Britain in Squalor

...The activities of such craft-unions have driven out of business numerous small employers, and several big ones, and ex-tinguished newspapers...

...A British entrepreneur must pay interest of some 14 percent on his loans, and even then he will find it hard to raise the capital because the reputation of British industry is all too discouraging...

...Where the British seem to feel confident enough to follow American examples is in the areas of fads and trivialities...

...As a result, the man who improves his wages by extra effort finds himself at the end of the week poorer than ' he would have been if he had done less work...

...In Britain the welfare state puts such arrangements into the hands of a massive, expensive, faceless bureaucracy, which is notoriously unconcerned with real human beings (children in state "care" have proved the most vulnerable to battering and murder) and deal instead with files, regulations, and statistics...

...but it was notable that the Church did not see much of a role for itself, or assume any blame for the decline of Christian morality among a nominally Christian population...

...Each separate British union works for the interests—often the short-term interests—of a particular craft, and gives no consideration to the interests of other crafts in the same industry, let alone the "working class" as a whole...

...The pound is weak...

...after all, the British bourgeoisie expected something in return for being the most heavily taxed bourgeoisie in the European Economic Community: they can hardly be expected to be satisfied with the thought that the seat at the Royal Opera House 'According to research undertaken by the British Institute of Fiscal Studies and published last year in The Reform of Social Security by AW...

...Christianity is not much of a force in British society, either (although the Irish, both Catholic and Protestant, are still, in their own special way, intensely religious...

...they reacted by staging more strikes than ever, and brought his government down...

...At the same time, independent fee-paying schools, greatly improved on their prewar models, turn out students well-trained to snap up the desirable places in Oxford, Cambridge, and the other elite institutions...

...The unions are one of the chief causes of unemployment in Great Britain...

...Thus, whereas it was once possible for a poor boy to graduate via the grammar schools (giving him as good a schooling as he would receive at an independent school such as Eton) to Oxford under the "egalitarian" system of the comprehensive schools, the bright poor boy, held back by a classroom of dullards, is outstripped in the race for a university place by a dim rich boy, individually coached by the superior (and better paid) teachers at Eton...

...Today's idea is to try and find out what most people want and then provide it for them...

...Callaghan's Labour government tried to charm the unions into more public-spirited actions...

...These authors demonstrate that despite this vast army of bureaucrats, the state's welfare disbursements do not reach the people most in need, but are squandered on people whose incomes are well above the poverty line...

...The old industries, on which British prosperity was built in the nineteenth century, have succumbed to competition from Korea, Japan, and other Far Eastern states...

...Dilnot, J.A...

...For nearly twenty years, the Conservative party, the traditional home of aristocratic values, has been trying to give itself a less snobbish image by a series of maneuvers beginning with the choice of the inelegant and charmless Edward Heath as its leader...

...The system also penalizes any effort by the lowest-paid workers to earn more by putting in more hours...

...Thatcher's decision to abolish exchange controls, serves the whole world, profitably funneling money and credit from one place THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 19 to another, but seldom succeeding in finding investment for British industry even at very high rates of interest...

...The more modern industries, such as aviation and automobiles, have had to be rescued from bankruptcy by American or continental takeovers...

...These schools, with few exceptions, have now been replaced by comprehensive schools, which bundle students of mixed abilities together and often fail to satisfy the needs of employers or the standards required by the better universities...

...The British welfare state, once considered a model achievement of the postwar years, has proved a failure...

...Yet among the decaying structures of Britain's inner cities today can still be seen the spires and towers of the High Anglican churches where the poorest of the old slum dwellers were once given solace and inspiration and help by a Church of England which considered itself, and not the state, to be the proper instrument for God's ministry on earth...

...This is supposed to be democratic, and therefore desirable...

...Unlike the upper classes of Italy, withdrawn and exclusive, or of France, overtaken by the pushing bourgeoisie, the English upper classes succeeded in taking over the leadership of most of the important institutions of the kingdom, with the notable exception of industry...

...Reagan's policies have produced in America millions of new jobs...

...There are the workers with jobs in the highly unionized sectors, where they are reasonably well paid and well cared for...

...The Labour party, with a good deal of Conservative support, succeeded under the Wilson and Callaghan governments in destroying the educational structures set up by the wartime coalition government and the earlier Labour government of Clement Attlee, which provided grammar schools, modern schools, and technical schools to suit the different talents of students and satisfy the various demands of universities, industry...

...but they have been costly, and the country will take years to recover from the harm that has been done by industrial unrest...

...and then there are the unemployed, who often find they can get more money as clients of the welfare state than as employees in low paid trades...

...For example, more than half the babies born to black mothers in Britain are illegitimate, whereas an illegitimate child is almost unknown inthe families of Moslem and other Asian faiths...

...A middle-class British taxpayer who has a son or daughter at the university may take satisfaction in the realization that the tuition fees are paid by the state, and, until recently, that even the richest student received a minimum maintenance grant...

...instead of "Mrs...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 21...

...interest rates are high...

...In Switzerland, employers can offer jobs to workers because they can afford to borrow money to build factories, or enlarge and modernize their plants, since interest rates are around 5 per-cent...

...Retirement pensions, medical insurance, and other institutions of social security are in Switzerland the province of mutual benefit schemes which keep their human dimension even as they keep their independence...

...The southeast of England is relatively prosperous, suffers little from unemployment, and with the prospect of a Channel Tunnel, can expect its prosperity to continue...

...The results have turned out to be far more divisive than the alleged divisiveness of selective education...

...I think most British people would rather like their country to be more like America, but believe that there is not enough space, or wealth, in these islands to reproduce the best things in America, and this thought freezes any resolve among the British to make the efforts the Germans have made to reinvigorate and reconstruct their economy on American lines...

...What is perhaps worse, is that there is no agreement as to what should be done...

...Culturally the Afro-Caribbeans should have been the easiest to integrate into British society, since they are, unlike the Asians, native English speakers and Christians for the most part...

...Thatcher has been tougher with the unions and has secured some spectacular victories against them...

...Alexis de Tocqueville once predicted that Europeans would seek to model themselves on the United States, since that was already the most progressive country in the world...

...Thatcher's government, which a year or two ago enjoyed the solid support of the Conservative party and massive public backing, has now to appeal to the grudging loyalty of its supporters in Parliament...

...the gypsies were briskly expelled...

...The carefree Afro-Caribbeans do not share this zeal for work, with the result that there is often racial tension between the sophisticated, . industrious Asian immigrants and the unemployed, proletarian blacks, although a number of left-wing Asians claim to represent politically, and even to belong to, the "black minority...

...An unemployed unskilled man with three or four children, for example, will be allocated by the welfare state a series of benefits for rent, housing, food, television, and so forth that will most probably add up to more than an unskilled man could earn in a job—for even the most modest wages are heavily taxed in Britain...

...Indeed there seems to be in post-imperial Britain, as there was in post-imperial Spain, a kind of lassitude or fatigue, a resignation in the face of even such an appalling fact as unemployment rising to some 14 per-cent of the British workforce at a time when Mr...

...Asian immigrants are conspicuous in Britain for the fact that they—even more than the Swiss—work hard, risk their capital, and show enterprise in business, so that much successful smaller commercial activity in Britain is now in the capable hands of Indians or Pakistanis...

...It has indeed been shown by the statistical investigations of the Institute of Fiscal Studies in London that the less well-off families do least well out of the British welfare state...

...There are a few minority groups which do not command the support of the left...

...and they do not always do well when they try to democratize their institutions...

...Assuredly, the "city"--the financial market—flourishes in London, but that is because it is relatively free from state interference and, benefiting from Mrs...

...Benjamin Disraeli complained that Britain was "two nations," and he at-tempted, through the enlargement of the right to vote and the development of the Empire, to mold it into one nation...

...for the British upper classes, who have taken a considerable financial battering since the liberal government abandoned the gospel of liberty for that of social reform during the reign of Edward VII, have learned to defend their interests through the art of making friends and influencing people outside their own ranks...

...Another significant difference between the British and the Swiss is that the Swiss seem to enjoy their work, while the British—with their high appreciation of sport and leisure—seldom do...

...there are workers in trades where the unions are weak, and such workers are generally poorly paid...

...Jogging and aerobics, beginning in California, spread eastward to the British Isles...

...The welfare state dominates them as an oriental religion dominates the oriental poor, at once their consolation and their curse...

...Shrewd or cunning parents must, if they want anything like a decent state education for their children, uproot themselves and move to a town where one of the remaining good state schools exists...

...The so-called "trade union movement" is a myth...

...More than half the babies born to black mothers in Britain are illegitimate...

...In some cases they are its victims...

...In England, it must be pointed out, child-abuse of one kind and another has reached alarming proportions in recent years, so that this last remark touched a tender nerve...

...For years British broadcasting was dominated by the lofty ideal of Sir John Reith of giving the public what was good for it—if the public did not like it at first they would grow to like it...

...The organization of minorities into lobbies and pressure groups is developed on American lines...

...Unfortunately it is becoming less nice, and less nice to the extent that the upper-class ethos is losing its authority—and perhaps losing its nerve...

...Nearly all countries today subsidize their Opera Houses with taxpayers' money, not for the promotion of welfare, but for the sake of prestige, as the Italians say, to far figum, to show off to visiting foreigners—an excellent motive, in my opinion, but having nothing to do with social service or social science...

...The extinction of the Greater London Council has done nothing to discourage organizations of the kind it subsidized: Transvestite and transsexual support groups, the gay liberation front, black lesbian adoption societies, collectives of battered wives, Friends of the Soviet Union, and a host of other solemn-sounding bodies continue to demand our attention and our sympathy.' The anti-Semitism which broke out among the blacks of Harlem twenty years ago has spread to the blacks of London's East End...

...When Sir Keith Joseph, the Conservative minister of education, tried to replace students' free tuition with student loans, the middle-class Conservative voters revolted...

...Even the Labour party was taken over for what proved to be its best years by upper-class leaders such as Attlee, Dalton, Gaitskell, Crossman, Crosland, and Cripps...

...this may or may not serve to stem the swing of the old-fashioned Tory voters to the Social Democrat party, which, despite its name, is the most elitist and urbane political formation in Britain, its leaders admired for their taste in fine wines and Savile Row suits and assumed to have enough smooth ruthlessness to get the better of the more left-wing, provincial, and earnest Liberal party, with which they are so anomalously allied...

...but this has not worked out...

...He is condemned to sit at home, idle, bored, and demoralized.' Such, again, is the "welfare" that the welfare state provides...

...The "working class," beloved of left-wing theory, simply does not exist...

...the British system high taxes...

...The habit of addressing women as "Ms...

...Thus the unskilled man simply cannot afford to take a job that would entail the loss of all his welfare allocations...

...London, which has been my home for most of my life, is a nice place to live...

...and another 2,300 pro-vide ancillary services...

...One such group are the Irish gypsies who ventured some months ago to pitch their camp in the verdant grass of Hampstead and so disturbed the tranquillity and threatened the environment of the Labour party leaders who favor that part of London for their gracious homes...

...Events have turned full circle and Britain today is once again two nations, perhaps more than two, divided between those who must count themselves happy and those who are not so lucky, who have been stranded, so to speak, by the tides of history, a demographic segment for whom there is no longer a place in the economy, people who are, in the grim language of Sartre's sociology, superfluous...

...How very superior the roast pheasant and port at All Souls College in Oxford to the hamburgers and Coke of Harvard Square...

...Oil prices, crucial to the economy, are unstable...

...Thatcher's government to set up a task force to at-tempt to tackle the problems...

...The trouble is that the bureaucratic charges of the transaction consume up to 18 percent of the sum total cost.' The really poor families are not the beneficiaries of the system...

...Some correspondents in the Times of London recently suggested that the British should look to the Swiss for an example of a well-ordered society...

...In Switzerland, these correspondents pointed out, there was very low employment, low taxation, relatively little crime, and a high level of social discipline, so that even "little children could safely walk to school alone...

...These political divisions reflect deep fissures in British society...

...This is especially true of Germans, who fail to see behind the appearance of easy-going relaxation, a capacity for brisk and effective action...

...For if he works harder and earns more, he pays more income tax and loses the benefits which are only available to those with less than a mini-mum income...

...or they somehow, and in some places, make superhuman efforts to do well by their students...

...Kay, and C.N...

...What thewelfare state does, in effect, is to take money out of one pocket of the better-off person (in the form of taxation) and put it back in the other pocket (in the form of benefits...

...There is no faith in the possibility of such job-creation over here...

...How cultured and well-mannered the kind of people encountered at a London cocktail party, even one attended bymembers of the House of Commons...

...We see it in the media...

...there is not enough faith in the pound, and British investors are advised by their brokers to invest in Deutschmarks and yen...

...Morris, there are 35,000 civil servants employed to administer the Supplementary Benefits scheme, financed by taxation...

...Maurice Cranston is professor of political science at the London School of Economics...

...or "Miss" has caught on, even in "quality" newspapers and among people with a classical education...

...31,000 employed to administer contributory benefits, financed by the National Insurance system...

...Thatcher has wisely reversed the trend with her recent appointment of such patrician figures as Paul Channon and Douglas Hurd to her Cabinet...

...British experts in public relations have long been uttering the same sort of complaints, and nowadays they are listened to...

...The educational system, if it can be called a system, serves only to enlarge the fissures—racial, social, ideological, temperamental—of British society...

...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 for which they pay £30 is subsidized by the state to the tune of a further £20...

...The fact remains, however, that to get the most from the welfare state, one needs to be well off...

...The north of England, the south of Scotland, and Northern Ireland are areas of deprivation and despair, where poverty is mitigated by unemployment relief—the "dole"—financed by oil revenues and high in-come tax, the one uncertain, the other unpopular...

...for independent schools, fearing extinction under a future Labour government, have become ever more exacting in their standards, while the comprehensive schools, increasingly short of resources since parental fees were suppressed, and tormented by disputes between the state and the teachers' unions, languish unhappily behind...

...The better-off have more reason to be grateful to it...

...The Swiss system means low taxes...

...Middle-class parents are better at this exercise than are poorer people, which is just another example of how Labour policies are far from advantageous to the workers...

...Such is the "social justice" of socialism...

...As a result of this influence, an atmosphere of gentlemanly amateurishness, of good manners and tolerance and relaxation prevailed in all those areas of British experience where a prosperous visitor such as John Kenneth Galbraith would be likely to find himself...

...and commerce...

...How very superior the roast pheasant and port at All Souls College in Oxford to the hamburgers and Coke of Harvard Square...

...and lament the absence of any earnest early-rising middle-class briskness akin to their own...

...and indeed if a British worker did show any undue eagerness for work he would probably find himself in trouble with his union...

...Unemployment, between 3 and 4 million, is worse than it was during the Great Depression...

...The civil service, the army and navy, Oxford and Cam-bridge, the London clubs, the financial houses of the city, the publishing companies, and the public schools were penetrated by upper-class people and upper-class ideas...

...the Labour party is more bitterly divided than ever, and the alliance of Liberals and Social Democrats has not even an agreed leader...

...But the British are not instinctively democratic (as the Swiss are...

...When John Kenneth Galbraith suggested that Britain, for all the defects of its economic situation, offered a superior "quality of life" which was not to be readily measured in statistics, he spoke, of course, as a rich man rather than in his capacity as a liberal or an economist...

...Nonsense spreads so much more easily than wisdom, and instead of the best, it is the worst things which are first plucked across the Atlantic...

...The Church of England came out last year with an aggressive and much publicized attack (visibly drafted by some progressive sociologists) on the government's "neglect" of the inner cities, which seems to have led Mrs...

...crime increases, drug abuse is widespread, and racial tension has erupted in violence hitherto unknown...

...Now, of course, the really great difference between postwar` Britain and Switzerland is that Britain has erected a vast edifice of state socialism which conservative governments have only partially dismantled, whereas the Swiss have relied on the market to guide their economy and voluntary organization'to resolve their problems of welfare...

...Visitors who are not, with John Kenneth Galbraith, charmed by it, are sometimes appalled by it...