These are the British

by Drew Middleton

In company with the National Insurance, which applies its sickness, unemployment, maternity, and widows' benefits to everyone over school-leaving age, and the National Assistance Board, with its responsibility for the care of those unable to maintain themselves, the National Health Service has established the Welfare State in Britain. Another important function has been largely taken out of the hands of private individuals and delivered to the state.

What effect did the nationalization of industry and the establishment of the Welfare State have on British society? Obviously, the first removed from the control of the moneyed and propertied classes certain powers over the economic functioning of Britain. The second, because of its cost, made certain that the heavy tax rates introduced during and just before World War II would continue. These taxes were paid principally by the middle class, which, at the outset, refused in many instances to use the National Health Service.

The effect was a leveling one. The dominant class was stripped, on one hand, of some of its power to control a large section of the national economy, although, as we have seen, it managed to retain its direction of the nationalized industries. At the same time this class found that it must continue to pay year by year a high proportion of its earned income for the state's care of its less prosperous fellows. The decline in the influence, prosperity, and prestige of the old middle class was definitely accelerated by these two bold advances toward socialism.

From the standpoint of the prestige of this class in Britain and, frankly, of the usefulness of many of its members to the state, the withdrawal of British rule from India and Burma and the steps elsewhere toward the liquidation of the Empire were blows as grievous as the creation of the Welfare State and the nationalization of some industries.

Americans should realize that to Britons the Empire was not simply a place to work and get rich. The people who did the Empire's work usually retired with only their pensions and a conviction (which is not much help when you need a new overcoat) that they had done their duty.

The propaganda of India and Pakistan and of their well-wishers in the United States has obscured for Americans the grand dimensions of the British achievement in India. For a hundred and ninety years, between Plassy in 1757 and the withdrawal in 1947, British rule brought peace and justice to peoples hitherto sorely oppressed by irresponsible tyrants, many of whom were corrupt and decadent. The British stamped out thuggee and suttee, ended the interminable little wars, introduced justice, and labored to build the highways, railroads, and canals that form the skeletons of independent India and Pakistan. All this was done by a handful of British officials and white troops in the midst of the subcontinents millions.

Parenthetically, it might be remembered that when the British Indian army, which served with the British Army in India, existed, and when the Royal Navy had the strength and facilities to take it where it was needed, there was peace between Suez and Singapore.

The British are proud rather than defensive about their record in India. Even the anti-colonialists of the Labor Party note that free India and Pakistan operate under British political and legal forms. Most of them, even those who knew the country well, regarded withdrawal as inevitable after World War II. But it will take more proof than Mr. Nehru is prepared to offer to convince many Britons with roots in India that the people are happier, that justice is universal, that corruption is declining.

This attitude galls the Indians and their friends, who never liked the British much. But in the great days of empire the British didn't care about being liked. This is a significant difference between the American and British approaches to responsibility and leadership in international affairs. The American visitor abroad worries about whether he and his country are liked by the French or the Egyptians or the Indonesians. The Briton, when the Empire's sun was at the zenith, never gave a damn. What he wanted was respect, which he regarded as about as much as a representative of a powerful nation could win from the nationals of a less powerful nation under economic, political, or military obligation.

"We ran that district with three officials, some Indian civil servants, the police, and their white officers, and we ran it damned well," an official recalled. "There were some troops up the line, but we never needed them. When we made a decision or gave a judgment, we adhered to it. We made no distinction between Moslem and Hindu. There was justice and peace. No, of course they weren't free. They weren't ready to govern themselves. And d'you think they'd have traded those conditions for freedom and communal rioting?"