Muddling Through in Britain

...Similarly, few British export managers speak a foreign language other than schoolboy French...

...Of one such British company director, a Spanish friend said: "In the morning he's eager to get away to the beach...

...The 1945 Labor government carried out a few reforms and lessened the harshness of the British caste system...

...In 1959, the board of the General Electric Company, one of the biggest in Britain, was advised by an insurance group, from which it had sought a loan, to call in management consultants...

...Since 1945 successive British governments have starved industry, communications and housing of capital in order to squander billions of dollars on the most negative kind of "prestige" projects: military bases everybody knew were useless and, all too often, an embarrassment, and nuclear weapons the superpowers would never allow Britain to use...

...Once Europe's biggest car industry, it now occupies third or fourth rank, and the British-owned sector of it has actually shrunk considerably during the last 10 years while in other European car-producing countries the nationally-owned sector has grown...

...To cite just one example: The automobile industry--better than most, since it is one of the best managed and best equipped in Britain--produced fewer cars in 1970 than in 1964...

...The achievements of the managers of British industry and commerce, during a quarter of a century of favorable terms of trade, high protective tariffs and government aid, are staggering: inadequate investment, insufficient modernization, minimal expansion, a declining share of world exports, appalling labor relations, sagging profitability, and a steady takeover of firms and markets by American and European capital and products...

...Admission to the European Economic Community--an increasingly Social Democratic bloc--might work the trick within a decade or two, but Britain's entry is not yet certain...

...Ray Alan, a veteran British correspondent in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, recently returned home to assess his own country's woes...

...Ostentatious nonchalance, disinterest in facts and drunkenness were badges of rank in more than one British official outpost I have had dealings with in the Mediterranean and Near East...

...The Establishment's instinctive label for such people--the British pioneers of jet aircraft, swing-wing aircraft, the hovercraft, and microcircuits--is "cranks...

...If only he had sent over a few more bombers . . . How can Britain, afflicted with its scores of decrepit industries and hundreds of square miles of slums, compete with countries like Germany and France, which rebuilt their major industries after 1945, or upstarts like Japan and Italy that were able to industrialize from scratch...

...Between 1950-70 Britain had the slowest growth rate in the world (excluding Communist and underdeveloped countries), and its citizens dropped from fifth to 13th place (excluding oil sheikdoms) in the prosperity stakes...

...SICK ECONOMY SICK SOCIETY Muddling Through in Britain BY RAY ALAN London The day before Rolls Royce crashed, an officially-inspired commentary broadcast in the BBC's external services assured the world that the British economy was in splendid form and the pound sterling positively glowing with health...

...The higher the rank of a British executive or official, the later he can be expected to arrive in his office...

...When do these people do any work...

...The better newspapers and TV and radio programs are encouraging the slaughter of a few sacred cows...

...But Britain had muddled . . . er, come through worse than that . . . The Rolls Royce disaster has achieved something...

...The British middle classes produce an impressive number of resourceful, imaginative and inventive men and women...

...Admittedly, Britain's unemployment rate was the highest in Europe, and the economy was beset by inflation, stagnation, major postal and industrial strikes, and a tidal wave of demands for higher pay...

...Since nationalization of the Bank, its boss, at least, has been a professional...

...They were unanimous that the British understood the Arabs much better, and were more highly skilled in dealing with them, than those crude, clumsy, naive Americans...

...the afternoon is too hot for work...

...One of the party was the managing director of a British engineering firm who was hoping to sell the French some equipment...

...Every pub has its authority on "how we got into such a mess...

...The average Briton now has the lowest standard of living in Western Europe outside Italy, Spain and Portugal...

...Few countries produce more inventors and originators whose ideas must be exploited abroad before they are taken seriously at home...

...There are some promising signs...

...The Foreign Office misjudged almost every major international issue during the '30s, '40s and '50s (it never really understood what World War II was about, and it considered Stalin a revolutionary...

...Down Whitehall way, the party line was that there was nothing wrong with the economy that a high bank rate and firm handling of the unions couldn't cure...

...An Italian suggestion that the European Economic Community help Britain to reduce its indebtedness to Commonwealth countries was greeted with something like indignation in Whitehall...

...But, for "prestige" reasons, Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Chancellor of the Exchequer James Callaghan set their faces against it and preferred to toss most of Britain's reserves down the drain to buy time...

...but nobody of any account in the Establishment--or, sadly, the Labor party--considered that a drawback...

...Both Clement Attlee's government and Harold Wilson's exempted the "public" schools--notorious seedbeds of snobbery and nepotism--from their educational reforms, and actually invigorated the prestige of the House of Lords...

...And British executives visiting continental firms or trade fairs often exasperate their European opposite numbers by pretentiously refusing to "talk shop" over drinks or meals...

...So Britain acquired--and was still saddled with in 1945--a social-political-industrial establishment distinguished by its hostility to professional expertise and endeavor, its cult of the ingenious amateur, its confidence--even pride--in improvisation and muddling through...

...during the second he fell into the ornamental pool of the open-air restaurant where they were entertaining us...

...Whether or not the Luftwaffe might have done more to streamline British industry, the real advantage Germany and France gained in 1945 was an opportunity to reshape their institutions...

...The Foreign Office and most British embassies are grotesquely overstaffed--state Department officials ask one how Britain can afford such extravagance--yet they are at last tuning in to the modern world...

...the top jobs went not to the able but to those with the right connections...

...explanations range from trade union militancy to managerial inefficiency, from Tory incompetence to Labor's betrayal of its principles, from delusions of grandeur fostered by the Commonwealth myth to the brain drain...

...Smugness and complacency were the norm...

...Even Adolf Hitler conies in for a share of the blame...

...The secret services, traditionally mistrustful of intellectuals, are also in the market for graduates, offering Foreign-Office pay and pensions with retirement at 55 instead of 60...

...The last time I visited an international car show, two models were missing from one of the main British stands: They arrived the week after the show closed...

...Foreign travel is broadening horizons and awakening appetites...

...As the Economist once observed, Britain is the last major country in which a man's words are less important than his accent...

...Some examples of this shadow-before-substance syndrome: . A few years ago I spent some time discussing Saudi Arabia with a group of British officials and officers who had been there...

...Most educated Britons under 25 are "pro-European" because they realize membership in the EEC could open exciting perspectives...

...Labor's new tycoons were quite ignorant of civilian administrative methods and of the vital national industries they were to run...

...according to the Economist he is "slightly worse off than the average American Negro"-even after adjusting the figures in Britain's favor to take higher U.S...

...No one at the board table knew how to go about this...

...In a Spanish city last fall, a British tea-exporting firm launched an expensively-publicized sales drive, but within a week it was publishing apologetic ads in the local press: It had run out of supplies...

...Phenomena like the Beatles, greater permissiveness, Mary Quant's miniskirt, and Carnaby Street--today just another slum, but for a year or so a fiesta of color and originality--have helped to brighten and loosen up British society and break down caste divisions...

...Still, the structural changes Britain needs to make it a happier, more humane, more prosperous society seem more distant than the moon...

...Soon after the 1964 Labor government came to office, most non-Whitehall economists considered devaluation justifiable and many believed it to be inevitable...

...Britain remained stuck with prewar and, in important respects, preindustrial institutions, conventions and attitudes...

...The Treasury was the economic dunce of the Western world in the '50s and '60s...

...But many Labor leaders were overanxious to convince the possessing class of their respectability and obtain admission to the Establishment...

...Edward Heath's government is currently trying to persuade Washington to underwrite more nonsense of this kind in the Indian Ocean...

...Even today few British company directors possess any expert knowledge of the techniques and processes used in their factories or those of their competitors...

...It has let a little air out of official complacency, and it has stimulated badly needed discussion among the politically-minded...

...The Establishment, which has no sympathy for supranational-ism and considers the EEC essentially "the Common Market," a business get-together, could yet be taken by surprise--if Britain gets in...

...As every schoolboy used to know, the British aristocracy, cloddish and anti-intellectual but wilier than its continental cousins, managed to keep its estates and many of its privileges by swaying with winds of change and absorbing--or at least allying itself with--the wealthier members of the bourgeoisie...

...The wrapper is more important than the contents...

...Nobody was so ungentlemanly as to mention that it was, nevertheless, the Americans who had won the oil concessions in Saudi Arabia...

...The consequences of all this are clearly on record...

...To look back over Britain's feckless fifties and stagnant sixties is depressing...

...Whitehall man who may take two hours off for lunch is by no means extinct...

...Things are undoubtedly better now than they were in the 1930s, when the Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Montague Norman, was a total ignoramus in economic matters...

...One reason why Britain neglected the European movement for so long was that Whitehall's foreign-policy trendsetters considered first the Arab League, then the Baghdad Pact, of far greater importance...

...So business magazines were sent for and GEC's supposedly high-powered directors leafed desperately through them in search of helpful advertisements...

...The 10 a.m.-to-5:30 p.m...

...the robe makes the monk...

...Fewer still have received any professional training in management or economics...

...Even the workers' demands for swingeing wage-increases, though inflationary in the short term, may prove beneficial in the long run by forcing employers to install labor-saving equipment...

...Many do not even know where to turn for professional advice in these fields...

...prices into account...

...Industrialists, scientists and politicians who ought to have been innovators and radicals were persuaded to adopt as their ideal the titled idler, the "gentleman of leisure...

...all the British had got was patently insincere flattery...

...Higher education, appallingly inadequate before 1960, was expanded by the Labor government, and more university-educated men and women than ever are going into industry and the civil service...

...He spoke about 20 words of French, was sozzled and sleepy both afternoons, and quite drunk halfway through the first dinner our hosts offered us...

...I doubt if he won much business...

...Not long ago, I was invited with two other people to spend a couple of days visiting an important French industrial development...

...Several officials and MPs appeared to believe that Britain's sterling liabilities were assets...

...The heads of the other industries the 1945 Labor government nationalized, though, were recruited from the military general staff--not the most efficient body of men in Britain or the most progressive...

...and in the evening all he is interested in is drinks and nightclubs...

...Although too many firms still don't know how to employ graduates, and prefer to hire rugby players from their directors' old schools, the better companies now send recruiting teams to the universities...

...A member of the British Establishment will almost always choose shadow over substance: He will generally prefer mediocrity to merit, pretense to frankness, dogma to fact...

...They became pillars of a society which scorned intelligence, originality and effort, and rewarded conformity, time-serving, sycophancy and bluff...

...That was fine for the aristocracy but unfortunate for Britain...

...What an Englishman knows remains less important than the school and college he attended...