BRITAIN THEN & NOW
Williams, David C.
Britain Then & Now THE DECLINE AND FALL OF BRITISH CAPITALISM, by Keith Hutchison. Charles Scrib-ner's Sons. 301 pp. $3.50. THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASSES, by Roy Lewis and Angus Maude. Alfred A....
...the most they can do is to place their children in it by paying their way through the right sort of school...
...Lewis and Maude in their 360-page lamentation about the hardships of The English Middle Classes...
...American observers may think that Britain has suffered from a persistent failure to apply scientific techniques in her industries, but the authors shudder at "the production of the vast numbers of scientists prescribed by the authorities as a panacea for economic and technological anaemia...
...What has happened to British enterprise is revealed, though quite unconsciously, by Messrs...
...After its collapse, Tory-sponsored tariffs administered the final opiate to British enterprise...
...Reviewed by David C. Williams ANEURIN BEVAN, the idolized tribune of the Labor Party's left, long ago described British gradualist socialism as a process of "disarming the capitalist tiger, claw by claw...
...This is not the English way...
...One was the promotion of social justice...
...Although he briefly sketches the events of the past five years, Hutchison leaves the reader free to pass his own judgment as to whether the Labor Party has learned from past errors and omissions...
...Fortunately, this theory has never been applied in its full rigor, since England has always drawn upon the less constipated communities of Scotland and Wales for a good share of its leaders in all fields...
...A third was the need to prevent any single power from dominating the Continent, and thus threatening Britain's national independence...
...Hutchison with skill, understanding, and all-embracing charity...
...Nothing seems to frighten Messrs...
...At that time, many socialists feared that it might turn on its tormentors and rend them limb from limb...
...During the entire period Hutchison discusses, from the 1880's to the present, the problems facing British political leadership have remained in some important respects the same...
...Alfred A. Knopf...
...No protest came from the Labor Party on this dismal occasion...
...for a London suburb...
...Regrettably, the Labor Party has been very timid in tackling this problem...
...Generally speaking, people do not climb into the middle class...
...360 pp...
...Of the parties which have governed Britain since the 1880's, the Liberals came nearest to passing all three tests...
...This is appropriate, as his and Lewis' book is an amalgam of Conservatism and the suburban point of view...
...For the blame rests not so much on individuals as on parties and classes...
...It should convince its readers of the profoundly un-American character of British Conservatism...
...Lewis and Maude so much as the expansion of educational opportunity...
...Maude is sitting in Parliament as a Conservative M.P...
...It appears to be the theory of the authors that the obstacles erected against talent and originality in England, particularly if it occurs in the lower classes, are a source of "dynamic forces of social progress...
...Hutchison seems right to choose fairness and balance instead...
...There is one form of education, the superior one of private schools, for the privileged few...
...another, through inferior government schools, for the underprivileged many...
...It has also recognized that production and efficiency are essential to Britain's survival...
...Ironically, it is now talking of prodding the capitalist tiger into greater activity with anti-monopoly laws and investigations...
...The Government of Ramsay MacDonald was too cowardly and unimaginative to take the steps against unemployment which President Roosevelt took a few years later...
...Of all the steps going down, the most inexcusable was Britain's failure to act against Hitler's reoccupation of the Rhineland...
...Writers more involved in the British political struggle have given color to their stories by exploiting their hatred of some of its leading characters, with Ramsay Macdonald and Neville Chamberlain heading the list...
...In their great days before World War I, they carried out a New Deal a generation before Roosevelt's, while at the same time insisting on free trade as essential to the maintenance of Britain's economic vigor and resistance of Germany's bid for mastery of Europe...
...If the middle-class monopoly on education were once broken, the release of creative energy and ability in England might surprise—and please —the world...
...Such a school also gives its graduates a head start in the competition for the pitifully meager number of places in English universities...
...3.75...
...Other nations, including Wales and Scotland, seek by education to develop talent wherever it occurs...
...Britain has need of every resource of enterprise it can develop, private as well as public...
...By making entry into the middle class so difficult, its way of life is preserved from the inundation of barbarians with the wrong accents...
...In fact, it has often seemed likely in recent years that the toothless old beast would succumb before Labor found any source of animal energy to take its place...
...Tory leadership between the wars failed on all three counts, and Labor can be given passing marks only for its advocacy of social justice...
...The Decline and Fall of British Capitalism has been traced by Mr...
...Another was the maintenance of Britain's commercial and industrial position in the world, which implied the continuous modernization of Britain's economy...
...Whatever one's view of the North Atlantic Pact, it is clear that the Party has broken with its old futile pacifism...
Vol. 14 • August 1950 • No. 8
