THE TABLET Ju ly 21st, 1056. VOL. 2<1S, No, 606!

TH E TA 5 [ i l A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

F o b lis h « ! a s a N ew sp jp * r

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

JULY 21st, 1956

NINEPENCE

A New Generation : Spain After Twenty Years

Unrest in Czechoslovakia; Another Satellite Government's Troubles. By Wilfred Ryder

Catholics in. Israel l The Experience Under a Jewish Majority

Mr. Scott’s Irritation; Self Conscious Youth. By Christopher Hollis

Humour and Nonsense : The World Turned Upside Down. By Renee Haynes

The Secret of St. Thomas More; From a Sermon Preached by llltu d Evans, OP

Critics' Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess

NO COMMON MARKET

nPHE causes which bring a man into public life are seldom A the causes he has to make his own when he finds himself in the highest place. Sir Winston Churchill was an exception in his first war-time premiership. But Lloyd George, who entered public life almost wholly concerned with the condition of the people, achieved the first place in the state on condition of waging war and making peace and was maintained there by a majority which shared none of his original interests. Baldwin, entering public life from the industrial Midlands, with his interest concentrated on good relations between capital and labour, found himself increasingly forced to think about foreign affairs, and is judged by what he did or failed to do in that unfamiliar and uncongenial field. With Neville Chamberlain, the story was the same. Coming from the Birmingham municipal tradition, and primarily interested in social welfare, he found the two years of his premiership dominated by the imminence of the second German war. Sir Anthony Eden, at the outset of his parliamentary life, would probably have been very well satisfied to have had such a career as the late Marquis of Willingdon, and very well he would have filled the governorships and viceregal offices. But he was caught up in the growing world of international negotiation, and now in his premiership finds himself involved in the battle against inflation, knowing that it is by the economic and financial measures of his Government that he will stand or fall. There are other fields of policy of great importance where the results, though momentous, are much less immediate. Policy towards the Commonwealth or the Colonial Empire, whether it is well or badly conceived, brings no immediate political retribution. Economic and financial policy is something to which the closely affected and quickly critical electorate is almost immediately sensitive. The Prime Minister is in the difficult position that if he uses calm and moderate language, nobody pays much attention, and if he talks, as he has just been doing, about the country being in “ mortal peril,” of gradual, steady, but far-reaching impoverishment, he finds that if he is believed he has then to explain who has been in power for the best part of five years. Politicians who readily claim the credit for economic results that are not much to do with them, and who blame their opponents for things equally outside their control, must expect to be held responsible. So there is a concerted move to blame inflation on the Government, and on the whole Conservative philosophy of rulers who at long last were trying to get away, if only partially, from the network of government controls woven in the war years. The measure of justice in the accusation is that there has been a great expansion of activity and demand in the home market, one of whose consequences has been a demand for more and more imports, and another a demand for labour which has forced up the market price for all kinds of services. Londoners, in particular, now have daily before their eyes the influx of newcomers whom a state of overfull employment, more jobs than people, is attracting to the great British cities. They increase our productivity, but they also intensify demand in the home market, these newcomers who arrive willing to do the kind of work for which it is increasingly difficult to find native-born English people.

This great home market cannot function unless expanding exports pay for expanding Imports, sufficient to feed both the export market and the home market; and while we have many markets abroad we have none of importance which may not be abruptly curtailed by some other Government, in the interest of its own manufacturers. At the very time Sir Anthony Eden was speaking of mortal peril, our Western European neighbours were meeting to discuss a common market which; if it is achieved without Britain, will prove prejudicial to Britain. It will supply German manufacturers, in particular, with a market of nearly 200 million people and enable them to produce with stream-lined automation and capture overseas markets with the surplus, just as the Americans have been so triumphantly able to do. This common market has yet to be achieved, and many local vested interests stand in the way. But the broad lines on which it can be achieved are clear, that each country will