These are the British

by Drew Middleton

The judgment may seem too harsh. It is manifestly unfair to place the entire burden of progress toward a healthier economy on one element in the economic situation. Certainly British capital in the past and to some extent in the present has been singularly blind to the country's new situation and unenterprising in seeking means of adjusting itself to this situation. The price rings and monopolistic practices have sustained inefficient factories and restricted industrial enterprise.

Nevertheless, it is my conclusion that today the industrial owner and manager understands the nation's situation and the union leader does not. The TUC has attained great influence in the realm. The industrial worker has won living standards undreamed of a generation ago. Nonetheless, there is a dangerous lack of tolerance in labor's approach to management. This carries over into labor's approach to government. It is a highly unrealistic attitude in which organized labor clamors for the adoption by a Conservative government of a system of economic planning which that government was elected to end.

As we have seen, thousands of the Tories' strongest supporters are angry because they regard the government they elected as pseudo-socialist.

This contest between labor and capital is involved and sharply partisan. Viewed from the outside, it may seem an insurmountable obstacle to British progress. But to accept that view is to ignore the most important, the most enduring of all the country's resources: the character of the British people.

From the time of Charles II on, visitors to Britain have been struck by the way in which the character of the British people has allowed them the widest latitude for internal differences, often carried to the very edge of armed conflict, and has yet enabled them to maintain their political stability.

There is a lesson in recent history. Imposing forces within the kingdom reached a pitch of fanatic fury over the Ulster question shortly before World War I. Great political leaders took their positions. The Army was shaken by rumors of disaffection. Officers were ready to resign their commissions rather than lead their troops into action against the turbulent Ulstermen. The Germans and others watching from the Continent concluded that the heart of the world empire was sick. Yet what was the outcome? Finally aware of the magnitude of the challenge presented by German aggression in Belgium, the country united instantly. The leaders composed their differences. The Army closed its ranks. The officers went away to fight and die at Mons and Le Cateau.

The lesson is that the British, because of their essential homogeneity, can afford a higher pitch of internal argument than can other nations. Indeed, the very fury of these arguments testifies to the vitality of the nation. It means a country on the move, in contrast to the somber, orderly, shabby dictatorship of Spain or the somnolent French Republic where the great slogans of the past have been abandoned for the motto "We couldn't care less."

Those who admire the British accept British character as one of the strongest arguments for their nation's survival as a great power. But before we go too far in endorsing this view we must note that there are bad characteristics as well as good ones. We know that the British society is changing. Is it not possible that in the process of change some of the characteristics which made the nation great are disappearing?

Mr. Geoffrey Gorer tells us that the British have become a law-abiding nation dwelling in amity and honesty under British justice. In some aspects of civil relationship this is true. Visitors to Britain only a century ago were alarmed by the behavior of British mobs. The cockneys of London pulled the mustaches of a visiting Hungarian general and shouted rude remarks at their Queen and her Prince Consort. From medieval times the British working classes have been long on independence and short on respect. The uprising of the Jacquerie in French history is balanced in British annals by the dim, powerful, and compelling figures of Wat Tyler and John Ball.

Has all this changed so much? Have the turbulent, violent British really become a nation of sober householders indifferent to their rights or to those at home or abroad who threaten them? Superficially the answer may be yes. Basically it is no. The present strife between organized labor and the employers is only a contemporary version of a struggle which has gone on throughout its history and which is world-wide. It is when this struggle is submerged that it is dangerous. Despite all the damage it is doing now to the British economy, dissension in the House of Commons and in the boardrooms of industries is preferable to wild plots laid in cellars.