THE TABLET December 29th, 1956. Vol. 208. No. 6084

THETABLE” A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

DECEMBER 29th, 1956

NINEPENCE

Cyprus After Suez : What Sort of Base Does Britain Require?

Our Lady’s House l A Catholic Shrine Among a Moslem People

I he Saar Becomes Ceriliau : Within the Federal Republic. By Reginald Colby

A Few Cross Faees : Report front Austria. By Stella Musulin

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

CHOICES BEFORE BRITAIN

'TTIIS end or 0)56 is a momentous date, the time when the

British people, after eleven years of post-war recovery and prosperity, have been forced to take stock of their real position in the world. They are entitled to ask from their rulers some explanation why, having spent almost a third of their Budget on defence, and that Budget itself taking more than a third of the whole national income, there is apparently so very little to show. The quite small operation which was mounted against Egypt took three months to prepare, while its immediate consequences, even apart from the loss of oil, showed in what very poor shape the national economy is, with no margin for any sustained and extensive military campaign. Yet for the sake of spending £1,500 million a year on defence, we have kept taxation at such a level as seriously to prevent saving and investment, and know that we are living at the expense of the future.

Basically the responsibility is with the people as a whole ; with the artisan electorate which expects, and, indeed, compels the two political parties who are in competition for its favour to woo it in terms of current consumption, to tell people what they can expect to get here and now. Neither party dares to refrain from filling its shop-window, or dares to stand for diminished personal consumption, although both parties know that that is what the national interest, in fact, requires. Both know that they have drifted into a dependent position towards America for a mere matter of five or ten per cent of excessive consumption.

This is the direct result of the benefits of what is termed the Welfare State. The attraction of that State has been its promise to relieve the ordinary artisan household of the expenses that a previous generation shouldered, whether for more than elementary education or for health, thus releasing a margin to be spent elsewhere. That margin, of which successive Chancellors of the Exchequer have ever since been in frantic pursuit, has shrunk through rising prices, while the trade unions seek to restore it by increasing the Monetary value of wages.

Lime as the present Government likes import controls, grave as is the risk of retaliation by countries whose exports we shut out, it is becoming difficult to see how the Government is going to avoid discrimination against imports, when there are so many imports which must be brought in, if the British economy is to function and British exports are to be not only maintained but increased.

Looking ten years ahead, with the prospect of steadily developing atomic power to diminish our present dependence on oil, those who have to think about Britain’s economy know that for as far as they can see into the future the great question is going to be this one of export markets. They know that the reality at the heart of the British Commonwealth is that political independence always brings with it in the new countries protectionist policies. We cannot rely on the Gold Coast and Nigeria when they are politically independent for the same advantages that we have come to take for granted in the decades in which we have looked on both countries as countries from which we could buy and to which we could sell on advantageous terms.

There is in consequence of the recent shock a much greater interest today not only in the common market for Western Europe, but in the broader possibility of the European Powers acting together as a Power bloc. This has suddenly become attractive to many Conservatives, who feel very acutely the secondary position to which the country has drifted through taking so much from the United States. In so far as this dependence is a dependence on dollars, for dollar imports; it could be diminished by a developing European market. In so far as its depends specifically upon oil, there is no relief in sight if the Middle East continues to be overshadowed by political uncertainties, as it will be overshadowed if a more united Europe inherits the antagonism between France and the Moslem world.

This is today the biggest obstacle in the path of that progress which Mr. Selwyn Lloyd in Paris declared himself so anxious to see. Britain is not in the least anxious to underwrite French interests and policies in North Africa. Only the undifferentiating hostility of Nasser gave the French the opportunity they were quick to take, to make Britain their ally. But in the event they feel that we pulled out of the adventure before it had achieved its essential purpose, from the French point of view, which was to bring to power in Egypt some Government less hostile to France.

The French mood today is to conclude that, disappointing as the story has been, the French position in Algiers is very much what it was before the Canal crisis. The Algerian rebels still have their Cairo base. Probably the French very , much underestimate the likelihood that all this Egyptian rearming reflects Western as well as Eastern ambitions on the part of Colonel Nasser, If Israel is the first objective, the