THE TABLET February 22nd. 195S VOL. 211, No. 6144

Published as a Newspaper

•HE "AB LET' A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

FEBRUARY 22nd, 1958

N1NEPENCE

Nuclear Poker : The T h re a t of Civilian Massacre Supping with a Long Spoon : Church and State in Poland. By Auberon Herbert Revolt in Sumatra : Indonesia’s Uncertain Future. By Wilfred Ryder

Rochdale Reflections l Liberal Illusions. By Philip Bell, M.P. 1he German Catechism : A Stimulus to Those who Teach. By the Bishop of Salford Meditations in Lent : I. M ara in the Desert. By Sebastian Bullough, O.P.

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

WELFARE ECONOMICS

t’T 'H E increase in the Health Service charges, of sixpence a week for men and fourpence for women, twopence for juniors and twopence for employers, comes very soon after the last increase and follows a familiar pattern of compulsory levies and all other kinds of taxation, that, when once there is the machinery for collecting the money, more and more money is always collected by that machinery.

The Government will make a profit on the new increases, of some £10 million this year and £20 million in a full year, but, in proportion as charging is introduced, the basic purpose and chief merit of the service, what it does for the poorest sections of the community, is progressively diminished. That is a general truth about Welfare State economics, that in attempting to do too much for everybody, regardless of need, the really needy come to suffer, as they would not have done if State aid had been from the first more carefully limited to those who need it. It is a parallel story in education, where there is inevitably an immense waste through making extensions universal. These rising charges are naturally resented by those who do not make any or much use of the facilities. To increase the weekly payment rather than the charges for prescriptions is to encourage people to take what they do not need, since they are conscious of having to pay for it. But the method chosen is no doubt preferable to increasing the direct charges, which would increase the burden on the sick.

The Conservative Government has now been in power for the same period as the Socialists were in power when they were finally ousted, late in 1951. It has been a long spell, enlivened by the remarkable achievement of an increased majority in the 1955 election. But since then more has gone wrong than right, and their popularity has accordingly declined. Today Ministers give the impression of being so relieved that all characters were cleared by the Bank Tribunal that they quite forget the background against which all that episode took place: the raising of the Bank rate to the abnormally high figure of seven per cent, and the sense of alarm about the future of the pound which was being expressed in confidence by the very men whose judgement the Bank and the Government rate so highly. How can it be taken as anything but a severe reflection on the way things have been handled, that, after six years of Conservative rule, there were all these informed misgivings about the stability of the pound in August last, and that the anxiety still remains so acute that the Treasury Ministers resigned over the policy needed to allay it ?

This weakness of the pound has developed at a time when the prices of primary commodities, as measured against manufactures such as we export, have been falling. It is true that the sterling area as a whole is an immense primary producer, but it is also true that the loss of confidence in the pound was not due to lower prices for Commonwealth agricultural or mineral exports, but to the continual erosion of the purchasing power of the pound in this country ; and that erosion is really the beginning and end of the Government’s electoral troubles. It would have helped the Government had it been offset by successes in other directions, but there has been very little success. That is not the fault of the Government, but the drift towards placing the main reliance on nuclear weapons is not one that anybody is viewing with anything but gloomy acquiescence. Some sympathy should be spared for the leaders of an historic party whose special enthusiasms in the past have been the Empire, the Navy, the Army, and the Air Force, that it should have to preside over so much painful revision and scrapping.

Readers of the White Paper on Defence may well be left at the end very sceptical whether more pay is the