The Shock of Today

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The signs and symbols of prosperity are everywhere in Britain, crowding the past, complicating the present. Along rolling Roman roads and winding country lanes, past sleeping Norman churches and whitewashed farms, weekend traffic flows like an invading army. London's raw new office buildings jostle Georgian mansions; a Hilton hotel stares impertinently down onto Buckingham Palace. Bowling alleys and dance halls are packed each night of the week. On city rooftops, TV antennas stand as thick as the English archers at Agincourt.

In one decade, the number of cars on the roads has doubled (to 6,000,000), though the entire island boasts only 190 miles of expressway. Most Britons earn twice as much as they did in 1949, and they are gambling and betting their lolly at the stupefying rate of $3 billion a year. One of London's most exquisite 18th century houses opened recently as an opulent gambling club. In the past two years, bingo palaces and betting shops have mushroomed throughout the country, which some now call "the windfall state." These days, more than 3,500,000 "insular" Britons go abroad each year--mostly to the Continent, where darts and marmalade and tea at 4:30 are now an accepted part of the rites of summer. Britons are better educated and in better health than ever before--and need pay no doctors' bills.

Yet, for all their heady new affluence, the British today feel disturbed and insecure. Their troubled mood is indefinable but inescapable. It is a sense of unease in which is blended the awareness of national decline, the conscious sense of failure to find new outlets for their energies, a feeling that many of their hallowed institutions and traditions are increasingly irrelevant to a formidably changed world.

Two Rings. The nation's commerce and industry, its education and ethics, were all developed to meet the challenge of global power. Its history books and literature reverberate with the names of soldier-heroes and the battlefields on which they won and held an empire: Omdurman and Lucknow, Quebec, Khartoum, Mafeking. In every corner of their island, statues and street names still celebrate a glory that has passed. "You used to open the atlas," muses a Manchester businessman, "and half the world was red. Now Britain is just a little red speck off the coast of Europe."

Suez cruelly demonstrated to the world that it takes power to be a Power. But even then, Britons could not come to terms with the harsh reality of vanished might. Their feeling of shock today is all the greater because it has been so long delayed. As if by some malevolent design, a whole series of frustrations and failures has beset Britannia in a few short months, deepening the nation's angst. The abrupt U.S. cancellation of the Skybolt missile rudely exposed the fact that Britain's "independent" nuclear deterrent is in fact almost wholly dependent on Washington. There was a time when U.S. Presidents sought Britain's counsel--and even approval--before taking any major initiative in world affairs; in the Cuban crisis, the most perilous of the last few years, the celebrated Jack-Mac telephone rang just twice.

Back on the Dole. Britain's insecurity has been exacerbated by 14 long months of haggling with the Europeans. Swallowing their pride and reversing centuries-old tradition, the British decided in mid-1961 to cross the Channel and make common cause with the Continent. Then last week, just as they were within sight of their goal, Charles de Gaulle of France contemptuously closed the door on perfidious Albion.

Even at home, the storm signals were flying. Once again the lines of unemployed workers are lengthening outside labor exchanges. The half-forgotten word "dole" is back in the language. Britain's overall unemployment rate of 2.6%, though mild by U.S. standards, is at a four-year peak and still rising. Moreover, most of the 600,000 men without jobs are concentrated in a few dozen "black spots" in the north, where in some communities up to 14% of the work force is on the dole ($13 a week for a married man).

In Merseyside, amid the dingy jungle of slums that surrounds Liverpool, unemployed dock workers pick through garbage tips in hopes of finding salable salvage. Shipyards are working at half capacity; 15 new factories are shuttered. In the northeastern shipbuilding cities of Hartlepool and West Hartlepool, 13.7% of the male work force is idle. The last new ship built there was completed 18 months ago.

In affluent Britain, unemployment is even harder to take than it was in Depression days, when hardship was the rule rather than the exception. "Today," says Joe Dyson, a Hartlepool shipyard plater, "we have been leading different lives, with nice little homes and little luxuries. A man on the dole now has more to lose than he ever owned in the '30s."

Brave New Nothing. It was with grim memories of the Depression, and of the "submerged third" of the population which was chronically undernourished before the war, that the first postwar Labor government engineered the most far-reaching social upheaval since the Industrial Revolution. In today's welfare state --or the "opportunity state," as the Tories prefer to call it--physical and material well-being is shared by all segments of society for the first time in British history, blurring the once rigid frontiers between Disraeli's "two nations" of privileged and poor.

In this "peaceful, humdrum, hell-free, deChristianized life," as Culture Pundit Sir Kenneth Clark describes it, many Britons feel merely fretful and frustrated. In the euphoric '50s, a new crop of playwrights and novelists, mostly from the grubby lower reaches of provincial life, hammered furiously at the deadening smugness of their society. It was a time when many of their countrymen were groping for a new sense of purpose and national identity. "Nobody thinks, nobody cares," cried Jimmy Porter, the non-hero of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. "There aren't any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it'll just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you."

Explosive Exodus. If their polemics sounded curiously off-key in the never-had-it-so-good society, the Young Angries at least helped ventilate British complacency and restore some of the dynamics that had gone out of the welfare state. A later wave of novelists and starkly realistic films bitterly mocked the opportunism and intellectual dishonesty of society as they saw it. Last year, for the first time since Pope and Swift peppered the 18th century Establishment with choleric wit, no-holds-barred political satire found a big, avid audience in theaters, nightclubs and newspaper columns. Even on BBC television, a longtime stronghold of genteel conformity, bright young men fresh from the universities outrageously lampoon such sacred cows as the Church of England, royalty, black African prime ministers and their own Harold Macmillan.

Youth's rebellious mood was measured by a Daily Telegraph Gallup poll, which reported recently that 45% of the under-25 generation would leave Britain if they could. To the government's dismay, 3,300 highly trained scientists and engineers migrated to the U.S. between 1957 and 1961; 250 Ph.D.s, whose training cost the nation $28,000 each, go each year.

Yawning Gulf. On the other hand, many of Britain's most talented young citizens feel that their country today is the most stimulating environment in the world. Says Author-Critic (The Uses of Literacy) Richard Hoggart, 44: "England today is the most exciting country in all Europe. We're facing ourselves, beginning to be honest." Echoes David Frost, 24, a recent Cambridge graduate who presides over the BBC's socko satirical television show, That Was the Week That Was: "We can be the first nation in history that's both a great nation and a totally honest one. We can stop this morale-boosting nonsense and the terrible underestimation of people's intelligence. It's a great time."

The new generation tackles life with an ardor and audacity that are in bright contrast with the fashionable listlessness that was once seemingly endemic among educated Britons. They laugh easily at themselves and view the world with a wry detachment that is often in striking contrast with the prickly provincialism of their elders. Says Bryan Robertson, 36, one of the most influential art gallery directors in Britain: "The intelligence of the people over the past ten years has vastly outstripped the intelligence being meted out to them by their leaders. They're way, way ahead of the politicians. And there's a yawning gulf between young people and the lingering Edwardian business type."

Induced Euphoria. Xenophobic headlines still erupt with every real or fancied slight from Washington, but many Britons are embarrassed by Fleet Street chauvinism, are eager for firm U.S. leadership of the West. During the furor over Dean Acheson's mild remarks about Britain's uncertain role in the postwar world, Lord Gladwyn--who as Gladwyn Jebb was an able U.N. ambassador in 1950--pointed out: "This is true. But she will never find a role if she merely concentrates on hating everybody at the same time--the Americans, the Europeans, the Russians, the Chinese, even some of the emergent states --clutching as well a ruinously expensive deterrent and trying to create an economic third force out of the ashes of a vanished empire."

This is exactly the reaction of many young Britons each time that their press and politicians explode over some trivial and usually out-of-context quote from the New Frontier. They have few illusions about the value of Britain's nuclear force --"the papier-mache deterrent," as David Frost calls it. With greater social mobility, their generation has gained an instinctual distrust of the ossified values and superstitions of the old ruling class. They look skeptically on the "induced euphoria of the late '50s," says Social Critic Raymond Williams, and are too knowledgeable to accept the official "fictions and manufactured images" of British life. For despite radical social reforms, to the worldly younger generation, the country is still a long way from being a lively, open-minded, contemporary society.

What is most exhilarating to imaginative Britons today is the feeling that, Jimmy Porter to the contrary, there are good, brave causes left--and that they should be fought.

Bravest challenge of all is root-and-branch reform of the nation's educational system. Its schools, like the civil service and the railways, are a legacy of the Victorian age, designed to fit England's 19th century needs and social patterns. At expensively spartan "public" (i.e., private) schools such as Eton, Winchester and Rugby, young gentlemen receive an intensive liberal education that aims also to inculcate "character," muscle and Christian gentlemanliness. After four years or so, they are expected to go on to Oxford or Cambridge, where they learn more and more about less and less from some of the best minds in Britain. With all its defects, the system provides one of the best-rounded and most civilized educations in the world--for those who can afford it.

The Way to the Top. With the exception of a few famed grammar schools, where the standards are at least as high as Eton's, Britain's state-supported schools are mostly overcrowded, understaffed, badly housed and educationally lackluster. The state schools are short 10,000 teachers; less than half have indoor toilets. The majority of the 7,000,000 state-educated students--including four of every ten in the "top ability group"--drop out at 16. Most state-educated children who continue their studies go on to socially inferior "redbrick" universities (many of which offer better science courses than Oxbridge). Less than 1% of all Britain's students go to Oxford or Cambridge, and the majority of those come either from the public schools or superior grammar schools.

The young Englishman who goes to the right schools is automatically a member of the elite, gets a better chance to inhabit the room at the top in banking, law, politics, the civil service, the church, or any other traditionally upper-class vocation. A public school education is thus an expensive (around $1,500 a year) form of social security, but so effective that 95% of British parents who earn $2,800 or more a year save, borrow and scrimp to give their children private schooling.

Critics of the system argue that it perpetuates snobbery and conformity, unjustly penalizes the bright working-class child, and deprives the nation of desperately needed scientists, engineers, teachers and other professionals. While the public schools "did at least train a leadership perfectly fitted to the needs of a growing empire," argues Labor M.P. Anthony Crosland, "they are not equally apt for a mid-20th century world of computers. Communism, trade unions and African nationalism.''

Millions for Nylons. Perhaps the greatest single threat to Britain's economic future is that only 4% of young Britons go to a university, v. 25% in the U.S., 12% in Russia; there are more Negroes receiving higher education in the U.S. than there are students at all of Britain's 23 universities. Yet B. V. Bowden, head of Manchester College of Science and Technology, protested recently that Britain has spent less on education than the government's scientific research department "spent on improvements in the manufacture of nylon stockings." Sir Geoffrey Crowther, onetime editor of the Economist, who has headed two commissions that investigated British education, puts its failings more succinctly. He calls it "a formula for decline."*

Last week Britain's first national campaign to expand state education was launched in London. Supported by all political parties, trade unions and religious denominations as well as many other influential groups and public figures, it was hailed as the nation's "greatest ecumenical movement in education."

Once they are aroused, Britons are among the world's most impassioned crusaders. But there is a passive streak in the English character that meekly suffers surly shopkeepers, sleazy architecture, lunatic liquor licensing laws, eternal queues. But only so long. Rising in righteous wrath, 18 TV dealers in Essex last week sued the Eastern Electricity Board for supplying voltage so low that television pictures were shrunken. "Hundreds of customers have complained that we sold them ropy sets,'' declared Dealer Albert Hall of Hornchurch. "We have reached the end of our tether. By law the electricity should be at least 224 1/2 volts, but I've been to homes where it is as low as 149. This has been going on for years.'' The Electricity Board did not deny the charge. Allowed one official: "Demand for more electricity builds up rapidly in an area like this. It is difficult to cope."

During the past year there have been other signs that the nation is growing increasingly impatient with many of the flourishing inconveniences and inequities that make life not so good in Britain. Highways are so crowded that by 1980 there will be only 18 inches of main road for every car. (However the government announced last week that it has approved an 80-mile bridle path across the Sussex downs.) The tax system of Britain blatantly favors the gambler, speculator (whose capital gains are exempt) and expense-account swashbuckler.

Of nearly 4,000,000 houses that were built before 1880, 50% have no bathrooms, and at least 500,000 are officially designated as slums. Britain in the next 20 years will have to build a minimum of 300,000 houses a year. The shortage is compounded by a steady influx of office buildings into downtown areas and an exodus of city dwellers to the suburbs, where land grows ever more scarce and costly. Outside London, the government may even be compelled to build new towns in the Green Belts, as Britons call the jealously preserved rural areas around their cities.

One of Britain's most perplexing problems is the lopsided growth of the Southeast, which already has 27% of the island's population and attracted 80% of all the new office buildings that have gone up in the past decade. Though the government offers massive incentives to industries willing to settle in the north, it has had little success. In Birmingham or London, Britons do not have to be told that they never had it so good. The message is in every store window, crowded restaurant and shiny traffic jam.

Nonetheless, Britain's prosperity is poised on a knife edge. In the past decade, its economy has grown only 2 1/2% per year on average; in 1962 it rose only 1%, whereas in the Common Market even a 4% growth rate is considered disappointing. Since 1950, balance-of-payments crises have brought Britain to the brink of bankruptcy six times. By draconian measures the government succeeded last year in boosting exports 3% for a new $11 billion postwar record, helping to maintain gold and hard-currency reserves. However, it was only able to achieve stability by cutting back credit and curbing industrial expansion. "Other countries have had their economic miracles." sighs a Manchester journalist. "Britain has had its crises."

Britain needed urgently to expand its markets and broaden its shaky financial base. Once inside Europe, British industry was confident that it could substantially boost exports to the Six. It also anticipated a heavy influx of investment capital from U.S. and other foreign companies eager to have a British toehold in the Common Market. If Britain were finally excluded from Europe, investment would continue to dwindle and Britain might be forced as a result to make drastic cuts in its living standards. Meanwhile, it may either retreat behind high tariff walls or else return to its classic ideal of free trade, possibly in association with the U.S. and European nations outside the market.

This week, as M.P.s flocked back to Westminster from the Christmas recess, unemployment threatened to be an even more explosive issue than the collapse of the Common Market negotiations. The government's best asset in time of crisis has always been the Prime Minister, a political MacHoudini who can slither out of almost any trap by sheer sleight-of-hand. Undisturbed by the country's mounting frustration over unemployment and housing, Macmillan did not swing into action until last summer, after the Tories had suffered the worst series of by-election reverses inflicted on a British government in 40 years. In his third and most drastic Cabinet reshuffle since he took office, Macmillan purged half his Ministers, handed key posts to some of the brightest young politicians east of the New Frontier.

To ginger up the faltering economy, new Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald Maudling cut interest rates, gave generous new tax concessions to industry, slashed purchase taxes on autos and a wide range of consumer goods. To speed homebuilding and slum clearance--a task that Macmillan himself discharged with distinction in his first Cabinet post in 1951--the Prime Minister brought in Sir Keith Joseph, 45, an astute politician and onetime construction company executive, and gave him the go-ahead for a major public-works program. Geoffrey Rippon, 38, the party's "backroom" housing expert, was assigned to streamline archaic building codes and techniques. Two weeks ago, as unemployment kept rising and support for the government slumped to an alltime low (36% v. 45% for Labor), Macmillan assigned Lord Hailsham, his Minister of Science and former party chairman, to make a crash effort to help the worst depressed areas as Cabinet Minister responsible for the northeast.

The government does not have to call an election for 21 months. It has recently seemed likely, however, that Macmillan would go to the people in the coming fall. By then, politicians figured, Britain would have made her triumphal entry into the Common Market, and the government's pump priming would have thinned the unemployment rolls and reinvigorated the economy. But after last week's dimming of hopes for a prompt entry into Europe, the government may feel it is necessary to seek a new mandate even earlier.

The Conservatives have been in power for eleven straight years, the longest unbroken innings that any party has enjoyed since the 23-year Tory reign that ended in 1830. Sixteen by-election setbacks for the Tories in the past year have badly dented Macmillan's prestige. Until Hugh Gaitskell's death last week, a Tory defeat in the next elections seemed at least a possibility. Against a demoralized, leaderless Opposition, the Conservative chances are far brighter for the fourth straight electoral victory. Some experts speculate that Harold Macmillan may decide to step down after the election. He has no clear heir, but Deputy Prime Minister R. A. ("Rab") Butler, an astute tactician who is distrusted by Tory right-wingers, would succeed him if Macmillan were removed tomorrow.

Though he is too young for most Tory tastes, Chancellor of the Exchequer Maudling, 45, may yet be a contender for Prime Minister if he can perform well in his present job, the toughest in Britain's government. Party Chairman Iain Macleod, 49, who has been in the doldrums the past year, would not be out of the running if he could repeat his brilliant success as top Tory strategist in the 1959 election. Not since Lord Salisbury in 1895 has Britain had a Prime Minister from the House of Lords. However, if the government, as expected, passes a bill permitting peers to sit in the House of Commons (TIME, Dec. 28), Lord Hailsham might emerge as the strongest candidate of all.

After the tragic loss of its leader last week, Labor's chances are an unknown quantity. Gaitskell's death by heart failure after his mysterious virus attack was a crushing blow, for it was only in 1961 that he finally managed to end Labor's strident schisms and present it as a cohesive, contemporary party capable of governing Britain. The agonizing questions that now face Labor--and the nation--are whether 1) Gaitskell's absence will fragment its hard-won unity, and 2) his successor as party leader can project himself as a future Prime Minister.

By unhappy coincidence, the reviving Liberal Party will go into the election with the same slogan as Labor, "Get Britain Moving," which both parties, of course, lifted from the New Frontier. The Liberal Party has already put up 320 candidates (average age: 38), 67% more than it ran in the 1959 general election, and will probably wind up with 400 or more. Liberal Party Leader Jo Grimond, 49, a witty, tireless campaigner, appeals most strongly to middle-class voters, but is sufficiently radical to attract many Labor supporters. Despite the Liberals' bright, humane image, most disgruntled Conservatives who have voted for the party at by-elections will probably return to the Tory fold if the economy has rallied by election time. The Liberals will probably gain only a handful of seats in the Commons (present strength: seven), but they could decide whether the Tories or Laborites win if the election is closely contested.

Under the ceremonious surface of private and public life in Britain, the nation's pulse last week was already beating faster in anticipation of the election campaign. Britons, who look back with distaste on the cynical huckstering that marked the 1959 campaign, sense now that the nation is nearing a historic threshold. Seldom have so many momentous issues converged at one time, or so many established institutions been so sharply challenged. The impending debate will determine the military and economic role that Britain is to play in the world. It will affect the loyalties and pocketbooks of some 728 million Commonwealth citizens. Inevitably, it will either uphold or repudiate the vision of a united Continent, which is still the noblest dream of millions of Europeans and Englishmen.

In the months ahead, Britannia could conceivably even retreat into isolation. Her history, talents and interests suggest, on the contrary, that she will find new worlds to win. "In the past," Arnold Toynbee wrote in Encounter, "the English have avoided the awful mistake of crying over spilt milk. They have quickly found and milked new cows. They stopped grieving over their defeat in the Hundred Years' War in the exhilaration of discovering and colonizing a New World. They stopped grieving over the loss of the 13 American colonies in the exhilaration of making the Industrial Revolution and acquiring a new Empire in India."

Since World War II, Toynbee observed, "this simple but effective British philosophy" helped turn the 19th century Empire into the 20th century Commonwealth, and powered a social revolution at home. "Achievements," he concluded, "are wasting assets, and nothing but unremitting hard work can ever renew them. In a world in which Americans, Russians, Chinese and Japanese, as well as Continental Europeans, are all working like beavers, can any nation afford to sit back and rest on its oars?"

* Crowther's pet solution for expanding higher education is to start at least two new universities, which would use Oxford and Cambridge buildings during the 240 days of vacation each year when they are not in use.

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