AN ISLAND AT SEA

...For these things are essentially imponderables...

...This year's eminent BBC Reith lecturer, Dr...

...In his novel, Dickens' alternative to the world of Gradgrindery was provided by the circus-that is, 'the horse-riding.' Today, most of the horses are dead (though I did notice a few days ago that one brewery has just bought a couple of shire horses from a circus to use them for delivering beer to pubs...

...The search for a different moral outlook- an outlook that will result, for example, in the fairer society that socialists like Denis Healey demand at home, and that humanity requires at the global level-is necessarily a search for a way of life that transcends the whole business of measuring economic health or personal happiness...

...From another quarter I have also recently heard talk of the merits of going back to the old rule of one meatless day a week for the same cause...

...Once you see yourself in that kind of rat race, all other rat races will be added to you...

...That the very notion of "the international-league tables" is what is wrong...

...The best we can hope for is a gradual improvement after 1980 or so...

...But to most reasonably objective commentators, it seems that the budget is about right as far as the immediate measures go...

...They did not, on the whole, believe that the current world-system was capable of ensuring any such thing...

...But it was just this that they doubted...

...Dahrendorf (newly appointed principal of the London School of Economics), is only one who says so...

...And as Dickens also knew, the prevalence of Gradgrindery also meant the coming of Hard Times...

...But everyone knows, of course, that budget proposals can only touch the fringes of even the most urgent problems...

...Here surely is one of the fundamental contradictions of contemporary capitalism: everyone knows that mere accumulation is not the measure either of happiness or even of economic success (this point is, I think, a very significant admission for the Chancellor to make) but nobody has yet produced an alternative that is both plausible and effective...

...As for long-term considerations, despite Mr...

...A QUESTION OF GOALS BRITAIN ON THE BRINK By now every Briton, and perhaps most Americans, know that the Chancellor of the Exchequer's newest budget contains a heavy increase in the price of petrol, provision for the Confederation of British Industry of about half the money it asked for to get it out of the current mess, and a number of increases in social security benefits to compensate the poorest for the inevitable cost of living increases that will come in the wake of the budget...

...We have just bought a secondhand bicycle made for two...

...On the same radio program I have just mentioned, a spokesman for the British Churches has spoken of a new campaign to help feed the hungry of the world by a systematic weekly fast...

...Healey when he said-in a paragraph of his budget speech very little noticed by the mass media-that "the senseless accumulation of material goods of exactly the same type as the Western world has been producing since the war can no longer be regarded as the only guarantee of human happiness or the only measure of economic success...

...Healey's claim that he has laid the foundation for a four-year strategy, there is very little that any mere budget can do...

...Many people here seem to be in agreement that we need a radical economic, psychological and moral refit...

...Yet the irony is that in the very same speech, he spoke of the overriding necessity of Britain's regaining her place in "the international league table...

...Most people recently interviewed on TV, when asked if they would be prepared to eat less meat if this meant helping the starving to survive, said they would-as long as they could be sure their sacrifices would, in fact, entail that the others benefited...

...Furthermore, there is practically nothing we can do about this...

...Naturally in a situation where everyone is hurt in some way or other, practically everyone screams...

...What he seems to mean by this is precisely that we have disastrously failed to accumulate, or persuade others to accumulate, just those very Westerntype material goods as fast as our competitors...

...Meanwhile, I and my wife have made a start...

...Indeed, I have just been listening to a European expert of the Hudson Institute predict that by the early 1980s, relatively speaking Britain will be in the position in which Spain has been for many decades: i.e., among the poorest and most miserable places to live in on the whole continental shelf...

...May it not be that this is because it is not the difficulty of finding a yardstick that matters, but that our very preoccupation with measurement is the root of the trouble...

...To put it another way, I think that many people here would agree with Mr...

...BRIAN WICKER (Brian Wicker is Commonweal's regular correspondent in Great Britain...

...At the level which counts now-that is the level of world economic survival-capitalism has once more shown that it is still, in all essentials, what Dickens said it was: Gradgrindery...