"Really Up Against It"

Great Britain is perilously close to bankruptcy, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Richard Austen Butler minced no words about. "We are really up against it," he said last week. "Our lifeblood is draining away, and we have got to stop it." In contemporary Britain, the job that wealthy "Rab" Butler holds might well be called Chancellor of Gloom. His two predecessors, schoolmasterish Sir Stafford Cripps and perky Hugh Gaitskell won admiration for telling people the worst. Last week Butler did the same, frankly and specifically, and added to his reputation as one of the fastest rising Tories. No orator, but respected for the cool clarity of his mind, Butler told the House of Commons how the Tories propose to slash $420 million off Britain's imports--and that on top of the $980 million cut announced last November. This is 1952 austerity, Conservative style:

P: "Considerable reduction" in non-European imports of canned goods; "much lower" imports of clothing, furniture, toys.

P: A cut in tourist allowances from -L-50 to -L-25 ($70), saving $35 million. (Continental resorts cried foul. Nearly a million Britons visited France and Switzerland last year; dozens of small hotels on the Riviera may have to close.)

P: A slash of $61 million in tobacco imports, while Britain smokes up some of its reserves.

P: Reduced coal purchases from the U.S., to save $7,000,000. Warned Butler: "This country must export, not import, coal."

Then Butler, warming to his cold duty, went to work on domestic expenditures:

P: Ten thousand civil servants to be laid off ($14 million saved).

P: Information and propaganda services to be deeply cut ($3,360,000 saved).

P: Local sales of automobiles and trucks limited to 120,000 in 1952 (compared to 210,000 last year); meaning that most Britons would have to wait up to eight years, instead of five, for a new car.

P: A one-third cut in the production of motorcycles, bicycles, washing machines, radio and TV sets; a new one-third down policy on installment buying.

P: A virtual ban on steel for rebuilding blitzed British cities.

P: A whole new scale of charges for National Health Service, sacrosanct to Labor's left wing: one shilling on prescriptions, for which, Butler gibed, he planned to use legislation "very conveniently left behind" by Labor; a $2.80 fee for dentistry; charges up to one half the cost for surgical belts, hearing aids, wigs. Total saving: $56 million.

The only hope that Butler held out is the kind that warms a banker, but only vaguely reassures despairing householders. During the last half of 1951 the U.K. was running a trade deficit at the shocking rate of $4 billion a year. At that pace the country would be broke next September, for gold reserves at year's end had dropped to $2.3 billion. If the U.K. deficit is cut to $280 million, other sterling countries will match that with a surplus and, promised Butler, "the whole sterling area would balance its accounts."

Across the aisle the Opposition stirred. First came ex-Chancellor Gaitskell, responsible, good-natured, sympathetic, though unable to resist quoting Tory election speeches which cried horror over similar shortages under Labor. The debate did not stay moderate long.

Rebel Nye Bevan, ostentatiously docile since the elections, leaped into action. At a secret Labor Party meeting, he had overpowered Leaders Clement Attlee and Herbert Morrison, who were urging mild criticisms of Butler. Bevan, angry over the new health-plan changes, demanded and got a Labor Party decision to move a vote of no confidence against the Tories. It was Attlee in the House who was called upon to move the vote, describing Butler's proposals as "irrelevant, unnecessary and unfair"--but the language was Bevan's. Then from the crowded back benches Nye Bevan rose amidst a buzz of anticipation to show Leader Attlee how to conduct an Opposition case.

His economics were shaky but his performance was superb. It ran the gamut--cajoling, coercing, counseling, wheedling, joking, jeering. Enjoying the performance more than anyone was his chief target, Winston Churchill, who sat, fingertips touching with his hands slung between his knees, smiling benignly, occasionally rising to the bait in high good humor. Churchill, roared Bevan, "is not fit for his office." At this point Churchill interrupted to observe smoothly that Bevan was obviously still smarting from Churchill's wartime description of him: "a squalid nuisance."

Not everyone reacted so good-naturedly. The Tory Daily Telegraph charged that Bevan "unrepentantly insists that a free set of false teeth is more important than the national survival." When time came for the vote of confidence, the Conservatives won handily, 309 to 278.

Chancellor Butler was not through with his bad news. The next installment will come March 4 when, six weeks earlier than usual, Butler submits his new budget. But it is already plain that Butler and Churchill are determined to give Britain no soft answers for its hard problems.

Only 60 Britons had incomes of $16,800 or more after taxes, in the year ending March 1950, the government announced. The year before, there were 86.

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