Left-Hand Drive on the Road to Serfdom
Greer, Herb
Herb Greer LEFT-HAND DRIVE ON THE ROAD TO SERFDOM Never before in Britain have so few produced so little for so much. In January this year you could read an editorial in the Observer of London...
...With the single exception of the hideous "winter of discontent," none of these maneuvers has aroused real public anger...
...They are deserved, tout court, and that is enough...
...The Civil Service, which includes a large part of Britain's defense establishment, has gone on strike over the government's offer of seven percent...
...He said that when comparing...
...On the fascist Left Trotsky-ists organize counter-demonstrations...
...Legislation is no longer presented in the form of laws, i.e...
...It did not occur to Jack's archetypal and foul-mouthed interlocutor that he would, in effect, be f-ing himself...
...Another refrain is that the "greatness" of Britain must be resurrected...
...There are other straws in the wind...
...There is talk about increased public spending-to be financed by borrowing-and higher taxes, and "some kind of wages policy...
...Fear of jobs has heavily dampened wage claims in the private sector, and even some parts of the nationalized industries have been careful...
...But how much harm has this done her in the eyes of the public...
...But this is not a solid proposition...
...This was not a matter of compromise but of giving way before problems, economic or political, which might be electorally awkward or dangerous...
...They intend to impose it on the country by abolishing the House of Lords and creating a unicameral Parliament which would be dominated by a new sort of MP...
...In effect, Britain would become a kind of European Cuba...
...Now they have one of their own, of which the April Brixton riots were only the most recent manifestation...
...This tactic has drawn a fair number of blacks and Asians into the ranks of the far Left, which they see as their natural allies, and whose paranoid approach to politics they are very ready to share...
...Thatcher...
...Crisis...
...These moves are (at the moment) important mainly in the context of the Labour party's own civil war...
...When the gentlemen across the aisle have this same feeling they think it is political economy...
...Where U.S...
...But over all shades of the political spectrum, from deep blue to blood red, there hangs a superstition, a pervasive hunch that "greatness" is somehow endemic in the people of these islands...
...The National Health Service is referred to as "free," for example, when it happens to be extremely expensive to the taxpayer...
...Industrial efficiency became a joke and markets, always taken for granted by the workers, began to fade away...
...Hand in hand with this powerful new soteriology goes an old Biblical impulse, well described by a nineteenth-century speaker of the House of Representatives, Thomas B. Reed...
...This faith is arguably as strong as, say, the medieval peasant's belief in the sacraments...
...They are engaged in active sabotage of the tax-collection system and are impairing the function of certain defense facilities, immigration posts, and customs offices...
...Racism in the U.K., like most other kinds, is relatively benign until it comes under pressure...
...Then a new prophet arose in the land, one Frank Cousins, a union leader in the nationalized transport industry...
...The economic and political life of the country was stagnating in a kind of Brownian motion, suffering a series of random collisions, mostly between government and unions...
...When the unemployed are given their say, for example, the reporter urges on his interviewee such notional miseries as the "loss of self-respect" which comes from losing a job, suggesting that the poor wretch's life is over, that he or she will never find wofk again...
...ployment, has intensified the normal chauvinism of the working class into active and often brutal hostility against black and Asian (East Indian) immigrants, which political extremists have been quick to exploit...
...There are those who are more interested in her failure than in the recovery of Britain...
...One of the most interesting panel shows on BBC television is "Question Time," in which a large studio audience is encouraged to needle public figures with awkward questions...
...There can be no doubt that Mrs...
...Nearer the center of Britain, meanwhile, a more dangerous political monster is rearing its head...
...There is an apparent willingness to gape passively as government and pressure groups battle it out, the electorate never considering the government as guardian of the public interest...
...If Mrs...
...This link between wages and productivity, he preached, was a chimera and a snare for the unwary and was being used as an excuse to deprive the workers of their well-deserved riches...
...Audience support for the Chancellor was so strong as to be astonishing, and the Labour MP had little help for his attempt to run the government down...
...It provides for [the citizens'] security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasure, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances...
...The Mine Workers have pushed through a wage rise more than double the public sector cash-limit percentage, with the Water and Sewerage workers not far behind...
...Cal-laghan, returning from a conference abroad...
...So these Reds under the Bed have turned out to be nothing but a reincarnation of the worst of the American Capitalist Robber-Barons...
...Paypolicies, when they were not ignored, invariably ended in an explosion of competing wage-claims, none related to productivity, all racing ahead faster than before the pay-policy was attempted...
...Yet it is seldom admitted that the desire to buy a new car, have a mortgage, make those payments on the washing machine, and drink better beer or whiskey while watching color TV is not necessarily pure cupidity...
...Then there are ominous attempts to play the racist ace of spades, although it should be said that the extremist political acne of the crazy right is not an ailment to be taken seriously-yet...
...In this kingdom, made up of three nations and part of a fourth, it has become an irritating cliche of political discourse that "national unity" must somehow be "restored...
...Both Asians and West Indians have tended for their part to cling to a form of cultural and social apartheid, which is now hardening...
...The stated intention of Mrs...
...Today it is 3.59 percent of the population, and is expected to reach 6 percent in the 1990s...
...This notion derives mainly from folk memories of the Victorian "empire," with vast red maps, triumphs over lesser breeds, and the satisfactions of enormous affluence and power...
...Possibly the Left are counting on the power of the unions to help impose a People's Republic on the country...
...Thatcher...
...These reports made it clear that they were inspired by comment inside the Tory party, maximizing the trouble Mrs...
...Thatcher's Tory government...
...She came to office with a plan to "regenerate" the British economy with a monetarist program, to reduce inflation, cut taxes, and do something about the unions...
...a "higher standard of living...
...Both have presided over the expansion of the middle class and consumerization of British society...
...Economic issues figure most heavily in the concerns of the government, but they are not the only problems facing Mrs...
...Most of the electorate, when they see Mrs...
...Now, at the end of the seventies, when Callaghan's government attempted to place a five percent ceiling on wage-claims in order to fight inflation, the response was a chain reaction of strikes, notably in public services and transport...
...Novelists, playwrights, newspapers, magazines, and television have all played this Orwell-monopoly: Cast your dice, pick a card, go directly to a dictatorship...
...Thatcher may be more widespread than many reporters would like to believe...
...do not pick up your human rights, do not pass go...
...Between supporters of the two major parties there exists, instead of normal political rivalry, a greater gap of mutual incomprehension than at any other time since 1945...
...The mood was embodied in the title of a 1959 Peter Sellers film, I'm All Right, Jack, a bowdlerization of the British expression, "F- you, I'm all right, Jack...
...And yet-the Asian and the black may say with some justification, "Just because I'm paranoid, that doesn't mean they aren't out to get me...
...Not the worker's productivity but his consent to a strike was the way to higher wages...
...the most detailed, it is said, ever drawn up for a Labour administration...
...Most of the extortion and opposition demagogy takes place to the accompaniment of loud bellowings about "democracy" and "democratic" government...
...This suggests a public opting out of the political process, except for the ritual casting of a vote, as villagers kill the corn spirit and set up a new straw figure to make a better harvest next year...
...One of these strikers, a trucker, snarled at a reporter: "Why should anybody get food if we can't buy it...
...One remembers well enough the boost that such sentiments gave to the careers of Hitler and Mussolini, and there is certainly nothing in the blood of the British that makes them immune to authoritarianism...
...The ordinary voter is probably at least as suspicious of the jargonizing columnists and economists as he is of the politicians, and knows well enough that most of the current predictions of disaster are really nothing but sophisticated guesswork...
...Thatcher is the right-wing equivalent of Tony Benn, and claimed that a "centre" policy can find a less uncomfortable way to put Britain back on its economic and social feet...
...The universal goal became a "higher standard of living," with all the paraphernalia of what priggish cant calls "materialism...
...Just after the war the coloured population of Britain was negligible...
...Other complaints echoed from all sides: Unemployment is wasteful, taxes are taking too much out of the economy, Britain's industrial "base" is being destroyed, not enough aid is being sent abroad, Mrs...
...Frank Chappie of the Electrical Workers has already declared support for the Social Democrats...
...What this amounts to in terms of detailed policy is not yet clear, but we have a great deal of rhetoric to be going on with, about "changing attitudes," "participatory democracy," "equality," and the general plea that everyone should be nicer to each other all round...
...Thatcher's Wasteland") which did allow that the budget might work, but added that it was a terrible gamble and, anyhow, probably wouldn't succeed...
...In office both have remained committed to the mixed economy, to the Western alliance with its nuclear deterrent, and to financing the welfare state on the assumption that it is possible to borrow yourself out of debt...
...Men are not used in their own company to her style or the directness of her methods and it is easy for them to go away bearing the bruises she has inflicted and make common male cause in her absence...
...They-and indeed most of the population-perceive non-whites as utterly foreign...
...The gap in any case is less important between the two major parties than between the two factions in the Labour Party where a totalitarian Left opposes a Social Democratic center...
...they have stubbornly and lustily watered the currency, with the cooperation of both managements and governments who gave in to their new species of wage-claim...
...it is being expressed now along American lines, with Watts-style riots like the one in Brixton...
...Meanwhile, the sheep still inside continue to savage each other...
...There remains the problem of financial support for the new party...
...The warning was ignored...
...She has sought (and, it seems, obtained) cooperation from Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey over the bloody question of Ulster...
...The vacuum may be filled by the new Social Democratic Party, who are trying to present themselves as a refuge from both Labour extremists and the tough Toryism of Mrs...
...If union opposition and Britain's terrible vulnerability to world economic currents do scuttle Mrs...
...racists will often see their non-whites as inferior Americans, the cognate group in Britain does not have this disadvantage...
...Thatcher is too friendly to Ronald Reagan, and so on...
...Most British workers have been thoroughly embourgeoises during the past couple of decades, but few of them have lost their steel-clad conviction that the bosses are out to do them down...
...For the past few hundred years the British have been used to rule by a congeries of local and regional oligarchies, loosely overseen by a Parliament which was never fairly representative of the people at large and is not now...
...The policies on taxation and spending which lie behind all this would, according to Labour moderate Harold Lever (an economic expert), stir up a "financial hurricane...
...They also stopped essential equipment such as oxygen tanks, and patients already in hospital died, though this was not and is still not admitted publicly...
...Thatcher is to sell parts of the nationalized sector back into private hands "when the market is right," while no more nationalization is planned in any industry...
...For their part, the workers continued to reason that the government had lots of money, the bosses had lots of money (after all, that was what made them the bosses), and this money had been created by the sweat of the workers...
...Since current-affairs programs on the BBC are not known for their friendly attitude either towards the Tories or towards Mrs...
...This is widely recognized in Britain, and both Social Democrats and Liberals call for a new system of proportional representation...
...I do not feel kindly to the people inside...
...The latest attack by a union on government policy is the Civil Servants' "industrial action...
...If people have followed this path for half a generation, it is extremely difficult to get them off it, even temporarily...
...However-to paraphrase Tocque-ville-even those who most vehemently attacked each other were united on one idea: The government, not the electorate, should solve all the problems...
...Before the end of the decade this message led to a new method of creating wealth...
...The piece gave the clear impression that the writer-an Oxford don-did not want the budget to succeed...
...Such items instill a powerful sense of progress, of moving upward and onward toward higher things...
...Thatcher's plans like Victorian virgins who see the dirty dank paws of a rapist slithering up their thighs...
...The soft-centered quality of the electorate is said to date back to the post-austerity period of the fifties, when, according to the damnable slogan, they "never had it so good...
...In the London boroughs of Brent, Camden, Islington, and Wandsworth the left-dominated Labour parties are recruiting large numbers of Asians, some of whom cannot speak English, in order to pack meetings which select candidates for council elections...
...Neo-Nazi groups like the National Front campaign for "repatriation," staging deliberately provocative demonstrations in ghetto areas (two of these were banned by the government in March...
...Excepting the occasional ghastly hiccup like the Suez Crisis and all that embarrassment about Rhodesian sanctions, both have shared the burden of withdrawal from Britain's overseas possessions, and both have been equally ready to do business with ugly regimes of both Left and Right in each hemisphere...
...Thatcher at all, do so at a distance or on a TV screen...
...She is seen to govern, and to do so with a political flair and courage which most young Britons have never seen, and many older ones probably never thought to see again...
...that the government does not get...
...To combat attacks, vigilante groups are forming in the larger urban centers...
...His apparent intention is to remake Britain into a blend of human battery farm and the Big Rock Candy Mountain, ruled by...
...It was the fault of workers who would strike if a foreman swore at them, it was the fault of incompetent managers, it was the fault of bad salesmen or reluctant investors, it was the fault of the media who were knocking Britain...
...He was fond of saying that such things were got up by the media...
...the brownstone fronts of the rich merchants with the unrewarded virtue of the people on the sidewalk...
...It is as though British society were evolving along the lines of F.A...
...In a fierce public speech she turned on critics in her own party and raked them for demanding more public spending while whimpering about the taxes which had to pay for it...
...Protestant workers literally struck down the Sunningdale Agreement on power-sharing in Ulster in 1974...
...Similar campaigns are under way in the Midlands city of Leicester and in the Northwest...
...However good it might be, the bottom line was that everyone wanted it better and better, and damn the consequences, and the devil take the hindmost, unless one happened to be the hindmost- in which case the devil take everybody else...
...It sounds bizarre if one remembers that the British franchise is based on property, and that Britain has no tradition of democracy at all, or none of long standing...
...But what Harold Macmillan actually said when he made his famous speech at Bedford on July 20, 1957, was: "Some of our people have never had it so good.'' He added, with point, "Is it too good to last...
...These attitudes bore fruit in the notorious "winter of discontent" of 1978-79-Britain lay in the slovenly hands of James Callaghan's Labour government...
...Thatcher in particular, this too was quite unexpected...
...It is an illusion, of course, but our lives are built on faith in such conceits...
...The Labour party's clear aim to play this nasty card in the next general election as it is doing now at local level may be much more important...
...The outstanding characteristic of political life in Britain since 1945 has been the lack of any genuine political rivalry between the major parties except in the most rhetorical and ritualistic sense...
...Shirley Williams, Dr...
...principles which apply equally to everyone...
...The terrible economic situation, with its high unem...
...The tough hectoring image which she deliberately projects (and, if reports are correct, is a true portrayal of her behavior in cabinet) may be helping her with the people at large...
...British Leyland workers have accepted a small increase and workers in British Steel have actually agreed to a freeze in wages until their new American chairman can move the industry a little toward recovery...
...Under the Trades Disputes Act of 1906 and Labour legislation of the 1970s, unions are virtually immune to civil law...
...not just in birth, but in religion, loyalty, and in the deeply irrational areas surrounding marriage, eating, and sanitation...
...They reacted to Mrs...
...It followed that there was no reason why the workers should not have more, and more, and more of it...
...These dead and others were stacked up in mortuaries because gravedigger pickets would not allow them to be buried...
...Strikes brought down the Heath government in the same year, and destroyed support for Callaghan in 1979, and these are not the only cases in point...
...Ambulance men declared calmly into television cameras that if people died because of this "action," that was just too bad...
...Another report on racial harassment in council housing estates was published in March by the Commission for Racial Equality...
...Thatcher and her policies, an alliance of Social Democrats and Liberals-on the evidence of current opinion polls -might win an election...
...Thatcher was supposed to be having with former Heath supporters in the cabinet and giving unanimously.downbeat and carping projections of the budget's effect on the economy...
...She ought to have a chance to make it work...
...The idea of a dark-skinned Englishman is still very, very special...
...This residue of the British class system, and the old sense of political economy, created an amusing paradox: Unions have, since the early sixties, treated the British economy exactly as Jim Fisk and Jay Gould treated the Erie Railway...
...The very violence of the carping and hostility in the media may in fact reinforce her authority...
...As to the rest, economic and social miracles remain in short supply on these islands...
...The government has had to struggle hard for two years, not only with its domestic economy but with the effects of a terrific worldwide recession...
...In the British case the incantation is "higher standard of living...
...None of these privileges are thought of or spoken of (except by Mrs...
...It is good honest high-minded envy...
...Such a unity has never existed here, even in the English part which is, now as always, highly regionalized...
...Votes may after all be cast for the illusion of "something new": a "new" party, with "new plans," "new policies," a "new direction," a "new realignment in British politics"-a new everything except the one thing which is never mentioned: a new electorate which will provide the commitment upon which all government depends...
...No one was very happy about this, but instead of cooperating to fix it, all groups played out their usual zero-sum games, quarrelling and blaming each other...
...Thatcher's friends as well as her opponents...
...Thatcher displays these qualities in flamboyant and concentrated form...
...Some of this is due to continued support for nationalized industries, which appears to run against the inclinations of Industry Secretary Sir Keith Joseph...
...an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing people's enjoyment and watching over their fate...
...With all the poison in the political atmosphere (and there has been nothing like it since the seventeenth century), there is still far more resilience in the social and economic fabric of Britain than one might imagine from the demagogy of Michael Foot or Tony Benn...
...The moderates who remain with Labour have not yet given up hope that the deserters- principally Mrs...
...The public may sense this, and it may be why even a Socialist taxi-driver is willing to give her a chance...
...As everyone knows, wages duly climbed, were duly rotted by inflation, and unemployment followed after, slowly but inexorably...
...and whatever it did to solve them, no one must give up his "higher standard of living...
...Levin was tardy with his observation, since the unwillingness dated from the fifties...
...Thatcher to prepare the country for their new order...
...These result in battles in which the police, caught in the middle and trying to maintain order, attract the anger and abuse of Asians and blacks for "trying to protect" the neo-Nazis...
...Failing that, they were prepared to starve the population...
...It means that if you work with capital equipment which does not belong to you, then the person, corporate body, or government to which it does belong is ipso facto your boss...
...They too are felt to be here on sufferance, tolerated for the time being...
...When Edward Heath tried to change the rules and fight his way out of a confrontation with the Miners' union, the electorate rejected him in 1974...
...It exploded with a viciousness that swept away the most elementary social sanctions...
...It asserted that Asian families were living in fear for their lives, complained of high unemployment among blacks and Asians, and noted that racist violence has spread from big cities to small communities...
...He meant that they wanted more expensive food, i.e...
...Thatcher and some of her supporters) as commodities which have to be earned...
...Of course no one believes that the "empire" can be literally revived...
...The logic of it is exquisitely insane: If the government will not give them the money they want, they will see to it...
...A dazed and passive populace watched news bulletins on imports rotting in the docks, and saw companies unconnected with disputes being put out of business by "secondary pickets," while "strike committees" imposed arbitrary rule on whole communities, halting industrial and food supplies...
...His surrealistic and more or less emetic comment on the savage behavior of those winter pickets did enrage the public...
...The Trotskyists continue to batten on racial tension, and are having some successes at the local level...
...One classic mirror of "what people think," a, London taxi driver-with 'a Socialist family . background!-expressing admiration for -Mrs vs Ehatcher's guts, says, "I'm willing to give her time...
...They have tinkered with taxes, continued to borrow furiously, and tried hard to sustain pay-policies of various kinds...
...Until the late 1970s the electorate concurred in a largely passive policy of government which avoided or minimized risks, trying to cover up domestic economic difficulties with a series of Micawberish short-range measures...
...A pattern of non-white pressuregroup politics is emerging, rather on the American model, with a notional "equality" as its stated aim, but actually reaching toward a privileged status for minorities...
...The foreign policy would feature withdrawal from the EEC, unilateral nuclear disarmament, asking the Americans to go home, and probably abandonment of NATO...
...Several commentators expressed a thinly veiled hope that she would be defeated at the next election, while the Times and the Observer happily contemplated the possibility that the Tories might get rid of her before then...
...They underline the fact that Labour has, for the time being, ceased to be a credible alternative for governing Britain...
...This Supreme Soviet is the favored idea of Benn, who in his own words has "often thought of the parallel between Castro entering Havana and a new government entering power here . . . the two events should be as similar as possible...
...Since 1979 political life in Britain has indeed been different, but not because of any "gap of mutual incomprehension...
...But she was not at all fazed, and was in no mood to apologize...
...As I have said, Governments of both parties, instead of facing up to this problem, have tried to sneak round it with Micawberish sleight-of-hand...
...These people are concentrated in London, the West Midlands, and in the Northwest around Bradford and Manchester...
...The resulting tendency to down tools at the slightest pretext was often portrayed both in Britain and abroad as a kind of Red Menace, in which militant left-wing activists were undermining the British economy...
...These and other elements in the TUC are rallying to try and reverse the recent changes in Labour party rules, but on this the TUC is as splintered as the party itself...
...The pressures today are highly visible...
...Despite their objections, there was passed a relatively mild Employment Act which modified, not very radically, some of the "traditional' ' immunities...
...Non-white hostility to the police is already an old story...
...The peasant would have reacted angrily to arbitrary excommunication, just as the British electorate, with only general and fairly primitive ideas of economic process, responds with hostility and fear to a halt in "progress," and rejects any suggestion of going "backward," away from the salvation which lies at the (infinitely distant) end of a consumer-goods path...
...This harsh woman acts like a leader, and she is clearly stimulating even to those who grit their teeth and hate her...
...Into the situation stepped Mr...
...Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II, Part iv, Chapter 6.] Benn has a plan for the eventuality...
...Both British and Irish governments have the common goal of defeating that small group of terrorists who call themselves the Provisional IRA and who would like nothing more than a fascist-style takeover of the dear old Emerald Isle...
...Politicians and media seized on the slogan in the first sentence (used earlier by the Democrats in America) with almost lickerish enthusiasm, and the electorate did them one better...
...If she is knocked down it will be very bad luck-not just for her, but for Britain, too...
...Certainly she is the luckiest political leader since Harold Macmillan, but whether this will carry her through the next couple of years is another matter...
...Thatcher's gamble succeeds, she may be able to modify or reverse this process...
...He suggested . . . that some of the Cabinet's and the Government's public disarray also arises from the' historically new experience of a woman as Prime Minister...
...Equality has prepared them for all this, predisposing them to endure it and...
...Labour party rules were changed at the last conference to aim for selection of MPs who would not represent all their constituents as at present, but function strictly as party delegates, absolutely bound by the party manifesto...
...Both of these guarantees are under great strain, and not only from a view of government which sees it as an automatic machine which will, if only it is manipulated properly, make everyone happy...
...There is also a heavy program of overspending by local Labour-controlled councils to contend with, and of course the unemployment-figures are the highest in fifty years, one in ten of the work force- which continues to drain the public purse for dole and welfare payments...
...Today's workers are anything but downtrodden, and Britain's poor are mostly the ghetto non-whites who have been co-opted by Trotskyists...
...That said, it has become a fashionable game during the past ten years to predict one or another tyranny for the United Kingdom...
...They were really rather well paid...
...Benn and his friends count on a colossal debacle for Mrs...
...Sidney Weighell, who heads the powerful National Union of Rail-waymen, has derided Benn as a "Socialist with a silver spoon in his mouth," and said that if Benn tried fo enforce a loyalty oath as he did at the last party conference, "I'd spit in his eye...
...This litany is chanted, especially by Social Democrats and Labour, as though democracy were the great touchstone of government and the bulwark of freedom in the United Kingdom...
...This confirmed the impression of the other report, with ugly stories about excrement and sometimes flaming liquids being poured through letterboxes into front hallways of flats where immigrants were living...
...There would be severe problems with the police-not noted for their left-wing tendencies- and with the armed forces (Benn is currently denouncing them for using Ulster to "prepare for the effects of monetarism...
...In an amazing display of hostility, all the "serious" press attacked the Prime Minister in terms which sometimes reached hysterical proportions...
...These new organizations are beginning to reject previous efforts at assimilation, which came mostly from the white side of the community...
...That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle...
...On the day after the budget uproar, when most serious newspapers seemed to be predicting imminent revolution, the Chancellor of the Exchequer appeared on this show, opposed by a left-wing Labour MP...
...he chortled...
...often even to regard it as beneficial...
...At the moment the opposition, and many union leaders on the Left, are doing all they can to destroy commitment (Labour goes further than this, what with Michael Foot-and certain MPs on the far-Left fringe-openly trying to incite insurrection over unemployment...
...He carries in his heart a deep respect (and demand) for private property, which is of course the truss of capitalism...
...There are a few indications, sometimes from surprising quarters, that public support for Mrs...
...Elsewhere brute strength has continued to rule over common sense...
...But when I feel that way I know what the feeling is...
...But even with an electoral success it is unlikely that Britain could be forced into such a procrustean bed...
...Without the backing of any major economic interest, and depending entirely on membership subscriptions to survive, they will have a hard and very uphill fight...
...The "real Socialists" on the Left, with the egregious Tony Benn in the vanguard, loudly hawk a centralist view of government not unlike that of classical fascism...
...The facts are familiar: Like a vast cube of water, public spending has defied all attempts at compression...
...It is supposed to include a blueprint for massive nationalization, taking in all industry which still remains in private hands and extending into areas such as banking and the media...
...The comment is all the more surprising against the background of the budget, with its stunning rise in diesel and gasoline taxes...
...The British sense of political economy was, until the fifties, constrained by an acceptance of a relationship between wages and productivity...
...Certain popular patterns of thinking are worrying: Misery of any sort is automatically equated with "injustices," special interests tend to be accepted as "special cases" entitled to special consideration and money...
...Everyone agreed that if anyone had to skimp, it would have to be someone else...
...Picketing hospital porters "diagnosed" and capriciously barred the entry of patients, some suffering from cancer...
...They have guaranteed jobs and indexed pensions, but there is still the "higher standard of living," and the devil can still take the hindmost, or, in their case, everybody else...
...Loyalty to unions has repeatedly been placed before the public interest, and sometimes exploited for ugly political purposes...
...And the population, it seemed, was prepared to take this lying down...
...So far neither the Tories nor any other party have a credible substitute for her or for her policies...
...He did not mean that he and his colleagues were on starvation wages...
...Television reporting has on the whole reflected the same attitudes, with corre spondents showing obvious satisfaction at hostile comment on the budget, and inter views slanted heavily to create maximum political rage at the government...
...employment is portrayed as a "right," as are all the benefits of the welfare state...
...Instead we have administrative acts which usually apply to specific groups...
...What crisis...
...In January this year you could read an editorial in the Observer of London which began: Britain enters 1981 an unhappily divided nation...
...Or would it...
...David Owen, and William Rodgers-will have a change of heart and rejoin the fold...
...First, the beacon point of 1945 was not a gap between the parties but their fundamental agreement on the completion of a welfare state...
...Their mechanistic view of government ignores the fact that British liberties have never been rooted in "democracy" or the messy, anomalous system of government, but have been guaranteed by custom and the law...
...The Joint Committee on Racial Discrimination published a report in February which cited a thousand "racist incidents" in the previous 18 months, ranging from minor harassment to murderous attacks...
...Hayek's Road to Serfdom...
...For years the British were rather smug about American race problems...
...It is obvious enough that they have taken pains to do so in the presence of journalists...
...It helped to ensure the spring election of Mrs...
...They did, after all, throw up the prototype of Franco in the person of Oliver Cromwell, and the presence of a number of mini-Cromwells in the trade union movement shows that this capability is far from dead...
...But so far she has been a stimulant to morale, even among her opponents- something the British electorate needs far more than any electoral bribe...
...This attitude persists toward non-white children who are born in this country...
...The intensity of feeling-at least in the media-against the Iroin Lady is puzzling, and may fee tooted partially in a factor which was not, I believe, seriously discussed by any journalist in Britain until Times columnist David Wood finally broached it at the height of the budget uproar...
...This has been the technique of opposition for a long time, and has tended to shape a sulky, greedy, and passive electorate with an atmosphere in which government is expected to be a system of institutionalized bribery, with the biggest bribes going to those (they happen to be unions at the moment) who are powerful enough to extort them...
...Paradoxically, the surly indiscipline of the unions, which has done so much economic harm, remains a sporadic source of flexibility and strength in the body politic-though there is an important caveat to this...
...They feel no more childish or silly in this than do worshipers kneeling on a stone step in a big pointed building while a man in exotic robes hymns incantations toward a candle-lit altar...
...But the British worker is an abominable socialist, he has no flair for this dogma at all...
...The Sunday Times printed an analysis (under an eight-column editorial entitled "Mrs...
...The howl over the Chancellor's recent budget was immense, and it came from Mrs...
...As far back as 1973 Bernard Levin had written in the Times: The organized workers have realized that the constraints on their power that have, in the past, operated to limit the use of that power are, and probably always were, imaginary-self-imposed fetters that depended on the acceptance by the wearers of certain assumptions which they are no longer willing to make...
...any money to give them...
...There are several things to be said about this...
...They have tried, rather fatuously, to imply that Mrs...
...Clarence Darrow once wrote that an Englishman is never sure he is right unless the great majority is against him, and is not afraid to stand alone...
...The recipe is familiar in outline: the same one which has been cooked at Westminster for the past two and a half decades, and which landed Britain in the mess of 1979-The people who lead the Social Democrats are the spiritual heirs of the Edwardian radical chic, who espoused Socialism out of a bourgeois noblesse oblige, meaning to better the lot of downtrodden workers and the poor...
...but he points out that if they were left to collapse the result would be more expensive than the present subsidy...
...It is an extraordinary change after two decades of shifty or clumsy prime ministers...
...The fact is that the two sides of British politics understand each other very well, and it is precisely this understanding which stimulates their mutual hatred...
Vol. 14 • June 1981 • No. 6
