England Looks Outward

...All the same, it says something about the stagnant industrial situation that a Conservative government has felt compelled to offer even this pale shadow of a planning agency to its grumbling electorate...

...The needs of expansion and the growing fragmentation of knowledge have combined suddenly to make the American model of collegiate training, which has always stressed the lecture, a great deal more relevant to British needs...

...It came as something of a revelation to one MP that the Secretaries of the Treasury and of Defense were businessmen, that Galbraith was half a world away from the centers of decision, and that a major role of the intellectuals seemed to involve writing speeches and mending American fences abroad, as Schlesinger did after the Cuban fiasco...

...In the circumstances, it is not astonishing that a good many Englishmen are beginning to believe that the French, of all people, are doing better by their economy...

...These political fears have been expressed in the last few weeks in a powerful polemic by William Pickles for the Fabian Society, Not with Europe: The Political Case for Staying Out...

...It is easily possible to exaggerate, but one does get the feeling that Oxford and Cambridge, especially among the young academics, are being perceived more and more as glorious anachronisms...

...Often students are "streamed" by ability groups at the age of seven...

...Robert Lekachman, a regular contributor to these pages, is associate professor of economics at Barnard College...

...Nonetheless, there is considerable appreciation of Snow's judgment that the American graduate school, working as it must with the products of American colleges, has on the whole been a success...

...American rates of unemployment, which only recently have dipped below 6 per cent, are tolerated by Englishmen who acidly protest British unemployment in excess of 2 per cent...

...Finally, the American visitor to England is struck by the prevailing British attitude toward membership in the Common Market...

...What Her Majesty's ministers have written into her speech will in all probability soon be the law of the land...

...Right now it is obvious that what Kennedy really wants from this session of Congress is his Trade Expansion Act in undamaged form, and the business tax credit...

...Closer attention to the details of the measures which the President is really fighting for might shock his English admirers...

...Even the Bridges Report on Cambridge education recognizes that specialization has begun to imperil the tutorial technique and increase the importance of the formal lecture...

...Worse still, arts subjects continue to carry more prestige than the sciences...

...One of its consequences may be the appearance at least of greater activity in the Conservative government...

...The love affair between British intellectuals and the Kennedy Administration is embarrassingly tender...

...A John Strachey considers American defense policy a good deal more intelligent than British policy and professes enormous admiration for John Kenneth Galbraith...

...C. P. Snow no doubt overstated this point and damaged its reception by shaky excursions into the content and definition of culture, but it is a point which needed badly to be made in the English context...

...The Spectator's cartoon comment caught this mood: It pictured the Prime Minister addressing a hang-dog Chancellor with the words, "I know you can't please everyone, Selwyn, but you must try to please someone...

...Frequently it is obviously intended to be nothing more than the reaffirmation of a campaign pledge...

...The second and more compelling reason for British entry is freely advanced on all sides...

...In a great many markets its products are dangerously uncompetitive, either because delivery dates are uncertain, service facilities are inadequate, or standards of design are too low...

...The general expectation appears to be that Neddy will become an efficient statistical agency and a convenient occasion for conversations among industrialists, labor union leaders and government officials about the problems of the economy...

...What does all this add up to...

...The Common Marketeers count upon the icy bath of open European competition to stimulate the business circulation of the land...

...I dare say that few sophisticated Englishmen confuse intellectually the Queen's Speech, ripe in its promise of impending Parliamentary action, with the array of Presidential messages which open and punctuate a Congressional session...

...What is less healthy, and what is certainly startling to an American, is the extent to which the British impression of American politics is founded upon myth and misinterpretation...

...Whether stimulus or paralysis is the consequence of the plunge, it is evident that the proponents of the Common Market have lost confidence in the capacity of English industry and English labor unions to reform by themselves...

...But what the President asks for in his State of the Union Message or his Budget Message demands a good deal more exegesis...

...Using brilliant economists and statisticians in their Commissariat du Plan, the French have engaged in a policy of target setting, investment plan reconciliation, and industrialist stimulation which has spectacularly revitalized French economic life...

...In short, the English system of education is excellently designed to exclude and badly constructed to recruit...

...The fear is genuine that adherence to the Common Market will entangle simple Englishmen in the untold intricacies of Roman law (how, one wonders, do British firms now manage to trade on the Continent...

...The British have at last begun to realize the necessity of expanding a university system which trains a smaller percentage of young people than any major advanced nation, including France, Italy and Russia...

...But it does seem to have deceived a good many intelligent Englishmen emotionally...

...Certainly several people observed that they could no longer listen to their Prime Minister without laughing and recalling Beyond the Fringe...

...Kennedy and his principal aides are young...

...If the Common Market can be read as an adverse judgment on England's ability to control her external economic relations, the new National Economic Development Council (already domesticated under the nickname of "Neddy") seems parallel evidence of British dissatisfaction with the determination of economic policy through the hallowed instrumentality of the annual budget...

...Malcom Bradbury, whose novel Eating People is Wrong presumably drew on his experiences as an English teacher in a redbrick university, recently published in the London Sunday Times a blast against the kind of students already taken in by previous expansion and a warning against suddenly taking in more of them...

...There is nothing despicable in this time-honored tactic...

...It has won the respectful rebuttal of so strong a proponent of the Common Market as the Economist...

...Last year over 200 fully qualified students sought some 20 places in the London School of Economic's sociology department, and the instance is not extreme...

...Thus far there are no signs that Neddy is fated to reproduce French successes...

...Nothing—or worse still, the same old things—seems to happen in London...

...As I have indicated, Continental and especially American institutions seen through British eyes often assume startling distortions...

...Least frequently of all, it indicates the President's determination to deploy all the powers of his great office to attain an important legislative objective...

...And closer analysis of the true relations between Congress and the President might modify Crossman's judgment of the relative power and position of Presidents and Prime Ministers...

...To an American critical of the Kennedy Administration, by all odds the most astounding English phenomenon is the huge popularity of the Kennedy government among Labor party politicians and intellectuals...

...More important, they have not grasped the relationships between Presidential utterance and Congressional action...

...Since Levin's literary performances of the past have featured the acid critique, it is all the more impressive that the Kennedy magic has operated even on this unlikely target...

...English academics have themselves become sufficiently interested in the United States to snatch eagerly at chances to teach in American universities...

...This is probably a healthy British reaction to an uncreative period in English political life...

...Nor can it be said that the political and intellectual mood is a great deal brighter than the grey skies overhead...

...Critics of the Common Market argue that British membership will terminate her "special relationship" with the United States, but there is no doubt at all that failure to join is an even surer way of losing American favor...

...The first is the general discontent with the way British politics, education and economics are going...

...Or, it may signal the start of complicated negotiations with Congress...

...A request in one of these messages may be only verbal obeisance to a group of voters...

...Although its director, Sir Robert Shone, and its research head, Donald McDougall, are men of reputation who can be counted upon to recruit able staff, the Conservative government has failed to confer on its new instrument any clear mandate...

...But the distortions, though they may momentarily confuse English policy, are less important than two other elements of the British climate...

...The British badly misconstrue the role of intellectuals in the Kennedy scheme of things...

...Certainly in the hands of recent Chancellors the budget has become less and less adequate and more and more unimaginative...

...British reluctance to associate closely with "Europeans" has not vanished...

...Repetitive balance of payments crises, actual or imminent inflation, and imperceptible improvements in efficiency are unpleasant testimonials to an undynamic economy...

...No doubt French politics are barbarous, but the French economy is, from a British standpoint, horribly efficient...

...Crossman, for example, believes that "by his hair's breadth victory, the new President acquired powers of radical change that no Left-wing British Premier can ever possess...

...Something always seems to be happening in Washington...

...Himself an MP, Crossman is willing to "defy any British politician, whatever his party, to read this account of how John Kennedy won the power struggle, first within his own party and then against the Republicans, without a thrill of envious excitement and an uneasy sense of contrast between the spontaneity of American democracy at work and the regimented uniformity of British machine politics...

...Neither has the wistful fondness for the Commonwealth in preference to the unpleasing Europe of General de Gaulle and the apparently immortal Konrad Adenauer...

...French "indicative planning" is respectfully discussed in the Economist and even distantly emulated in the new National Economic Development Council...

...Although Britain has been operating a full, if not overfull, employment economy for the better part of a generation, its economic growth is far slower than Italy's, West Germany's, or France's...

...Knowledgable Americans are aware that Presidential requests for power to vary tax rates in recession, trigger off public works expenditures as unemployment rises, secure Federal aid to education, and pass an enlightened consumer protection law, are gestures for the record and for the campaigns to come...

...It is still stranger to identify admirers of American education...

...The prominence in the Administration of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Galbraith, and W. W. Rostow, to name three important members of the Harvard-MIT complex, has so dazzled British intellectuals as to obscure the hard questions of the extent of their influence and the importance of their jobs...

...British admirers of the novelties of the Kennedy Administration have not taken in the existence of an American establishment of McCloys, Dillons and Clays who have their resemblances to the British model...

...Indeed, an American visitor to England is likely to be struck above all with the feeling that Chancellor of the Exchequer Selwyn Lloyd's famous "pay pause" plan, designed to halt inflationary wage increases and provide a breathing space for more effective planning, symbolizes a general fear that English political and economic inventiveness are inadequate to meet the demands of a competitive world...

...This is not to say that the British plan to expand on anything like the American scale...

...MPs to the left of their own party leader, Hugh Gaitskell, who in his turn is surely some distance to the left of President Kennedy, profess admiration for the American Administration...

...As for non-Labor party judgment upon the President, the first sentence of Bernard Levin's review of the same volume will suggest the tone: "The President of the United States is a good, courageous, dynamic, far-sighted and immensely able man...

...Probably the less important is the steady American pressure for Britain to join...

...It is possible that the devastating take-off of Macmillan in the hit satiric review, Beyond the Fringe, has done something to crystallize this feeling...

...It is probably fortunate for England that so many Englishmen have become disaffected by the excessively, even stupidly elitest character of British education...

...Some such self-doubt seems to explain the wide variety of foreign institutions—European and American—that have won the favor of the traditionally insular British: Envy and admiration of the Common Market are widely diffused...

...Those who fail cannot enter the grammar schools, and those who don't attend the grammar schools have almost no hope of the university —any university at all, let alone Oxford or Cambridge...

...It would be an exaggeration to say that rain fell the whole of every day of my visit there, but it surely fell at least a part of every one of March's inexorable 31 days...

...But the implicit image of Kennedy as the proponent of radical change derives from the proposals which the President is not pushing...

...It is sufficiently strange to discover Left-wing Englishmen who admire American politics and American politicians...

...compel formal renunciation of Commonwealth ties, and prevent some future Labor government from undertaking social and economic reform of a radical character...

...An optimist about England can securely hope that out of these two favorable attitudes will come release from the malaise which has made British life dull and unsatisfactory to so many of its intellectuals...

...And the once-maligned American university system is now frequently praised for its receptivity to talent and considered as a possible pattern for a revitalized British system of higher education...

...The distinguished commission headed by Lord Robbins, an eminent economist, is unequivocally expansionist in temper...

...Nevertheless, there is a reasoned economic case available for British emphasis upon general tariff reduction through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in place of the Common Market approach...

...As much as anything else, F. R. Leavis' blast at C. P. Snow and the intemperate responses of Snow's defenders are symptoms of a growing unease about the adequacy of even the "Oxbridge" variety of education...

...Thus the Edwardian languor which is the trademark of unflappable Mac has become tedious, and the energetic rhetoric which is the Kennedy style has become attractive...

...On economic grounds Pickles has been reinforced by the Cambridge economist J. E. Meade's temperate pamphlet, UK, Commonwealth and Common Market, which supports British entry into the Common Market only on the condition that the Common Market pursue a low tariff policy toward the rest of the world...

...Professor Meade's argument rather neglects the hard fact that Britain need not join at all if Common Market external tariffs are low, and dare not stay out if they are high...

...Nor is British opinion suddenly and unanimously in favor of American education in all its aspects...

...To an American who follows politics this is where civics leaves off and actual politics begins...

...In fact the British Treasury, in a widely criticized act, has already curtailed the request for economic aid which the University Grants Committee made on behalf of the universities...

...The unexpected Liberal triumph at the Orpington by-election continues to reverberate...

...The second is the general wish to do something to improve matters...

...Indeed, it is far worse for the talented woman student...

...It is the judgment that this is the only available way to stimulate British industry and British labor into 20th century behavior...

...But even the fortunate few who survive the grammar school and laboriously earn a collection of passes in the state examinations at "O" and "A" level, find themselves competing desperately for a tiny number of university vacancies...

...Yet it is ever more true that economic progress is intimately related to the vigor of pure science and the stream of technological applications which flows in complicated ways from pure science...

...That once intransigent critic of America, R. H. S. Crossman, now uses the occasion of his review of Theodore White's The Making of the President to celebrate the superiority of American politics: Americans can really change their governments, but Britons have condemned themselves to periodic reshuffles of grey establishment figures...

...The decision to enter the Common Market confesses the failure of England's rival enterprise, the European Free Trade Association, the inadequacy of the Commonwealth, and the danger that England's only alternative is a stagnant isolation admired by neither the American colosuss nor Western Europe...

...The best Oxford and Cambridge graduate is an admirable intellectual product, typically in command of skills of communication far superior to his American counterparts, but he is much too scarce to meet the demands of a complex modern economy...

...To true-blue supporters of the Common Market like the influential Spectator, failure to join will compel England to "drift along on an uncompetitive economic basis, taking a decreasing amount of Commonwealth trade, unable to give adequate aid where it is needed, but secure in the knowledge that our admirable moral qualities and our 'sentimental and traditional' ties with the Empire will gain us a place in the world...

...But neither the political nor the economic arguments against the Common Market are likely to win the day...

...No doubt the exaltation of Kennedy is partly the other side of disenchantment with Prime Minister Macmillan and the gentlemanly faces of a Conservative Administration which repeats old clichés and operates old, unsuccessful policies...

...Cuba is forgiven...

...The reasons for this judgment illuminate Britain's present position...

...The shelter fiasco is barely recalled...

...Members of the inferior streams have scant hope of passing their 11-plus examinations...

...A clever soul actually won a New Statesman competition for the most startling headline with the succinct entry, "Adenauer Dead...