, for Mr. Churchill's United Europe scheme, and on the left for a socialist "third force" embracing Britain and western Europe. The supporters of neither scheme are pleased when they are asked, "How could your new grouping get along, economically or militarily, with America? And, if it continued to get American aid, how could it be independent, and make a counter-weight between America and Russia?"

No one likes to be reminded too nakedly of the realities of life in a political ice-age. The government, which is reminded of these realities every day, is pulling on Mr. Churchill's coattails, and giving little encouragement to its own supporters who advocate the "third force." Indeed, in a curious way there is more isolationism here than in America: with the best planning and the most vigorous production drives, the government's schemes may yet founder because of wheat prices in America or fiscal irresponsibility in France. This is still an island-nation: one expects to hear momentarily the old cry, "There's a foreigner, heave half a brick at him": and Mr. Attlee and his colleagues must sometimes want to retreat behind their moat against the silver sea and build a compact, self-adjusted, self-sealing economy.

Since they cannot do this, they are pursuing a double policy: trying to restore themselves in company with western Europe, while insuring themselves against its potential collapse. Good will and modest hopes propel the first, prudence dictates the second. Thus, devoted to compromise, suspicious of Utopias, hostile to dogma, fanatically pragmatic, conservative in its most radical reforms, confounding all generalizations including this one, Britain will probably continue to irritate its friends and astonish its enemies.

ON VACATION FROM OXFORD: The author, Charles G. Bolte '41, and wife Mary about to go on a picnic at Vezelay, a mountain village in Burgundy, last summer. One of the best known of Dartmouth's younger alumni, Bolte went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1947 and is writing a thesis on "The Soviet Impact on British Politics." Invalided out of the British Army, he worked a year for OWI and then helped organize and become the first national chairman of the American Veterans Commrttee. His book "The New Veteran" was published in 1945.