THE TABLET, March 17th, 1956. VOL. 207, No. 6043

THE TABL ET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Rec/ina et Patria

FOUNDED 1N 1840

MARCH 17th, 1956

NINEPENCE

Banishing th e A rchbishop: A Blander in Cyprus

A T im e for D e ta chm en t : Reflections on Work and Wealth. By the Bishop o f Salford

“ Christians o f th e Left” in F rance: A Survey Concluded. By Frank Macmillan

The Gangsters’ Franciscan: In the Margin o f Italo-American Relations

An Empty C h a ir : The Memoirs o f Admiral Horthy. By Bela Menczer

J o s e p h : Evidence from Christian Art. By W. L. Gunton

The A ge o f St. H o ly W eek R estored: V: Good Friday (ii). By Lancelot C. Sheppard

C r itic s’ C o lum n s : N o teb o ok : B ook R ev iew s : Letters : Chess

COST OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY I F it is asked why British troops have to remain in Cyprus at all, why we cannot simply hand the island over to the Greeks and have done with it, at the same time perhaps asking the Americans to take a kindly interest in the Turkish minority, the answer in the last resort is that the British troops have to stay because they are protecting the British standard of living. They are there because they must be able to defend Britain’s oil interests in the Middle East. “Even Labour should recognize,” wrote The Times on Wednesday, “ that without these she cannot maintain her standard of living.” But even Labour does ; otherwise, of course, the Labour attack in Wednesday’s debate in the House of Commons would have been much more radical and, indeed, quite different. It is the same in Malaya and many other parts of the world as well : that troops and administrators endure great hardship over prolonged periods because that is necessary to help to preserve the highly privileged position which the British population enjoys in the world.

Even so, we live better than we can really afford to live. It has become a commonplace to say this. We do not merely assume that we can continue to enjoy the standards set when Britain had great overseas wealth which has since been lost ; when what we have to buy could be bought cheaply and what we have to sell could be sold dearly in relation to the world’s prices. We assume that the upward curve can still be continued as though nothing had happened, and that the more expensive amenities of life can be enjoyed all the time by greater numbers of people. Therefore the nation lives beyond its means, perpetually haunted by financial crisis. It prefers to live dangerously, if that is the only way of living well. How much is demanded is illustrated very strikingly in the new Index of retail prices, sometimes inexactly known as the Cost of Living Index, published this week.

widespread enquiry. Its foundation is, we are told, the “expenditure pattern” of nine-tenths of the households of the country, unrepresentative only of those where the head of the house earns more than £20 a week, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, of those where at least three-quarters of the income comes from public assistance or similar sources. And the most significant thing about the revised Index is the luxurious range of the commodities in which price-changes are to be taken into account ; commodities now taken for granted in the “expenditure pattern” of great numbers of men and women brought up to regard them as extravagances. The prices of candles and turnips are no longer worth noticing as they were when the Index was first made, before the first World War ; the cost of electric light and frozen peas is reckoned instead. The average man and his family not only eat very much better and more elaborately, but account must also be taken of proprietary cat-foods and dog-foods. When the first Index was made, very few people would have thought of buying cat-food. Television sets and washing-machines, motoring and dancing, telephone calls and school ties, sodawater and gin as well as beer and whisky—all these are now assumed to make their demands upon the income of the heads of nine-tenths of our families. The implication is that a man may reasonably complain of his lot if he does not enjoy them, and may say that he is not paid enough and must have an increase in wages. That is not to suggest that the new Index may directly encourage wage-claims. On the contrary, it should do the opposite, in so far as it will correct the exaggeration of the rise in prices which, as is generally agreed, the 1947 interim Index produced, by allowing food to bulk too large, so that the Index figure went up when the food subsidies were scaled down. What it will do is to encourage wage-claims indirectly by encouraging the belief that everyone can belong to the comfortable middle class.

The revised Index is based on what is taken to be the household budget of the average citizen, as carefully established by

The Minister of Labour, introducing his White Paper on