TH E T A B L E T , September 29th, 1961

THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

VOL. 198, No. 5810

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

LONDON, SEPTEMBER 29th, 1951

SIXPENCE

FOUNDED IN 1840

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

THE KEY TO PROGRESS The Moderate Place o f Government THE PERPLEXITIES OF MR. NEHRU Harrow, Cambridge and Mahatma Gandhi. By John Biggs-Davison

RELIGION IN TITO’S YUGOSLAVIA Some Signs o f Improvement. By Major-General Richard Hilton THE CHURCH AT ASSY THE NEO-VICTORIANS

By Kees van Hoek

By Arnold Lunn

THE END OF THE FESTIVAL Reflections on the Centenary. By Mgr. R. A. Knox

KING GEORGE VI

T HE bulletins from Buckingham Palace succeeded each other rapidly at the week-end, culminating in the operation of an obviously severe character which the King underwent on Sunday. The later bulletins are to some extent reassuring ; they are necessarily couched in very general and inconclusive terms, and so it must be for a considerable time. The nation was unprepared, for His Majesty seemed to have made a good recovery from the serious illness and the operation of two and a half years ago. The fresh bad news immediately elicited from the nation and the Commonwealth manifestations of a deep and genuine solicitude. They reflect both the unique position of the dynasty as an institution and a personal regard for a man who, following in the footsteps of his father, has for fourteen crowded and dramatic years fulfilled the steady, arduous daily round of duties which King George V established as the role of a modern constitutional sovereign in the British Commonwealth. The King’s grave illness, coinciding with the news of the General Election, throws into relief something which unites the nation at a moment when all the limelight and the oratory are inevitably concentrated upon what divides it. The prayers of ali His Majesty’s Catholic subjects are offered for his recovery.

HARD CHOICES

T HE great grim fact governing our politics and prompting Mr. Attlee to ask for a dissolution is the growing deficit in Britain’s balance o f payments. Every month since April the gap between what we are earning by exports and what we are importing has been growing wider, and it is now running monthly at a rate which would be over £600 million in a year, which is worse than a t any time since 1947. In part this is due to money the world over buying less : the figures each side of the ledger are larger, and so is the gap between them. But fundamentally the gap is due to something very simple, human, and natural to whole communities as to individuals —the desire to live and consume at a higher standard than is being earned and paid for. The gravity of the position is that foreigners do not accept any sort of obligation to maintain the standards desired in this country. For a certain time we can continue without paying, but in the end we have to pay. In the end we have to export more and import less, while having less in the shops a t home, and, for this less, there will be the same or more money competing, in proportion as wages are increased. Those who are demanding these increases want the money in order to spend it at once, largely on imported things, to eat or to wear.

This is the great reason for charging the Labour Government with improvidence since 1945. The Health Act was in itself an expression of idealism. But when it was introduced, in 1946, only wishful thinking could make Ministers believe they could safely spend £400 million a year on it. For what were they doing ? Firstly they were directing the labour and skill represented by that great sum into the extension of the service. Certainly much of it was medical, dental and nursing skill which was needed, in economical terms, to keep a productive community productive. But wherever there was a stimulation of activity beyond what was really necessary, two consequences followed ; energies, as of builders, were turned in one direction, and so could not be used in another, and payments were made whose recipients found themselves with more money than they had expected. This would not have mattered greatly if such recipients, the dentist or the chemist, saved and lent to the Government, or invested profitably. It did matter in proportion as they used the money to consume either more or at the same rate as before.

The second great consequence, the reason for the popularity of the service among the artisan population, has been that free medicine has released in every home money that would otherwise have been saved for such emergencies. The extent of this is hard to estimate. The service is not free ; it costs the State £8 a head per annum for every individual in the country, or £40 for each household averaging five. It takes Is. 8d. of a man’s weekly all-in compulsory contribution to social security, and prevents him spending to that extent elsewhere. But that is a small constraint compared with the psychological relief of not needing to save for a rainy day.

Many of these same consequences repeat themselves in the world of post-war education, with the utilisation of resources in providing the physical setting for education. They emerge again when the food subsidies enable men to give their wives less money for food than they would have to give if there were no subsidies. The margin, to an average per man of probably 27s. a week, is available for modest luxuries, for smokes and drinks and cinemas, sport and betting, the great forms of popular pleasure.

Of these variants, the first two are the great sources of fruitful indirect taxation, £700 million between them. There is certainly no other way in which the ordinary worker could be induced to give so much of his wages to the revenue. He is, in effect, paying for what his wife buys just as fully as he would if there were no £600 million food subsidies and no £700 million drink and tobacco taxes.There are some people whom it would suit that food should be very dear, provided drink was very cheap, but they are limited to a certain