Gloomy Spring
Wicker, Brian
process: left-wing Catholics have come a long way from the social Catholicism preached by Rerum Novarum. Their itinerary often began in the various Catholic Action movements and in the leftist...
...The tendency of most parties to the debate, when such a situation arises, is to say that one or other of these "realities" is not a reality at all...
...Their specific corrtribution to the French political scene is probably the creation of a Christian and humanist current within the mainstream of Socialism that provides a viable alternative to the rigid marxist dogmatism put forward by the Communist Party...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 O0 ROY SCHEELE THE DAY TRIP Among other things forgive me, Muses, for while on Parnassus we missed the spring...
...But the government's job is surely to face the awkward fact that both kinds of pressure----economic and political---are real...
...But they will not have an easy time of it, especially since price rises-in January went up by an exceptionally large amount...
...If the middle-class Catholics, who form an important component of the electorate, do not follow these committed left-wing Christians, then the latter's impact will be negligible...
...I don't mean anything terribly dramatic: but merely that there is a combination of problems either with us or about to hit us which, taken together amount to a major turning point of British capitalism...
...These examples are just two out of many which reveal the weaknesses of trying to control incomes by Commonweal: 263 a strict and blanket limit on everybody's rise in earnings...
...But as soon as you say that, in criticism of government irrationality or cowardice, you are faced with another example of the same thing on the other side...
...In other words, the policy of tighter price controls, however necessary politically, makes economic nonsense...
...Their itinerary often began in the various Catholic Action movements and in the leftist C.F.D.T...
...But the government says (roughly) that nothing can be done because the income policy prevents it...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 FROM BRITAIN O u SPRING Everyone knows that the British economy is in a fairly bad way: but I think that just now (I write this in Lent, so it seems appropriate to say something gloomy) we are in for a pretty big crisis...
...I don't pretend to give them in any order except as they come into my head as I write...
...namely the hostility of business to any sort of tightening of the price-control system...
...Like so many others before it, it seems destined to gather dust on some bureaucrat's shelf for many years to come...
...It would be tempting to think that in such a situation the extension of participation in decision-making within industry is the only long-term answer...
...An extremist minority of these Catholics have espoused the marxist cause to the extent of joining the Communist Party or one of the many fringe groups of Maoists, Trotskyites, or "Christian-Marxists," who are trying, without much success, to drew up a common platform from which to launch a French branch of the international movement "Christians for Socialism...
...And the Catholic vote will count...
...who have diagnosed the basic ills of industrial capitalism in terms of lack of involvement in decisionmaking at the level of the firm or industry...
...Without giving evidence of a willingness to control price rises, it has no hope of getting a renewal of the pay policy when it comes up for renewal in the summer...
...That is why, in the short term, the defeat of the government's devolution plans is only a set-back, not a rout...
...The most significant thing about this problem is that police are now campaigning for the right to strike in support of their demands: which is to say, they want a change in the law...
...And clearly they have a case...
...But as soon as the government faces up to one reality--namely the need to give something to the wage-earners and especially the wage-earners with skill or responsibility--it falls foul of another...
...Hattersley, the price minister admitted--even the new controls cannot do much by themselves to stop price-rises, and hence demands for corresponding wagerises...
...this: 29 April 1977:264...
...The businessmen say, with some justification, that price controls don't work where they are supposed to, but do have damaging effects where they should not...
...The recent arrival on people's desks of copies of the "Bullock Report" might have been calculated to warm the cockles of such people's hearts, for it suggests far-reaching legal and other reforms to ensure the presence of workers on company boards of directors, through elections conducted by trade union machinery...
...Especially since it tends to despise the existing political structures and to reject "popular religion" as a form of class collaboration...
...But the government is absolutely insistent that there must be yet another year at least, in which the pay policy continues...
...It is to be doubted, however, whether the new Christian Left will succeed in persuading the mass of apathetic Catholics, still largely conservative, to follow its dynamic example...
...Only by a combination of tax cuts and price controls (and perhaps some import controls too) can the government have any hope of swinging things in its favor and preventing a breaking of trade union ranks on a catastrophic scale...
...But after a few days of rejoicing, and some mildly enthusiastic noises from the unions themselves, the government seems to have decided to scrap any plans it might have had to implement that report...
...Their incomes too have gone down (in relation to costs) because of the incomes policy...
...Like the Bullock concept of extending participation in industry, the "nationalist" concept of widening participation through some form of self-determination for Wales and Scotland is basically a means for "managing" a situation which is beginning to look unmanageable on any other terms...
...The strikers are the firm's toolmakers: among the most highly skilled, but also the most "co-operative" and trouble-free sections of the workforce...
...This tradition stems partly from the utopian heritage of Proudhon, enriched by the contributions of such theologians and thinkers as Emmanuel Mounier and Jiirgen Moltmann...
...ALAIN WOODROW (Alain Woodrow is Commonweai's regular correspondent in France...
...This is why it is virtually inevitable that the Chancellor of the Exchequer will have to make big tax cuts in the budget in early spring...
...There is a very important strike at British Leyland--the country's biggest motor manufacturer, and biggest earner of export earnings--which is very far from being just another of those "wildcat" affairs we used to be told about so much...
...The essential question is whether it is possible to "manage" a mixed economy in a society which has inherited the sorts of difficulty that Britain faces...
...But even the new policy on price rises just announced will not be enough: f o r - - as Mr...
...Thus, the Confederation of British Industry, representing business, has tended to say (and still says) that the tightening up of price controls is simply an unwarranted "capitulation" to trade union pressure...
...trades union, which was Christian in origin, and which has served as an alternative to a strictly political commitment...
...And this is not because it is a piece of nonsense...
...If either comes to pass, it will be more for political than economic reasons...
...But the point is that it does not address itself to the questions that most bother people: for all its fundamental idealism, worker participation has little to say to the immediate question of prices and wages...
...BRIAN WICKER (Brian Wicker & Commonweal's regular correspondent in Great Britain...
...There have long been those (including many proponents of that curious body of thought known among Catholics as the Church's "social teaching"--as though there were any other...
...Nothing which gained the concerted hostility of industrialists to the extent that the Bullock Report did could be totally lacking in good ideas...
...As I write, they have decided to go on with their strike...
...This is why it has been necessary for the government to tighten up its control of prices...
...Similarly, the trade unions tend to say that refusal to concede price (or import) controls is simply a device of businessmen who want to keep up profits...
...Even the leaders of their own union are against them: but they are unabashed...
...Garbage collectors are better paid now than they are, largely because the police were caught by bad luck when the pay policy first came in...
...The real test will come next year, with the parliamentary elections and the choice of a next National Assembly...
...The economic problems will remain...
...Another highly significant development is the current pressure by the police for better pay...
...The crisis of British capitalism, then...
...not only in justice, but also in common sense: they are the sort of people the country depends on to make the kinds of thing Britain has to make to live...
...They haven't been in a serious dispute for years and their grouse now is very simple...
...Under the present policy of strictly controlling incomes, they aren't getting paid any more for their skills (and the years of training undergone to acquire them) than many of their unskilled colleagues: and they are clearly determined at the present time to get that situation changed...
...But to judge by the results of the municipal elections, more and more disgruntled middle-of-theroad voters, including Christians, are being seduced by the Socialist sirens...
...Without this, they say, there is no hope of controlling inflation...
...Thus, if Tony Crosland was right in his last important contribution to Labor party economic strategy, the cuts in public expenditure demanded by the business community (and the IMF bosses) as a condition of getting the big IMF loan at the end of last year were similarly irrational: that is to say, they made no economic sense, however necessary it was politically to make them...
...Consider some of the current issues...
...Neither, of course, does the other current political "hot potato"--"devolution...
...is one in which economic realities and political realities seem to be drifting apart...
...But the majority of leftist Christians have gone to swell the ranks of the Socialist Party---encouraged by the famous declaration of the bishops in 1972, "For a Christian approach to politics," on the legitimacy of political pluralism and on the need for Catholics to square their political ideals with the Gospel, which, declared the bishops, "is not neutral...
Vol. 104 • April 1977 • No. 9
