LETTER FROM LONDON; ENGLAND STANDS - MOSTLY

...Restaurant prices have shot up, almost 100 percent over two years, which no longer makes London the cheapest eating place in the Western World—though still the best, in the sense of the variety of national cuisine obtainable (whereas, after all, the French are still very French and the Germans very German...

...Membership of both the main parties has fallen rapidly...

...I think this is crucial to an understanding of British politics today...

...But theaters are still very cheap by New York standards— $10 for a very good seat at Covent Garden, $5 at the National Theatre or the Aldwych (the Royal Shakespeare in London...

...in the capitalist economy...

...Much of that legislation was, in fact, sensible: introducing injunctions and compulsory ballots of membership for the first time into British trade union law...

...And when they were up, they were up...

...I remember, now with an honest blush, writing the preelection "Why I Vote for Harold Wilson" piece in 1966 in the Observer...

...Actually, sheer trendyism on the Observer's part: for most people still vote overwhelmingly for the party, whether it is led by Jesus Christ or a donkey...

...If he hadn't lost his nerve in 1969, he'd have got trade union reform with his second Labour government...

...Wilson not merely tries to avoid making hard decisions, he has himself built up the myth that only by masterly inactivity (though like Alice, it requires a hell of a lot of running to stay still in the same place) can the Labour party be held together...

...Now, of course, as King Harold swings his men round another 360 degrees, he assures them that the principle of free collective bargaining has not been interfered with...

...Wilson turned the tables on his anti-Marketeers in the Referendum campaign and overwhelmingly won the 67 percent public majority for staying in Europe, and exposed how rhetorical rather than actual was the cry of his Far Left that "the people are against Europe...

...That this lunchtime at Brighton the leaders of British industry and the leaders of the TUC signed in my presence a mutual declaration of intent to limit, by voluntary means, wages and prices...

...There could be much more equality at the cost of remarkably little less liberty—though some touchiness and tensions there: government dislike of the press, the BBC and the prosecution of the publishers of the Crossman Diaries...

...Are you a trade unionist...

...but if possessed of une grande passion, for man, woman, or money, he would cut off his right hand, or whatever, rather than not remain leader of the Labour party and even alternating Prime Minister of Great Britain...

...And when they were down, they were down, And when they were only half way up, They were neither up nor down...

...A monopoly of power has been mistaken for effective power...

...So I'm not entirely to be trusted in my judgment on this issue...

...London will still be the pleasantest assignment for the princes of American journalism writing their 48-hour stopover pieces on "Why X is Collapsing...

...The land swarms with prophets of doom...

...But he would never have lost control of opinion in the Parliamentary party if he hadn't made a complete U turn on Europe in 1970 in a purely tactical attempt to bring down Heath's government...

...He shows no signs of wanting to do anything except keep the ship afloat...

...Dick Leonard, the deputy editor of the Economist, in a recent report for PEP (Political and Economic Planning) estimates that the Labour party's individual membership has probably fallen by two-thirds since its high point of just over 1 million in 1953, and the Conservatives have probably halved from just under 3 million in 1953...

...No, the sanctions will be against the employers if they pay up any fruits of free negotiation higher than the flat rate of £6 a head, for the nonce, and whatever emerges from whatever brand-new machinery for wage negotiation is now hastily improvised...

...After all, nearly 100 Ministerial positions, high and low, or posts as Whips, are in a government's hands, virtually the Prime Minister's...

...New York Times, July 10, 1975 328 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS breakdown in international confidence in the British economy, before gingerly going back to the vastly complicated but utterly necessary task of creating an incomes policy...

...To any form of tourist, London is still London, and if crowds have been gathering in Downing Street in July and August for cabinet meetings, most of the crowd seem tourists, native and foreign...

...I described him as a man of "left-wing sentiments but with a sense of realism more often associated with the Right...

...Thought you weren't...

...Who's he that said that...

...And talk of electoral reform because a government with 43 percent of the popular vote and a majority of one in the House of Commons presumes to speak for the people...

...As numbers fall in the Labour party, the more doctrinally intense take over...

...Well, Wilson's friends say that only by taking the country in July to the very brink of economic disaster did he scare the TUC into making up their own incomes policy, which, more or less, the government has accepted...

...By October 1970 I was writing an editorial in Political Quarterly saying, to the waves and the wild seashore, that he must go, unfit to remain Prime Minister, particularly on the evidence of his own pompous, egotistic, trivial, and dishonest huge volume of Memoirs...

...True symbolic anecdote...

...I will have none of your retorts that that honor should have been given by the Rockefeller Foundation to Richard Nixon...

...Similarly, this summer he took us to the brink of an absolute as One BANGKOK, Thailand, July 9 (AP)—Mao Tse-tung still thinks well of former President Richard M. Nixon and says the Watergate scandal was the result of "too much freedom of political expression in the United States," Premier Kukrit Pramj reports...

...No bad thing, in terms of socialist doctrine, but very damaging in the public eye (as the tragic-farce of Reg Prentice—a most popular Minister in the public eye—having his Constituency party determine to purge him as candidate next time round...

...For Wilson is more to be blamed for the neglect of power than for its use...

...Nixon's visit to China in 1973 and added: "Please tell him I still think of him...

...No big industries are free of considerable controls, both direct and indirect, about levels of investment and about location of enterprise...

...A GREAT DEAL of British politics now turns on the character of Harold Wilson...

...Like Charles II, we should apologize to those around the bed for being "such an unconscionable time adying...

...We all know that we are approaching 1 million unemployed, but we know it because of statistical rhetoric, not from the eyes or the belly...

...It was an affair of the liberal establishment...

...I had a pass for the Cabinet Office private car park, to give evidence one afternoon to the Privy Council Committee on Ministers' Memoirs (the Crossman Diaries affair...

...and all the facilities...

...He appears still to be the last of a dying breed, those who enjoy power simply, obviously and deliciously for the sake of power...

...But to be unfair and personal, Wilson's trouble is not merely that he made the old mistake of putting on the wolfskin of a wartime premier, as if it was effective for peacetime economic purposes—as did Attlee, Churchill himself in peacetime, Eden, Macmillan, and poor Sir Douglas Home—but about that he doesn't care...

...And he marched them down again...

...Like many a final, farewell performance, it threatens to be a spring-and-summer twice-yearly event...

...And interesting that Wilson's Memoirs showed that COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 327 he had had a bad attack of the John F. Kennedys, as well as adopting The Making of a President as his literary, to some extent even tactical, model...

...The mistake was plausible in wartime, indeed then was no mistake: when the whole nation was animated by a common sense of purpose etc., etc...

...And do you still have the old car that could hardly get you around Lisbon...

...Oddly, from out of all this, a kind of formal socialism may emerge...

...But Cabinet Ministers have to be known by sight to be identified...

...or under his own two attempts to get a statutory incomes policy in his second (1966-70) Administration...

...WILL the new initiatives work...

...But in Russell's terms, Wilson's power has been of the "unchallengeable" kind—if I don't do it, no one else can: a monopoly of the instruments of decision-making...

...Middle-aged cynic...

...He was in fact a crook even in damage to his otherwise strong political position...

...I know if given a lead they'll follow...

...Alcoholism and tranquilizer-drug addiction are high, but they are sicknesses of an urban capitalist civilization, not a sign that the walls have broken down, whether for good or ill...

...No, I have a fine new Mercedes-Benz, with a chauffeur who takes me around...

...An MP has to have friends of unearthly candor, as I heard Enoch Powell once say, if he does not believe that at the next Cabinet reshuffle a red telephone will wake his humble black one from its waiting hook...

...But the point is that Britain is a mixed economy...

...Leaving the Conservatives to do the job, he pledged himself in order to gain union support simply to repeal, not to amend, all the Conservative legislation...

...My friend and editorial colleague John Mackintosh wrote a standard and ultrarealistic text, The British Cabinet, which gravely weighed whether cabinet government was now giving way to presidential government...

...But still each a social problem, not the problem itself: anomalies, relics from the past that stubbornly evade and avoid the rules of the welfare state, but not a tendency of the future...

...Your true English Conservative doesn't give more than a very faint damn to the red iniquity of more national ownership or control, so long as they (maximum condition) are in government and control the vast patronage or so long as they (minimum condition) can ensure getting "balanced" representation on the boards, even when in Opposition—as they always can, so docile have British Labour governments been...

...She questioned him: "Alvaro, my son, do you still live in that brokendown old flat, with the unpainted furniture and the dirty rugs...

...I remember hearing veteran Labour leader George Brown tell a very apathetic student audience back in 1965, before the days of student militancy, that "so warm am I with the idealism of youth flooding up to recharge my tired old batteries" (and they'd only given him sherry), that "I'm going to tell you tonight what the rest of the country won't know until they open their newspapers in the morning...

...The bluff could be called of all those arrogant ones who say that only limitless financial incentive gets good men at the helm of enterprises...

...Cunhal Visits His Mother (Heard in Lisbon) Alvaro Cunhal, head of the Portuguese Communist party, visited his elderly mother whom he hadn't seen in many years...

...So for the emergency, now admitted, the fear of run-away inflation, the TUC have said, for the moment, "To hell with differentials: no increases of more than aflat-rate all round of L6 per week...

...The point is that if he'd spent twopence on capitalist market research, he'd have learned that the lads on the shop floor hadn't even heard of incomes policy...

...Sell it on the shop floor first.' Your professor...

...Pockets of acute deprivation, yes...

...Mao told him: "What's wrong with taping a conversation when you happen to have a tape recorder with you...

...As there are some who love him this side of idolatory (his political adviser, his press secretary, his personal secretary, a junior Minister called Arnold Kaufman, and about a dozen old cronies whom he's made lords, to be precise), there are others who— well perhaps blame him personally for more than social theory should attribute to any one man, whether Marx, Moses, or Mohammed...

...Are you still out of work, without a penny in your pocket...

...Repent-for-the-Last-Hour-Is-atHand" men lie exhausted on every sidewalk or pavement...

...Indeed, in the first week of July, he made a very relaxed speech warning against "creating a crisis out of fear," before canceling his engagements, dashing back to London, two emergency meetings of the Cabinet, and then the great reversal (under threat of a run on the pound) of the oft-sworn electoral oath never more to interfere with free industrial wage-bargaining...

...I know what the lads on the shop floor feel...

...So what do the backbenchers do—beside make gentle trouble and wait...

...Even 30 percent inflation, while it rubs and worries, hasn't yet wounded deeply...

...Oblique theoretical point on Harold Wilson: interesting that the Observer even in 1966 commissioned three "Why I vote for" Wilson, Heath, or Grimond personalities pieces, not on the parties...

...Yet it has rarely been able to carry out premeditated intentions...

...Yes...

...No, mother," he answered, "I have a fine suite now, with wall-to-wall carpeting, modern new furniture...

...I was, am a trade unionist...

...He is the purest of pure politicians...

...It has been a temporary, lunatic nonsense, encouraged by Wilson, for the British left-wing of the Labour party to follow the self-interest of a few big craft unions and to declare that "socialism means free bargaining...

...If, to reflective realists, the crisis is on us, to the otdinary man in the street it is still hard to perceive...

...The record of effective use of power, in terms not even of socialist aspirations (I hardly pause to consider these) but simply in terms of managing the economy (where now a fifth Two Minds of public expenditures are financed by borrowing), has been abysmal...

...Personality counts more in policy formation than in electoral appeal...

...Bless the BBC...

...However, instead of the party leadership using backbench MPs to try to reanimate the party, above all to convince the union shop floors that a national incomes policy is of the essence of socialism, the whole tendency is to let sleeping dogs lie—and then to practice unnecessary and unnatural exertions when the sleeping dogs get restless, whether out of boredom, pride, or conviction...

...Only the kind, I fear, of otherwise drowning men who succeed in bailing out the boat...

...But when they are on shore again, and the oil begins to flow...

...And Scottish separatism...

...But there will be time for a good many more such David Savarine television shows and magazine special reports on the final end of Great Britain...

...The young tend not to join politically active groups, but "Good Causes" and one-shot pressure groups...

...Hard indeed, looking at London, to think that there is an economic war on...

...They clap rather indiscriminately...

...In what might be politely termed a mellow afterdinner speech, full of boast, to the British Academy in June (the transcript of which is a collector's item in Fleet Street), he remarked: I have a portrait of Gladstone in my study at No...

...Half the Tribune group suddenly becomes converted to belief in the existence and iniquity of inflation and the other half cries "Ha Ha among the trumpets" that the walls of capitalism are at last collapsing— again—and that revolution will come without really trying...

...No, mother, I'm a government Minister now, with a fine salary and all that I need...

...For even on last Christmas Day the Prime Minister had a passage written into the Queen's Message (it used to be called the Sovereign's "Message to the Empire") deploring "those gloom-mongers who talk our country down...

...But would this semisiege socialism engender more fraternity...

...But two real theoretical points, one oblique, one direct...

...No wonder with Sir Keith Joseph as Mrs...

...The crisis provides a lot of extra comings and goings for the tourists to eye through their camera shutters...

...turned the corner into Downing Street, identified 326 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS myself to the police and got a small round of applause from the crowd...

...Nixon defamed politics...

...To be fair, I must broaden the point: it is true of the whole postwar period...

...Otherwise most of them look so smooth and well-groomed as to be taken merely for top civil servants or leaders of industry...

...Thatcher's economic adviser, there has been a renewed outbreak of "free market economics" in the Tory party, which ordinarily, unlike the Republican party, is pretty bored with that kind of doctrinaire talk...

...The unemployment benefits are greater, the clothes are newish, the television set won't be pawned for a long time, nor the automobile or the washing machine, and the children go to school well shod and, if a little less well fed, yet certainly fed enough...

...Much of public investment already is made through the nationalized industries...

...Either Royden Harrison (a left-wing and Tribune man) or I, we differ as to which of us it was, whispered in the other's ear, "He's got to sell it on the shop floor first...

...You seem to be doing very well just when the country is about to go Communist...

...Well, not too gloomy—nothing is about to break down, but everything is still working badly...

...You may remember better Cornwallis's drummers beating "The World Turned Upside Down" as they marched out of Yorktown in 1780 with colors furled...

...Everyone has been going on for ten years about "the increasing power of the British Prime Minister...

...but we tend to remember better the abortive Walcheren expedition of 1796: Oh the noble Duke of York, he had ten thousand men He marched them up to the top of a hill *Scottish word, basically meaning slow and thick, but respectably so, even somewhat comfortingly so...

...The Rosicrucians hope that finally the bishops will open Joanna Southcott's sealed boxes—if they have not lost them centuries ago...

...Perhaps if he had sat down and talked with (even incredibly just listened), not talked at, his own people, he'd have learned that acceptance would have needed a campaign as deliberate, long and grueling—but as possible—as, say, FDR's to get the Neutrality Acts repealed in 1940...

...Bloody sorry for you...

...But it should be equally noticeable that 30 percent of the cars purchased in Britain last year were made abroad—so great is the public's trust in the standards of British industry...

...When nearly all expert and responsible opinion saw the need for devaluation in 1965, he put it off discourteously till 1969, then had the gall by 1971 to blame the Conservatives for the fruits of his own fixations, cowardice, and neglect...

...Wilson has been so determined to play it cool...

...So much for rumors that he may go soon and voluntarily—which his cronies occasionally spread to provoke little gasps of anguish from office-holders and to make his opponents feel that time, a good Wilsonian adage, will heal all...

...and he gravely concluded, as 10,000 grave student essays now do annually, "not quite, but nearly" —perhaps better say, "prime-ministerial government...

...George Brown's hearing was the most unreported, phenomenal thing about him...

...Direct theoretical point on Harold Wilson: Bertrand Russell once distinguished two senses of "power"—power as "unchallengeability" was to be distinguished from power as "the ability to carry out a premeditated intention...

...I thought he should hang there, since he is the only other Prime Minister to form four administrations—though I have to concede that he was older when he formed his first than when I formed my fourth...

...I barked like John Adams reproving a Royal Governess...

...From what will virtually be a national minimum, there could also be a national maximum—not so much for social justice, however, as to sell the packet to the workers...

...Like Baldwin or Coolidge he would sit there for ever if no one disturbed and the world stayed still...

...Isn't that too bad...

...To an extent astonishing to any American congressman, the two main parliamentary parties are dominated by the quest for office...

...So between a third and a quarter of any majority party in the House of Commons have a job...

...If this is social breakdown, it is a bit hard to recognize...

...Most people in America love playing with tape recorders...

...A little sniff of indulgence toward a little slipping of moral standards in Wilson's entourage...

...Wilsonian pragmatism knew where to look for its sheep's clothing with which to cover its own sheep's body...

...Many things, of course, but the one thing that they are little used for is to mobilize opinion in the party outside Parliament...

...My American and German visitors are still much impressed by the number of Rolls Royces on the streets, and they do not each carry a plaque saying "Saved by the State...

...Perhaps this is the trouble...

...More likely, the TUC were just scared, indeed concerned and anxious, at the government's inactivity...

...SOCIALISM BEGAN with the belief that a free market could not achieve a just distribution of wages...

...The truth is that so great is party discipline and loyalty, that he could lead it where he wanted, if he wanted to lead anywhere, and if he troubled to prepare the ground...

...This leads a life of its own to an astonishing extent...

...He got into so many scrapes through hearing what COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 329 he wasn't meant to when chieftains are in their cups...

...Mr Mao said he remembered Mr...

...They not merely had me on that list of gloom-mongers, but gave me a full five minutes the following lunchtime (following their doctrine of balance, presumably) to protest, like some old Whig, "at the intrusion of the Crown into politics...

...Leaders do need to be followed...

...unforgivable misery and squalor of a small number of homeless and destitute...

...330 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS...

...Kukrit said that during his meeting with the Chinese leader Mao in Peking last week, the 81-yearold Mr...

...For Mr...

...Just because a man is elected does not mean that he has computerized, sensitized antennae to public opinion...

...We're not out to fight the foe Sing oh dear no, We're not out to fight the foe But just to put a little pepper In the Lord Mayor's show...

...All quite a spectacle, what with the police in Downing Street and the Life Guards just around the corner in breastplates, gold and scarlet...

...and a sad admission of failure to bring more people, especially young people, into the party...

...Indeed, but such is life...

...No mass unemployment and even in areas of high unemployment, it simply cannot look as terrible as in the never-to-be-forgottenbythe-labour-movement 1930s...

...And a life both declining and more intransigent...

...Arrivals of trade union leaders at Downing Street are among the most popular with the crowd: they look such heavy, honest, sensible, stoor* and trustworthy men just what a Labour government should look like...

...Talk, indeed, about personalization of politics in the American presidential manner...

...And Ireland...

...As market restraints or union power have diminished, no other mechanisms have emerged to determine wage levels and differentials...

...There will be no legal sanctions against the trade union brothers, as under the wicked Tories...