Britain's Changing Mood

...Parallel with this development one can discern signs of a new pragmatic breakthrough in the ranks of the British Left...

...As Roy Lewis, author of The Boss, an entertaining recent study of British business, has remarked, if a big British exporter, say of sports cars or computers, were to appear on a television program, he would be sure to be applauded by his audience...

...The new reformers hold that comprehensive social services like the National Health Service are only an initial step on the road to a Socialist society...

...Britain is, of course, also exporting nuclear reactors, and at home a big program of nuclear power-stations is beginning to take visible shape...

...Nevertheless, it also reveals a background of public indifference toward large political issues which is quite unusual in an election year...

...The British economic situation, for example, is still patchy...

...During 1958, the Conservatives, under Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's leadership, had rebounded from their deep post-Suez slump with such glossy confidence that they were put several points ahead of an apparently colorless Labor Opposition in the forthcoming election prospects...

...Still, these conditions already prevailed during the latter part of 1958, when the Conservative Government was growing in popularity, so the reaction seems curiously delayed...

...As a reflection on current British political indifference, this quip was not inexact, although the picture it describes is partly accidental...

...This realization has been accompanied by an interesting rise in the social status and popular esteem of British industrialists and businessmen...

...Russian and Chinese industrial activity, Lloyd declared: "We in Britain are few—that's why every one of us matters...

...Where no such special problems present themselves, the Conservatives are today as ready to withdraw as their opponents...

...In this way, Ghana and Malaya, which have recently become sovereign states, will very soon be followed by Nigeria and the West Indies Federation as new members of the Commonwealth Club...

...The transformation of the former British Empire into the transitional stage called "Commonwealth" is proceeding steadily...

...but this factor, too, was quite apparent last year...

...Government plans for the years ahead envisage the expenditure of several hundred million dollars on rebuilding and re-equipping state schools and an increase of up to 60 per cent in university faculty positions...

...In 1958, the automobile industry produced a record total of over a million cars...

...But the postwar years have seen quite a change in these popular images...

...wrote Noel Coward in 1934...

...One reason, I think, is the pervasive sense that, for the first time in many a day, a British parliamentary election will decide what is to be the government merely of a power of the second rank...

...The new shifts in party allegiance seem, therefore, not so much political as psychological—changes in public mood...

...The level of production has dropped in such basic industries as coal, steel and shipbuilding, while unemployment, which is still something of a specter to older British workers, has risen beyond the half-million mark...

...But in the earlier postwar elections, this fact was obscured by the participation in the battle of leaders like Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin, who had been central figures in the shaping of the wartime Grand Alliance and of world history...

...It follows that even though Britain's present Commonwealth ties, especially with Canada, Australia and New Zealand, are still warm and strong, through die mere fact of having become a power of the second rank, Britain is today newly on her own...

...and Nasser is just about the last hero remaining to that section of the British Left for whom the cause of world progress is primarily identified with the discomfiture of British Toryism—a somewhat insular view, but one that can still be heard in certain dwindling but diehard Left quarters...

...Only over a few touchy security areas like Cyprus, Aden and the Persian Gulf do Conservative and Labor policies differ, and perhaps concerning some areas of mixed population in Africa...

...The vogue for all these specialist causes is therefore explicable...

...Non-political preoccupations reflect awareness of loss of power Britain's Changing Mood By T. R. Fyvel LONDON IF PUBLIC OPINION polls are to be trusted, and they have in the past proved pretty reliable, the new year has seen quite a remarkable reversal of the British political tide...

...While some of the country's older industries are languishing, other and more modem industries have at the same time been making swift strides...

...First, it is not easy to say exactly why it has taken place...

...If Britain has indeed become a. power of the second rank, so runs the prevailing and disillusioning thought, then it really does not matter very much whether its next government is headed by an elegant progressive Conservative like Macmillan, or by a cautious Socialist intellectual like Gaitskell...

...In the obstinately hierarchical British society, business and industry had until quite recently been regarded as less gentlemanly, on a lower social rung than landowners, the top levels of the armed services, the civil service, the professions and, of course, the City and banking...

...With half of them shipped overseas, Britain in 1958 was again the world's largest automobile exporter (a tiny fraction ahead of Western Germany...

...For instance, the postwar social changes that have loosened up life in London and made it a much more international city, have been accompanied by an increase in prostitution, which has lately been painfully visible in some of London's main thoroughfares...

...and, as the authoritative Wolfenden Report, advocating reform of Britain's highly antiquated laws on prostitution and its even odder laws on homosexuality, was published not long ago, it was only natural that these two explosive subjects should go on being argued about...

...While Labor stands more strongly behind the Comprehensive Schools, there is no longer much difference in principle between the education policies of the two political parties...

...The Labor recovery they reveal puts party leader Hugh Gaitskell neck and neck with Macmillan, and so a Labor victory in the parliamentary elections, which are likely to occur in 1959, is again being forecast...

...Indeed, a recent television broadcast by Geoffrey Lloyd, Minister of Education, seemed to me significant...

...He also observed that first-rate state secondary schools are still in the minority and that it is his party's aim to build such schools throughout the entire country...

...M the reassessment has not yet found expression in party politics, one can nevertheless see many signs of it in British life...

...There are some basic facts which by now both sides know deep in their bones...

...These new long-term ideas have emerged from studies of the social services by Professor Richard M. Tittmuss, of the London School of Economics, and such disciples of his as Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith: Their ideas should be noted, for they seem to be among the most productive contributions to Social Democratic thought that have appeared for some time...

...Above all, that new race, television producers in perpetual, nervous search for an "angle," have never ceased plugging this issue...

...But there is little doubt that the country is moving away from the travel-poster image of a picturesque, peacefully class-ridden Britain...

...The changing mood of the country is perhaps most strikingly reflected in the new vocal concern with remedying shortcomings in education...

...has keen electoral interest...

...Whether the adjustment is fast enough to conserve Britain's place, in view of all the ground already lost, is still an open question...

...What is new is the way in which press and television have been telling the British man-in-the-street (or as one should say today, the average British viewer) that not only an abstraction called "Britain's future," but his very own security, will depend upon the efficacy of British scientific industry in the nuclear age...

...A friend of mine from abroad, who had resumed reading the London intellectual weeklies after a long interval, remarked with considerable astonishment that the British public appeared at the moment to be interested in only five topics: the treatment of prostitutes, homosexuals, "obscene literature," mental health—and Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser...

...This unevenness in the British industrial picture is not new...

...It may be said that this has actually been the case since 1945...

...Now, the Conservatives have in the past fought pretty hard to preserve educational distinctions between the classes...

...The next and more difficult stage is to humanize the new Leviathan of the state, to eliminate its outdated and repellent externals, the unintelligible printed forms, the delays and queues at counters, the forbidding public buildings...

...A second interesting fact is that these changes have been accompanied by remarkably little real debate on major political issues...

...Today the picture of nuclear power stations and school science laboratories is coming increasingly to the fore...

...Some observers have attributed Latbor's unexpected comeback to the establishment of Gaitskell's undisputed leadership over the party...

...it would be the banker, especially if an Old Etonian, who would have to justify himself and explain his usefulness...

...If they are now ready to put their weight behind a plan for mass education, this is one of the clearest signs of adjustment to the fact that Britain is today on her own...

...Today it has set: To maintain their standard of living on their crowded islands, the British realize increasingly that they have again been thrown back on their own resources, talents and inventiveness...

...It is true that the British economy has for some time been in the grip of a limited recession...

...With their departure, the sense of Great-Power drama in British politics has dwindled abruptly and so, equally...

...As for obscene literature, a British MP's private bill to change the law on the subject happened to coincide with fierce arguments over the proposed publication of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita...

...Showing dramatic filmed flashes of American...

...Exports of British jet aircraft and engines have likewise reached new peaks...

...It is, I think, this sobering reflection which has turned the present phase in British politics into a slightly numbed pause...

...The subject is a natural talking point...

...The sun never sets on Government House...

...The new task is to bring warmth and individuality into all contacts between the citizen and the state and to raise public services to the level of the best private enterprise...

...But over and above Government plans, such questions as the prevailing shortage of science school teachers, gaps in British technological training, and the argument over so-called Comprehensive Schools (large schools housing up to 2,000 pupils), have become topics of national discussion...

...Two points can be made about this shift in political opinion...

...The latest opinion tests show, however, that this trend has been not only halted but reversed...

...Mental Health is an old topic which is simply once again in fashion...

...But however peacefully this handover may be carried out, however much may be said about the like-mindedness of Commonwealth member-nations, in the harsh terms of power the process is for Britain not much more than a retreat without a strategy: how long before India's relationship to Britain will be rather like that of the United States...