These are the British

by Drew Middleton

But, granting this identity of outlook and aims, we have the right to ask ourselves if Britain remains a powerful and stable ally of the United States in the leadership of the Western community. I believe that the answer is in the affirmative, that with all her difficulties and changes Britain will continue to play a leading role in the affairs of the world, that she will not decline gradually into impotent isolation.

Let us be quite clear about the future outline of British power. The Empire is gone or going. The British know that. But the endurance, the resolution, the intelligence that transformed a small island off the coast of Europe into the greatest of modern empires is still there. Beneath the complacency, the seeming indifference, it remains. The best evidence is the series of social, economic, and political changes that has transformed British life.

These changes, whatever individual Britons or Americans may think of them, are not signs of complacency or indifference. They are rather proofs that the society has not lost its dynamism, that its leaders admit and understand their losses in political influence and economic power and are determined to build a stronger society on the foundations of the old.

Admittedly, the British make it difficult for their friends or their enemies to discern the extent of change. They cling to the old established forms. This is a characteristic that is almost universal in mankind. When the first automobiles appeared, they were built to resemble horse-drawn carriages. Men cling to the familiar in the material and the mental. Think of our own devotion, in a period when the nation has developed into a continental and world power, to a Constitution drafted to suit the needs of a few millions living along the eastern fringe of our country.

The changes in Britain have taken place behind a façade of what the world expects from Britain. The Queen rides in her carriage at Royal Ascot, the extremists of the Labor Party cry havoc and let slip the dogs of political war, the Guards are on parade, and gentlemen with derbies firm upon their heads walk down St. James's swinging their rolled umbrellas. Literature, the stage, the movies, the appearance of the visiting Englishman in every quarter of the globe has implanted a false picture firmly in the popular mind.

"Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun." They also play cricket and drink tea to the exclusion of other entertainments, live on estates or in tiny thatched cottages, say "by Jove" or "cor blimey." Their society is stratified, their workers are idle, their enterprise is negligible. Britain itself is a land of placid country villages, one large city (London), squires and lords, cockney humorists and rustics in patched corduroy.

This is Britain as many Americans think of it. It is also, as I have mentioned earlier, the Britain to which many of its inhabitants return in their daydreams. But it is not contemporary Britain.

The real Britain is a hurrying, clamorous, purposeful industrial nation. Its people, with a sense of reality any nation might envy, are carrying out major changes in the structure of the national economy and in the organization of society. The Welfare State may be considered a blessing or a curse, according to political taste, but the nation that first conceived and established it cannot be thought deficient in imagination or averse to change.

The human symbol of modern Britain is not John Bull with his country-squire clothes or the languid, elegant young man of the West End theater, but an energetic, quick-spoken man of thirty-five or forty. He is "in" plastics or electronics or steel. He talks of building bridges in India, selling trucks in Nigeria, or buying timber in Russia. In the years since the war he has been forced to supplement his education—he went to a small public school—with a great deal of technical reading about his job. His home is neither an estate nor a cottage but a small modern house. He wants a better house, a better car in time. Indeed, he wants more of everything that is good in life. He recognizes the need for change—and his own pre-eminence in the economy of the nation is a sign of change. But by tradition he opposes any change so rapid and revolutionary that it shakes the basis of his society. Politically, he is on the left wing of the Conservative Party or the right wing of the Labor Party. When in 1945 he left the Army or the Navy or the Air Force his views were well to the left of their present position. The thought that Britain's day is done has never entered his head.