Nye Bevan remains a major force in British politics. He is the only prominent politician who is a force in himself, a personality around which lesser men assemble. Like the young Winston Churchill, he inspires either love or hate. Untrammeled by the discipline of the party, he can rally the left wing of the Labor movement. Simultaneously he can alienate the moderates of the party, the undecided voters, and the tepid conservatives who had thought it might be time to let labor "have a go." If the next general-election campaign finds Bevan clamoring for the extension of nationalization in British industry, beckoning his countrymen down untrodden social paths, lambasting Britain's allies, and scoffing at her progress, then the Labor Party will be defeated.
I have known Aneurin Bevan for many years. For the weal or woe of Britain, he is a man born to storm and danger. A sudden war, a swift and violent economic reverse would brighten his star. In a crisis his confidence, whether that of a born leader or a born charlatan, would attract the many.
Barring such catastrophes, a reasonable stability in government is to be expected. The Conservative majority in the House of Commons after the 1955 election probably was a little larger than is customary in a nation so evenly divided politically. Despite the rancor aroused by the Suez crisis, there seem to be reasonable grounds for predicting the gradual disappearance of Tories of the old type and of the belligerent Labor leaders surviving from the twenties. The development of a national outlook by both parties seems probable.
Americans need not be concerned over the fission of the British political system into a multi-party one capable of providing a government but incapable of government. Stability means, of course, that British governments will know their own minds. In the complex, hair-trigger world of today this is an important factor. It is equally important in charting the future course of Britain. Nations that know where they want to go and how they want to go there are not verging on political senility.
This political stability is vital to Britain in the years of transition that lie ahead. For it is in British industry that the greatest changes will take place.
Britain is moving in new directions, economically, politically, and socially. The base of this movement is industrial—a revolution in power. The world's most imaginative, extensive, and advanced program for the production of electricity from nuclear power stations is under way. This magnificent acceptance of the challenge of the nuclear age is also an answer to one of the key questions of 1945: how could British industry expand and British exports thrive if coal yearly became scarcer and more expensive to mine? The answer is nuclear energy, 5,000 to 6,000 megawatts of it by 1965.
The program for constructing twenty nuclear power stations in Britain and Northern Ireland is the most spectacular part of the power program. As coal will be vital to the economy for years to come, more economic and more efficient mining methods also are regarded as a matter of national urgency.
Throughout the nation's industrial structure there is an air of purpose and enthusiasm. Five huge new steel plants will be started in 1957. An ambitious program of modernizing the railroads and the shipbuilding industry is well under way. The new industries that have developed since 1945 and old industries now delivering for the export markets are pushing British goods throughout the world: radar, radioactive isotopes, electronic equipment, sleek new jet aircraft, diesel engines, plastics, detergents, atomic power stations. All are part of Britain's response to the challenge of change.
To fulfill present hopes, production and productivity must rise, management must grasp the changed position of Britain in the world. From the courted, she has become the courter, competing for markets with Germany, Japan, Sweden, and the United States. Such competition existed in the past, but now, with the cushion of overseas investments gone, such competition is a true national battle. There is plenty of evidence that a portion at least of industrial management in Britain fails to understand these conditions. Such complacency is as dangerous to the export drive as the unwillingness or inability of the industrial worker to grasp the export drive's importance to him, to his factory, to his union, and to his country.
Due emphasis should be given to such failings. But we must not forget that the British are a great mercantile people, eager and ingenious traders ready, once they accept its importance, to go to any length of enterprise to win a market. It is also wise to remember that, although circumstances have made the British share of the dollar market the criterion of success, the British do extremely well in a number of important non-dollar markets.