Crossing the Channel

COMMON MARKET

(See Cover)

For nine centuries, since William the Conqueror won the Battle of Hastings, the English Channel has stood as the "moat defensive'' between Britain and her foes, between the "blessed plot" and the "envy of less happier lands." Today, Paris-London jets pass over the Channel tides in three minutes; nuclear missiles would blast across in as many seconds. The balance of envy has changed. Increasingly prosperous Britons, who swarm across to the Continent by the thousands each summer, return with European notions of comfort, elegance and efficiency that have breached England's insularity more surely than any invader.

But if the Channel is no longer a moat, it is more than a memory. In the missile age, as in the Middle Ages, it is still the demarcation line of British sovereignty, the symbol of differences in law and language, attitudes and institutions that have historically separated Englishmen from Europeans--and mingled their blood on countless European battlefields. "The English," it is said, "are always willing to die for foreigners--but not to live with them."

This month, some 400 years since Britain was driven from her last French possession, the island nation approaches the climax of a historic effort to vault the Channel and bind her fortunes indissolubly to those of the new, united, booming Western Europe. This decision will deeply affect Britain's relations with 724 million Commonwealth citizens. Britons who want to remember the sails of Drake and Raleigh, and the balance sheets that once followed the flag around the world, are being asked to turn their backs on what little remains of the Empire and to abandon (or so many believe) yesterday's wide horizons for a nearby, still suspect coast. And yet, to an extent unforeseeable only a few years ago, the decision to join Europe's Common Market may also be a new adventure for Britain and restore British prestige and power. The outcome will influence the future of Europe and of the entire free world.

Unite or Perish. Britain's passage to Europe began in earnest on a grey October day in Paris last year. Behind the closed doors of a high-ceilinged conference room in the Quai d'Orsay, Britain's Lord Privy Seal, Edward Richard George Heath, formally notified ministers of the six Common Market nations that his government had reached "a great decision, a turning point in our history." In a deep, resonant voice, Heath declared: "We desire to become full, wholehearted and active members of the European Community in its widest sense, and to go forward with you in the building of a new Europe." Gravely, he added: "Europe must unite or perish. We are convinced that our destiny is intimately linked with yours."

Never before had a British government committed itself so emphatically to economic and political union with Europe. For centuries, Britain had practiced what Disraeli elegantly called "abstention" from Europe, except when a drastic upset in the Continental balance of power made it necessary to intervene. This policy remained in force virtually until yesterday. For a dozen years, Labor and Conservative governments consistently cold-shouldered the supranational institutions that paved the way for the Common Market. To many European statesmen, Ted Heath's declaration last year was a hopeful echo of Winston Churchill's ringing pleas for European unity in the 1940s--but also a bitter reminder that even Churchill had never brought his people to share his vision.

The Vision Ahead. The U.S. is backing Britain's initiative with unalloyed enthusiasm--and, at times, pushing it with so much vigor that the more discreet British are downright embarrassed. U.S. policymakers, like many in Europe, are still fearful that the Six, dominated by France and Germany, could become a "Little Europe" and then retire behind high tariff walls into a political third-force position.

With her ties to the U.S. and the multiracial Commonwealth, Britain's adherence to the Continent is the free world's best hope that Europe will evolve instead into a liberal, outward-looking community committed for the foreseeable future to the Western Alliance.

Despite serious obstacles it is increasingly probable--if by no means certain--that Britain will be admitted to the Common Market. When that happens, the Market will encompass close to 224 million people--more than the U.S. (185 million) or the U.S.S.R. (218 million). It will produce more coal and steel than either of the present-day great powers, be the world's second biggest automaker (after the U.S.), absorb almost half of all world exports. If Britain's partners in the rival European Free Trade Association (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland, Portugal) become associated with the community, it will number some 264 million people.

Committed by its charter, the Treaty of Rome, to enduring and "ever closer union," the Common Market may become a United States of Europe in the 1970s, with general elections, as British Liberal Leader Jo Grimond predicts, "reaching from the Orkney Islands to Sicily.

" The Man for the Job. The man charged by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan with the day-to-day burden of bringing about this goal is a lifelong, dedicated European. Blue-eyed, silver-haired Ted Heath, 46, was born on the Kentish coast within sight of France--or "the mainland," as he calls it today. In his maiden speech before the House of Commons in 1950, Heath urged the government (in vain) to join the European Coal & Steel Community, the germinal economic pact that was planned as a first step toward the federation of Europe. Last month E.C.S.C. members finally agreed to study Britain's application for full membership. The "Minister for Europe," as Heath is sometimes called, is closer to Prime Minister Macmillan than any other man in British politics. "Ted Heath," drawls Harold Macmillan, "is a man I would go tiger hunting with."

For his current Brussels safari, the Lord Privy Seal* hand-picked a high-echelon band of astute and experienced civil servants. Headed by Sir Pierson Dixon, Britain's ambassador in Paris, they are known as "the Flying Knights" because of their titles and breathless commuting between capitals. With their support, the Lord Privy Seal has won a degree of respect from the Eurocrats that is rarely granted British officials on the Continent. Round the horseshoe table in the faceless slab that houses Belgium's Foreign Ministry on Brussels' Rue des Quatre Bras, they soon discovered that Heath's affable exterior masks tenacious curiosity, an infinite capacity for details, and a tungsten will.

But Negotiator Heath faces formidable political and economic obstacles in trying to work out British admission. After putting in twelve-hour days and seven-day weeks for months in hopes of getting what the Six call "a general panorama of solutions" by the end of this month, it seems unlikely that he will now be able to present it to Parliament before its summer recess.

The Barriers. Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle have apparently accepted Britain's entry as inevitable, but have not yet shown any signs of being willing to ease the admission price. They both consider the Common Market a Continental achievement and the British as latecomers who want to reap its benefits while trying to control and change it. Since Britain is asking special tariff concessions for the Commonwealth. Adenauer and De Gaulle suggest that Britain is in fact trying to drag the whole Commonwealth into the Common Market--and that, as they say, would be like having "an elephant in the bathtub."

De Gaulle, who did not much care for the Common Market in the first place, has by now grown accustomed to it and regards it as a cozy Franco-German club whose whole nature will be changed with British entry. Although Britain's admission is favored by most other European leaders (Germany's Ludwig Erhard calls the Common Market without Britain a mere "torso" and a "ghostly unreality"). Charles de Gaulle continues to cherish his Carolingian vision of a unified Europe under French leadership.

However, De Gaulle appeared impressed during his talks with Macmillan last month when the Prime Minister pointed out that active British membership in the European community might have prevented World War I (in one battle, Macmillan was the only survivor of 30 officers in his Guards regiment), as well as Hitler's war. Also in Britain's favor, by De Gaulle's reckoning, is her implicit support for a loose confederation of European states, along the lines of his own proposal for a Europe of Fatherlands, rather than an immediate, U.S.-style federal union. Britain cannot at this stage give France the nuclear know-how she has acquired under her "special relationship" with the U.S., but De Gaulle is well aware of Britain's potential contribution to the independent European nuclear deterrent that is only a few years distant--even though Britain shares Washington's conviction that it must be linked to NATO.

Settled Issues. At the working level in Brussels, the biggest problem facing Heath is to secure adequate safeguards for Commonwealth trade. Negotiations so far have been largely based on laborious economic studies of the Commonwealth's 27 independent nations and 47 dependencies. Two important issues have been settled so far: the British have agreed to apply, after 1970, the Market's common external tariff against manufactured imports from the Commonwealth, and the Europeans have agreed to let Britain have certain essential raw materials without any tariff. One of the remaining problems concerns tariff levels for "tropical" produce--cocoa, coffee. bananas, etc., mainly from Africa and the West Indies. To protect her own onetime colonies, France won associate membership in the Common Market for 18 African nations, who thus enjoy preferential treatment for their exports.

Last week the African nations renewed their membership for another five-year term--and won $780 million in development funds--but farsightedly voted down France's proposal to limit associate membership and thereby discriminate against Britain's former African possessions. Hoping to broaden Europe's commitment to Africa, despite Khrushchev's cry that the Common Market is a "new form of colonialism." the African delegates won agreement from the Six that "analogous treatment" should be offered former British colonies.

The Biggest Problem. By far the most crucial issue involves Temperate Zone producers, notably Australia, Canada and New Zealand, traditionally Britain's biggest food suppliers. Britain wants guarantees that they will find continuing markets for their grain, meat and dairy products. They will no longer be allowed free entry into Britain when she adopts the full Common Market tariff, which is designed to protect European farmers. France is Western Europe's biggest wheat producer, and opposes permanent concessions to the Commonwealth producers. since she hopes to sell French surpluses to Britain (which may have to pay as much as 10% more for her food). Probable solutions: 1) gradual application of tariffs over a transition period of eight to twelve years so that the Commonwealth growers will find new markets; 2) world-wide commodity agreements, possibly by 1970.

In its indignation over the possibility of such a deal, Australia last month pointedly met with Chinese Communist officials to discuss ways of increasing trade. In fact, say economists, Britain's preferential trading arrangements with Australia and Canada pampered their economies too long by encouraging them to export to far-off Britain instead of developing closer and more profitable markets. Britain is most worried about New Zealand, which is virtually an English farm and ships 62% of its total exports (mostly dairy products and meat) to Britain, where they will no longer be able to compete after Common Market tariffs apply. The British are least worried about Canada, which sells only one-sixth of its total exports to Britain and has ready markets for its bread grains.

The Case Against. The future of the Commonwealth has become a deeply emotional issue among Britons, who remember gratefully its ungrudging gifts of troops and guns in two near-mortal wars. Empire-Firster Lord Beaverbrook has waged a mighty campaign to stir up British sentiment on behalf of the Commonwealth and against the U.S. and Germany, which his papers accuse of plotting to "steal" British markets to round out the picture, the Daily Express predicted recently that England will be flooded with "French mutton stew."

On more significant grounds, the Labor Party's left wing fears that Common Market membership may jeopardize further nationalization of industry if a Labor government returns to power, and it generally distrusts Western Europe's massive success with planned free enterprise--a shattering riposte to Marxism of all shades. Opposition Leader Hugh Gaitskell, though privately in favor of Britain's entry, is biding his time; if the Tories, at an eleven-year low ebb, fail to win favorable terms, the Labor Party and rebellious right-wing Tories could seriously embarrass the government.

One argument that has rattled on in Britain since Henry VIII is that Britain should not associate with predominantly Roman Catholic Western Europe; the Free Church of Scotland has specifically warned members against the sinister "web of Rome." Another criticism of British membership is that under Common Market guarantees of free movement, the Anglo-Saxon shores will be invaded by hordes of immigrants from the Continent, competing for jobs and living space.

The Case For. Most businessmen, particularly the big industrialists, favor Britain's entry, thereby arousing labor union suspicions that they plan to trim British wages to Continental levels. Actually, those levels are rising.* More significantly. Common Market membership would shake up labor's soft and featherbedded ways. At present, British workers are immobile, hence many areas suffer from a severe labor shortage; plants will do anything--including slowing down production--to keep workers. British industry would have to take drastic steps to reorganize and re-equip. Many British businessmen agree that the "bracing cold shower." as Macmillan describes European competition, may flush inefficient firms right out of business. But, Macmillan argues, Britain is facing that competition anyway, and will be able to meet it under better conditions if she joins. In the Market, "the test will be in the straight competition of brains, productive capacity and energy per man."

In the heat of the Commonwealth controversy, few Britons recall that its sacrosanct trade ties started as a marriage of convenience--and have lately proved increasingly inconvenient. Since the 1880s, British politicians have dreamed of the Empire as a competition-proof common market that would forever absorb British manufactured goods and supply cheap raw materials in exchange. But it never worked that way. In 1962, as Richard Cobden protested in the early 19th century, the Commonwealth is, in purely economic terms, "but a gorgeous and ponderous appendage to swell our ostensible grandeur without improving our balance of trade."

While clinging possessively to the right of free entry into British markets, the Commonwealth nations have tended increasingly to discriminate against British goods that threatened their own budding industries. In recent years, Britain's Commonwealth trade has consistently ended in the red. Britain's exports to the Commonwealth since 1954 have dwindled from 49% to 36% of her total foreign trade; they were actually exceeded this year, for the first time, by her exports to Western Europe. Trade with the six Common Market countries alone has soared 30% since 1960 and now accounts for more than one-third of Britain's overseas sales.

Moreover, throughout the booming '50s, Britain's economy limped ahead at less than half the Common Market's rate of growth (annual average: 8%). Although at home Britons lived amid unprecedented--and inflationary--prosperity, a long series of financial crises culminated last summer in a massive, sustained flight from the pound that at its peak pumped up to $1.4 billion a month out of Britain. The government stanched the flow with heavy loans and anti-inflationary wage curbs (the "pay pause"), but the only permanent cure, economists decided, was to boost Britain's exports a herculean 40% over the next four years.

If Britain Does Not Join. Complacent British industry drastically needs to cut costs, improve design, and sell as aggressively as its European competitors. Most of all, Britain needs a bigger, more dynamic market than the Commonwealth, in which fewer than 90 million citizens have any real purchasing power. Even Australia, Britain's best Commonwealth customer, has a population only slightly larger than Paris and Rome combined. Despite high tariffs on British imports, Europeans already have a healthy appetite for marmalade and Jaguars, Wedgwood china and Scotch whisky (which chic Frenchmen fancy in le long drink}. British sweaters and men's shoes, chocolates and cloth--but not what Parisians call "weedytweedy"--also rate high with Continentals. The British, in turn, have shown a growing desire for Continental products and even customs. British import duties make the Volkswagen $370 more expensive than the slickly styled, British-made Ford Anglia, but more and more Englishmen are buying the sturdy German car. Increasingly, the British are drinking French aperitifs, wearing bulky Italian sweaters, puffing Dutch cigars.

To cries of "betrayal" from Sydney and Ottawa, Macmillan's men reply that Britain can best lead the Commonwealth from within the Common Market, where she can help to lower tariffs, pare discriminatory internal taxes, and channel Europe's fast-growing investment funds to underdeveloped nations. The only alternative to Britain's membership, as Macmillan, Heath & Co. see it, would be to relinquish all claims to big-power status and resign herself, like 18th century Venice, to continued isolation and impoverishment.

This fate, and Heath's attitude toward it, was prophetically expressed when in 1934, as a teen-age member of his school debating society, young Heath proposed the motion that "This House Deplores the Whither-ance of Britain" (as usual, he won the debate).

Negotiator at Work. To prevent the whither-ance. or withering, of Britain today, Ted Heath, though not an economist by vocation, has made himself one. Even the "high priests," as Britain's negotiators call members of the nine-man Common Market Commission, have ruefully acknowledged error when Heath has challenged an imprecise interpretation of the Treaty of Rome, which is virtually sacred writ on the Rue des Quatre Bras.

In Brussels, where he has discovered a gourmet's haven called Comme Chez Soi far off the beaten track, Heath gives small, elegant dinner parties for individual delegations. Says one recent guest: "He starts doing business immediately, asking questions all the time: 'Why do you do this?' 'Why do you want that?' By dessert he knows exactly what he wants to know." Though many were skeptical of Britain's motives at first, Heath has convinced Common Market officials of his government's deep commitment to membership in the community. "If this is not so," remarked a Belgian official, "then Heath is a truly marvelous actor."

A left-of-center Tory in domestic issues, Heath is regarded by fellow M.P.s as an "unflappable," honorable, totally dedicated politician who has ruthlessly eliminated from his personal life any interest or pleasure that would interfere with his career. He does not smoke, sips a single sherry or Campari before dinner, and occasionally twirls a brandy glass afterward. A bachelor, he lives modestly in a two-room apartment a few paces from Berkeley Square. One of his few indulgences is a sizable stereophonic record collection; though he is fond of art ("I'm afraid the abstracts don't appeal to me"), his most valuable pictures are a pair of landscapes in oil, signed W.S.C., that were a gift from the Old Gentleman who painted them. He occasionally takes a girl out to dinner, but even the inventive British press has hardly ever hinted that Heath has time for romance.

Explains a longtime colleague: "If Macmillan calls Heath from the Prime Minister's country residence at 11 o'clock on a Saturday morning and says 'Can you come to Chequers for the weekend?', he has no ties and he can go." Heath's friends have no doubt that some day Heath hopes to go to Chequers on his own--as Prime Minister. His long-range chances look good.* Many Britons believe that the nation's biggest task in the years ahead will be to strike a firm balance between the conflicting claims of NATO, Europe, the U.S. and the Commonwealth. They see astute, dedicated Heath as the ringmaster. So far, he has always acted under orders, and no one can be sure whether he could go it alone. But Ted Heath has one indispensable prerequisite for leadership--he is a superbly skilled politician.

Organ Tones. He was born July 9, 1916, light-years away from the graceful world that traditionally breeds Tory leaders. His father was a master builder in the sleepy seaside resort of Broadstairs, Kent, where Charles Dickens worked on David Copperfield. "Rather a nobby place," was Dickens' description of Broadstairs, but old friends remember young Heath as rather nobody. While other boys played on the beach, he preferred to read indoors or practice on the battered upright in the Heaths' front room. He grew up in a semidetached, six-room house beside the railway tracks that shudders every time a train passes, and he returns there at every opportunity. Each year, he still organizes and directs a Christmas concert, known as "Our Carol Party" in Broadstairs, that he started in 1936 to raise funds for charity.

Young Heath first showed a flair for music in his early teens, when he was attending a grammar school near Broad-stairs. After six years there, he landed a coveted organ scholarship to Balliol, Oxford's most earnest college and Harold Macmillan's alma mater. Heath played the organ at chapel and conducted the choir. He majored in politics, philosophy and economics, but was torn between the law and music as a profession. In 1940 he joined the Royal Artillery as a private in the ranks, fought through four of the Six: France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. He came out of the war a lieutenant colonel--and a bit of a drifter. He moved from a desk job at the Ministry of Aviation ("not much fun") to the post of news editor of the Anglican Church Times (where he is remembered as a deft headline writer) to trainee executive in a private merchant banking firm.

Through business acquaintances, Heath met some influential Tories who persuaded him that he might be just the man to fight Bexley (pop. 88,781), a Kentish dormitory town adjoining Harold Macmillan's constituency, which had voted Labor by 1,851 votes in a 1946 by-election. Shy, shaggy Kentishman Heath immediately captured the Tory matrons' vote. Says one: "When he flashed that smile of his, he won our hearts. From then on, we all called him Teddy among ourselves."

To Parliament. Unlike most Conservative candidates, Heath had no outside income. Staking his savings on an election that was still three years distant, he built one of the country's strongest Tory organizations, canvassed every house in town, held special meetings for professional people who are normally the backbone of the party--and played the national anthem on the piano. His name helped: to most Britons even today, the Ted Heath (no kin) is a bandleader, and young voters occasionally attended his rallies under the impression that there would be dancing. In the 1950 election Heath squeaked in by 133 votes. By assiduous nursing he carried Bexley by 1,639 votes the following year; in 1959 his margin was 8,633, a swing of 20,000 votes in 15 years.

After his election to Parliament, "Teddy" Heath trimmed a syllable from his first name and several inches from his haircut. With help from a Savile Row tailor, the spruce new member for Bexley looked the very image of the up-and-coming New Conservative.

Smart Whip. Within a year of his election he was promoted to assistant whip, one of a band of Commons corporals charged with enforcing party discipline. Most ambitious young politicians shun the role, since whips are so heavily burdened with party duties that they have little chance to make their mark in the House, Heath leaped at the job, which he saw as a unique opportunity to master the subtle inner mechanisms of Parliament and party. Thanks to a natural and sometimes ruthless flair for handling men and anticipating trouble, he rose rapidly through the whips' ranks until, in 1955, he was elected chief whip.

When he had been in that post less than a year, Ted Heath's reputation was put to the test in the ordeal of the Suez crisis. For weeks a top-to-bottom split in Tory ranks threatened to topple the government. In night after night of impassioned debate, Ted Heath's plump, pink face bobbed up wherever, as one M.P. says, "there was a soul to be saved." Convinced that it was too perilous a time for a general election, he averted that disaster almost singlehanded.

Finally, when Eden's illness made his resignation inevitable, it fell to Chief Whip Heath to summon the twelve other party whips to his office at 12 Downing Street and, in effect, pick a new Prime Minister. Recalls one participant in the meeting: "Round and round we went, talking for hours -- all except Ted. He listened." After listening almost all night, Heath was able to assure party chieftains that the rank and file would wholeheartedly support one man : Harold Macmillan.

The Grass Roots. The new Prime Minister, who by then dined almost nightly with Heath, made him Minister of Labor in 1959. when his government was step ping hard on inflationary pay raises. After only nine months at Labor, he was summoned by Macmillan and entrusted with the momentous job of getting Britain into Europe. He was appointed Lord Privy Seal, was also appointed to serve as Foreign Office spokesman in the Commons, since Foreign Secretary Lord Home sits in the House of Lords. Heath remembers the source of his power, and even in the midst of his present fateful negotiations, he manages frequent visits to his constituency. On a recent Saturday, Heath flew back to London from Brussels at noon and drove his seven-year-old black sedan down the Old Kent Road to Bexley. After a 15-minute huddle with his local party agent, Heath headed for a flower show held by the Horticultural Society, whose most coveted award (for fruit and vegetables) is the Edward Heath Challenge Cup. There he shook hands with the prizewinners, assiduously sniffed sweet peas ("Used to grow them myself when I was a boy").

After a quick visit to the Bexley Heath and District Rose Society show (patron: Edward Heath), the Lord Privy Seal stopped at his favorite pub, the King's Head, where the regulars greeted him as "Squire." There he downed three half-pints of bitter from a silver tankard and bustled off to present prizes at the North Kent Budgerigar and Foreign Bird Society annual show (patron: Edward Heath). Having made the rounds of Alario finches. Napoleon weavers and their fanciers, Heath headed cheerily back to London for dinner at the Savoy Grill.

Heath's attention to local politics is far from irrelevant. As he drove up Bexley's main street, he could see the gay new travel agency advertising the "sunshine and sands of Italy," while grocers displayed Dutch strawberries and French asparagus, alongside New Zealand apples --all vivid reminders of Heath's Common Market problems.

End of a Reverie. The discussion of those problems is growing ever more heated. A national opinion poll reported that those who favored admission to the Common Market had slumped from 47.1% of those polled in mid-April to 28.2% at the end of June. Taken at face value, the swing may well be due to real concern over the future of British sovereignty and independence; watching the tough French attitude at Brussels, many Britons have come to fear that, in the Market, Britain would be outnumbered, would not so much lead as be led. But to a large extent, the poll only reflected the fact that the government, as a bargaining maneuver, has calculatedly downplayed its high hopes in Britain so as not to raise the price of membership in Brussels.

Whatever else it accomplished, the great debate has wrought a refreshing change in the pulse and temper of Britain. Compared with bustling Europe, where far crueler wartime devastation forced its peoples to build and plan for the future, Britain at war's end sank back into a grandiose reverie in which--despite rising prosperity--the island was almost visibly turning into a museum of its own past glories. In the last year, Englishmen have been forced to re-examine their society and decide on its future. Those under 40, in particular, have been stimulated by a tide of change that most believe to be inevitable.

"The British are not working any harder than they were a few years ago," reports TIME'S London Bureau Chief Robert Elson, "and the philosophy of 'I'm all right, Jack,' lingers on, and yet a change has taken place. It has still to be acknowledged by a majority of Englishmen. But individually and collectively, they have concluded that they had better get moving in the big outside world once more.

Perhaps unconsciously they have decided that it is no longer enough to stay as they are. Sir William Haley, editor of the Times, put it this way: 'The mood of Britain is once again energetic, eager, prepared for the next expectant voyage--wherever it may lead.' "

Old Forms for New. Expectancy and adventure have always flowed from the commingled races from which the English are sprung. Whether handed down from Iberians or Celts, bloodthirsty Vikings or prudent Normans, or from the blend of their strains, the urge to cross oceans and found new societies has been the island nation's most compelling characteristic from the days of the Crusades and European adventure through three centuries of expansion that planted Britain's flag in the New World, through Asia and across Africa.

In turning an empire into a commonwealth, the British showed unparalleled genius for adapting old forms to new needs and alien peoples. Every other empire in history has either crumbled from within, exploded or been razed by invaders. By temperament and experience, Britain should be uniquely capable of making the successful passage from Commonwealth to Common Market--and in so doing, bring about that mingling of the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin spirit that Historian Andre Siegfried saw as the genius of Europe. As Edward Heath said to the House of Commons last month, "What we are dealing with is not tariffs or trade. We are dealing with fundamental human values. They affect the future of millions of people here, in Europe, in the Commonwealth and right across the world. That is what gives us the inspiration to on."

* "I am neither a lord, nor a privy, nor a seal," Heath quipped recently. The 900-year-old office, so named because its holder was once custodian of the monarch's private signet, today is a ministry without portfolio used for special assignments.

* West German wage rates, for example, have risen 33% since 1958, compared with an increase of only 16% in Britain. In cash wages, industrial workers in Britain average 77-c- an hour, more than in any Common Market country except little Luxembourg. But fatter fringe benefits in Europe make actual labor costs higher--3-c- an hour more in France, 15-c- in Germany--than Britain's 87-c- average.

* Though no Prime Minister in modern times has been a bachelor. Of 43 men who have held the office, 26 (unlike Heath) went to Eton or Harrow; 34, like Heath, went to Oxford.

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