T H E T A B L E T , A p r i l JUh, 19S3.

THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

VOL. 201, No. 5890

FOUNDED IN 1840

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGINA ET PATRIA

LONDON, APRIL 11th, 1953

NINEPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

NO HELP FROM DELAY The Moral of the Lords’ Debate on Central Africa CHANGE OF HEART OR CHANGE OF TACTICS ?

The Strange Case of the Moscow Doctors. By Victor S . Frank

ARMISTICE IN KOREA ? The New Prospect. By K. M . Smogorzewski THE DIGNITY OF GOVERNMENT The Source of Authority. By the Bishop of Brentwood

THE MIND OF LORD SALISBURY Mr. A. L. Kennedy’s Biography, discussed by Christopher Hollis

THE BELGIAN CAMPINE The Scene of the New British Military Base. By Tudor Edwards

THE RELIGION OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

“ Entre Dieu et Satan.” By Martin Turnell

BEFORE TH E BUDGET

T HE revenue figures do not suggest that the Chancellor will be able to do very much on Tuesday to relieve our over-burdened economy ; and the definition of politics as the art of choosing the lessee evil is all too apt for his dilemmas. As a politician, he does not need to be worried that the Government is losing popularity. The signs are the opposite. It is perhaps true that 1950, when the Socialists lost their big majority, although they did not go out of office for another year, really marked the end of the collectivist phase which began a long lifetime before. A tide which had run more and more strongly for the extension of State control, a tide carried to flood heights by two great wars, then began to turn, and the apostles of collectivism began to lose their market, simply because, through a combination of developments—an increase in material wealth being the main cause, buttressed by the strength of the Trade Unions and the effects of social legislation—the England of 1950 was an entirely different place, for both good and ill, from that in which the propagandists of collectivist solutions had first busied themselves to such effect.

This is the great fundamental weakness of the Socialists: that their great panacea is so largely a tiresome irrelevance, and the more Socialist they are, like Mr. Bevan, the more they will find themselves out of touch with the mind of the country, which is increasingly and rightly preoccupied with Britain’s trading future. For that trading future, the extension of State control is obviously not a solution, and can veuy easily be a grave handicap. We shall decline into penury if the Englishmen who have to sell abroad cannot produce cheaply or flexibly, because of the high prices they have to pay, first as consumers of public monopolies—light and heat, power and transport—and then as tax-payers carrying on their backs the immense superstructure of an over-ambitious Welfare State.

Mr. Butler, making a Budget for twelve months, has to frame it with much larger considerations in view, and when he is urged to lighten the purchase tax or to reduce the standard rate of income tax, he has to weigh the immediate disadvantage of an increased current consumption against the great importance of making or keeping the quest for real profits worthwhile. A Plan that is a Snare

That is the great danger in the latest Labour Party proposals for making the Government the 51 per cent shareholders in a number of industries. This notion of partnership has by now quite a history behind it in other countries, and one of the lessons of that history is that where private concerns are forced to accept the Government as senior partner they tend to leave it to that partner to see that their business is kept profitable. It is vastly easier, and much less exhausting, to play for official contracts at special prices, paid for from the taxes, or for special protection from competition, than to go out into the market and compete by giving better value. Those who are now engaged in framing Labour Party proposals of this type should study the experience of Mussolini’s corporate State, which was recommended to the Italian public by just the same arguments of the need to make the public interest the supreme and effective master inside industry.

The broad truth is that Governments can best help the economic welfare of the people by seeing how lightly it can contrive to tax them, which is another way of saying that it must take a modest view of its own function. Its social services should be basic, its educational aim modest. It should set out to help people in real misfortune, not to provide for everybody. There should be a movement away from the unhealthy and absurd position that the people spend £1,522 million annually on drink and tobacco, impoverishing themselves or proving what a margin of comfort they possess, by giving nearly all of this to the Government to do other things for them that they are thought unable to afford. The Government should devote itself to maintaining abroad a favourable climate for the activities of its citizens.

Lord Milverton in the House of Lords last week very pertinently recalled a warning uttered by Lord Milner in 1906:

“You cannot have prosperity without power : you of