BRITAIN'S SEA OF TROUBLES

...Strike action has been pending at Vauxhall Motors, a subsidiary of General Motors, and at all brickworks...

...As for the second sin, continued The Economist, "Talk to firms about even the most obvious departmental reorganization being undertaken by a rival, and you are liable to be told that this firm intends to copy it, but only in a few years' time when Mr...

...thousands of workers employed in the manufacture of the plane marched on London in protest...

...The Christian Democrats now in control, these Labor partisans say, have been permanently alienated by the Wilson stratagem of substituting ANF for MLF, and by the surcharge on imports...

...Christian Democratic Chancellor Ludwig Erhard has embarked upon a difficult election year of his own, and may have already chosen to wave a Gaullist rather than a Wil-sonian flag of exchange visits and mutual understanding before the German electorate...

...In his international relations, Wilson has been trapped by his own precipitate action and the wide publicity about heralded but unrealized accomplishments of the first Hundred Days...

...Too bluntly, if not too honestly, his Defense Minister, Denis Healey, declared on television that Labor's intention in this substitution was to drown West Germany's nuclear ambitions...

...Wilson squelched the idea, and it is unlikely that he will gamble now in view of the attrition of his party's popularity...

...On the contrary, Wilson's Labor government has stiffened the backs of the bankers in London by granting a whopping 9.5 per cent raise to railway workers, dismissing the government's specialist in cutting waste on the nationally-owned railways, renewing the regime's promise to renationalize steel, and expanding welfare benefits—all matters that, to non-Labor citizens, seem remote from solutions to Britain's pressing balance of payments problem...

...of Commons was thereby honed down to three...

...They began with a run on the pound which has been slowed but is not yet over, ran a gamut of labor and related crises, and ended with a by-election defeat of no less a Labor figure than Mr...

...Abandoning, at least for a lengthy moment, Britain's traditional free-trade position, Wilson placed a fifteen per cent surcharge on imports...

...Only the prospect of the City and Labor both going down may, paradoxically, bring them together in a national unity not known since Winston Churchill's wartime leadership...

...The solution will certainly not be found easily, but the London Economist recently may have shed some light on the problem, and certainly shook the stolid upper-class Britisher, with a statement entitled "Britons Will Be Slaves...

...It would be more practical to buy American planes, existing or to be developed...

...In 1964, Britain's currency reserves dropped $341 million, which was more than twice the decline of 1963...

...Harold Wilson, chief spokesman for Labor, and now Britain's Prime Minister, came out for a dramatic, dynamic reversal of Britain's grave economic decline in the first One Hundred Days of Labor's tenure...

...With imprudent abruptness, his government proclaimed a new look at the Concorde supersonic airliner project which Britain contracted with General Charles de Gaulle's France to develop jointly...

...The air industry marshalled its massive lobby and public relations forces in opposition...

...Yet new elections are most unlikely...

...One thing, however, is certain...

...Britain, banker to the Commonwealth and many other nations which keep their money in London, was close to bankruptcy...

...In Wilson's predicament we find our own future foreshadowed: how to disarm on a large scale with the least economic pain, particularly the wrenching stress of unemployment...

...On November 25, only the rallying of $3 billion from eleven central international bankers—in an unprecedented telephone campaign— saved the day...

...Smith has retired: Mr...

...If The Economist is a perceptive judge of the British temperament, Wilson and his Labor Party, who are no advocates of "bloody social revolution," may run into formidable obstacles to their concept of revolution by "democratic consent...

...He might have dramatized Britain's need to compete on the world market by taking action against anti-competitive practices of management and feather-bedding by labor unions...

...One can be grateful to Wilson for one of his few successes thus far—bailing the United States out of the MLF fiasco by substituting the proposal of a more grandiose Atlantic nuclear force (ANF...

...Yet to come is the final disposition of the Concorde project...

...On the one hundredth day, a Gallup Poll revealed Labor exactly even with the Conservatives in popular support...

...Between 1951 and 1961, its industrial production increased only about thirty-three per cent, while that of France swelled 300 per cent, and West Germany's and Italy's soared 400 per cent...

...It was suggested, for example, that he proceed with already-formed plans for a decimal currency to replace Britain's unwieldy pound, shilling, and pence...

...Britain's bankers were already edgy in anticipation of the fulfillment of Labor's pledges—re-nationalization of the steel industry, the imposition of corporate levies, an increase in capital-gains taxes, and the bank-rate increase...

...Labor was forced to retreat and is now promising a new new look at the Concorde and the possibility of producing a few prototypes...

...Much of the increase is designed to shore up Britain's shaky foreign exchange position, but this fact has failed to inspire a compensatory feeling on the part of the worker that somehow his paying higher prices is a worthwhile sacrifice for the general good, largely since Wilson has done nothing dramatic to suggest it...

...It was easy to say the workers should be transferred to more productive enterprises...

...Members of the Common Market saw in the surcharge further evidence of Britain's self-divorcement from the Continent...

...Earlier he was chief of the Paris bureau of the Sunday edition of The New York Times...

...At home, the socialist government exhausted its slim reserves of confidence on the part of Britain's own bankers when, fifteen days after the import surcharge took effect, Labor presented an emergency budget raising taxes and broadening social benefits...

...The One Hundred Days of Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson began badly, worsened as they progressed, and ended in disaster...

...None of these planes, it is generally admitted, is economically practicable...

...Wilson's timing and lack of consultation with Conservatives and Britain's financiers have led to serious speculation about a counter-revolution by the City—London's Wall Street...

...As for de Gaulle, the war he has waged since 1940 continues as always to be directed against his chosen perpetual enemy—not the Germans, but the Anglo-Saxons...

...As the picture blackened and devaluation of sterling threatened in Wilson's first days, speculators began to unload their pounds in massive volume...

...De Gaulle has won an easy prestige victory, while Wilson has suffered a defeat, costly in both prestige and money...

...the workers are as productive as their counterpart in Germany or Japan, when they have something to produce...

...Britain's own partners in the European Free Trade Association, set up in competition with the Common Market, promptly reacted in outrage...

...The question could be raised in another, perhaps more pertinent way: If Britain were not going bankrupt under the Conservatives, would the people turn to the Labor Party to rescue it...

...The Concorde has too few prospective airline customers...

...With a haste only too conspicuous, Wilson postponed a trip to Bonn, scheduled for late January, on the grounds that Churchill was dying and it was no time for the Prime Minister to leave the country...

...Its dependency on international finance was never more dramatically demonstrated...

...The possible benefits of the surcharge to Britain's balance of payments will not be seen for several months...

...the Conservatives (cleverly, they thought) had engaged France in an unbreakable contract which now rebounded against Britain's interests...

...Even so, there was a revealing reluctance on the part of the Conservatives to gloat over their by-election victory in the waning of the first Hundred Days...

...But if Labor's dilemma in finding a solution to this problem is depressing, it could not be more instructive for the United States...

...the fighter planes' only market would have been the declining Royal Air Force...

...It is as if they realized that Wilson's greatest potential threat would be to hand the country back to them...

...The analogy of the magic timetable was unfortunate...

...But another question—they are endless—is whether Wilson can provide that quality of leadership, even if there is bipartisan recognition of that gravity of crisis...

...Even though he is leader of Labor, he is faced with labor disputes in key industries...

...Smith, it will be explained, has been doing his present job in his present way since 1930...

...But what, then, is to happen to the British aircraft industry...

...there is no question that that has been damaged, and reprisals risked...

...Coolly, France asked for counterproposals and hinted at possible recourse to the World Court for damages of several hundred million dollars if Britain withdrew...

...This, plus all the disasters and disappointments of the Wilson government's First Hundred Days, foreshadow difficult times in the second Hundred or third Hundred Days—or as many hundred days as Harold Wilson can keep his head above the stormy economic sea that dominates Britain today...

...instead of having a forty per cent voice in the MLF, Bonn would have only a fraction of that in the ANF...

...In the Establishment's mating forum, the correspondence columns of The Times [of London]," stated The Economist, "you will constantly find some gleeful story that a computer has by mistake sent out a cheque for one million pounds and sixpence, instead of the one pound, no shillings, and sixpence that was intended...

...But unhappily for the seemingly hapless Wilson, his effort has landed him in hot water with West Germany...

...It was then that a quick second election was proposed, with the prospect of strengthening Labor's Parliamentary majority...

...Labor was 11.5 per cent ahead in November, following closely on its narrow October victory at the polls...

...the Christian Democrats, they claim, sniff suspiciously at the socialism of the Labor Party, not to mention Wilson's predilection for dialogue with Moscow...

...He has done neither...

...It is not the British working class, said the London weekly, which is failing to produce...

...The Wilson government blundered by leaking word—before making a clear-cut decision—that the TSR-2, the British equivalent of the American TFX plane, might be discontinued...

...All it would take would be a mild influenza epidemic for the socialist government to lose even that thin cushion of support in Parliament...

...The fault is to be found higher on the managerial and economic ladder...

...But how long will the $3 billion last, if $1 billion went the first month...

...these—whatever they may be— are still to be created or encouraged and somehow promoted by a Labor government with a razor-thin major-* ity...

...Nor has the Prime Minister made any bold economic move that might have bolstered confidence in Britain's sagging economy—abroad as well as at home...

...Indeed, the ending of capital punishment—except in rare instances—may turn out to be one of Wilson's few positive accomplishments, another being the burial—although possibly only temporarily—of the MLF, the controversial nuclear-armed multilateral force...

...The Economist concluded: "Perhaps this country's trouble is that it never really had a bloody social revolution, so that when the Victorian millmaster prospered, he began to ape the 'civilized' attitudes of the old aristocratic class...

...Ten days after Labor came to power, Wilson made his first move...

...The real threat is in the latter area...

...There are some in Britain, especially among the Laborites, who would put off any rapprochement with Bonn until the Social Democrats hopefully occupy German seats of power in the fall...

...The crisis is that grave...

...As always in its past, foreign exchange and trade lie at the heart of Britain's problems today...

...This may well be the ghastliest specter haunting the socialists—plus the general prediction of an even greater downturn in productivity this year and a new recession by next winter...

...British exports failed to rise, while imports marched upward, and the balance of payments problem finally reached the near-breaking point...

...Wilson's Foreign Minister...

...This raises the most basic of questions facing not only Britain's socialists, but Britain itself: What can be done to boost British production, give it the rate of growth that would make Britain competitive in the world market, and at the same time improve British workers' welfare...

...As if these were not enough troubles for a Labor government, decisions must be taken that mean life or death for almost the entire airplane manufacturing industry...

...it seemed too costly for the limited market, and too great a drain on Britain's dwindling reserves...

...Bonn responded—somewhat petulantly, in view of the recent Nazi era—by accusing the British socialists of displaying anti-German sentiments that would prejudice any cooperation on the part of West Germany in any British venture, nuclear or economic...

...Labor's already razor-thin five-vote majority in the House JOSEPH BARRY was the European columnist for The New York Post for the past six years...

...There is growing chaos on the docks, where dockworkers have refused to work weekends, and shipping is piling up in London, Manchester, and elsewhere...

...The two besetting sins of the upper-class Britisher, The Economist sets forth, are his revulsion against anything new, and a violent distaste for anything uncongenial or new...

...Wilson cancelled the projected PI 154, a vertical take-off fighter, and the HS681, a short or vertical take-off transport...

...Britain, in recent years, has experienced the slowest rate of growth of any major Western European country...

...It is possible that Prime Minister Wilson will, on the international front, engage in masterly inactivity in his second Hundred Days, assuming developments in Southeast Asia allow him this course...

...and a thousand comfortable bellies will then heave up and down in the clubs along Pall Mall in delighted mirth, while a story about some Bob Cratchit of a clerk making an accounting mistake would be regarded as rather bad taste...

...He wrote "Left Bank, Right Bank...

...Once again bus transport is in trouble...

...The domestic situation is sufficiently demanding to permit such a ploy...

...An American might think of Franklin D. Roosevelt's celebrated first hundred days, but a Briton would more likely recall the original One Hunded Days following Napoleon's return from Elba, which ended in Waterloo...

...I have been laboring the failures of the new Labor government, but in reality the chief weakness of Wilson lies in the politically-motivated campaign promise of a One Hundred Day miracle-cure for a decade of economic malaise which he inherited, in large part, from the Conservative government that preceded him...

...British export trade, and thus the pound itself, depends heavily on the good will of its trading partners...

...Such questions could easily be inspired by the outcome of Britain's general election last fall, when the Labor socialists barely squeaked through after an almost desperate campaign for power in which they promised the impossible...

...While Labor's stock has declined, prices have risen: Gasoline, food, drugs, and mortgage interest rates have all climbed...