Pox Britcmnica

ANATOMY OF BRITAIN (662 pp.)--Anthony Sampson--Harper & Row ($6.95).

In the 19th century, when Britannia ruled the waves, its terra firma was unquestionably governed by the ruling classes. Though Britain today is a comparatively egalitarian society, most Englishmen are convinced that the country is still run by the Establishment, a tight little coterie of Top People who, by most definitions, include the leaders of the Tory party, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the editor of the Times, a scattering of Oxbridge dons, industrialists, financial mandarins, senior civil servants and a few fashionable hostesses.

British Journalist Anthony Sampson returned home in 1955 after four years in not-so-dark Africa and soon became convinced that the Establishment was to blame for his country's slow, erratic reactions to its new place in the postwar world. He set forth on a close, hardheaded examination of what he calls "the legs, arms, main bloodstream and metabolism" of the traditions and institutions that collectively control the life of Britain.

The Greater Nightmare. He concludes from his investigation that The Thing, as William Cobbett called the 19th century Establishment, is no longer a cozy, close-knit power elite; it has fragmented into "a cluster of interlocking circles, touching others only at one edge; they are not a single Establishment but a ring of Establishments." By contrast with the Victorians, Britain's present-day Pooh-Bahs do not aspire to know "what is best for the people," or conspire to run the country, from whose overall interests they are increasingly insulated. "This." argues Sampson "surely is the greater nightmare of a democracy--not that the government is full of sinister and all-powerful eminences grises, but that the will of the people dissolves in committees, with thousands of men muttering about their duty to 'those whom we serve.' "

The real Establishment, he suggests, is not one of people, but of things: the unwieldy Victorian inventions, from the railways to the political parties, that contemporary Britain accepts as unchangeable. As Deputy Prime Minister "Rab" Butler said of the civil service: "You know it's the best machine in the world, but you're not quite sure what to do with it." Thus modern Britain's needs are often widely at odds with its resources, a gap that is most glaringly evident in its educational system, which produces only 1,780 university students per million citizens--roughly Turkey's rate--v. 16,670 in the U.S. At that, the social chasm between the elite undergraduates of quasi-aristocratic Oxbridge and the more numerous plebeians who attend the provincial redbrick universities is such, in the words of Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders. former director of the London School of Economics, that "four-fifths of our undergraduates feel inferior for life." This snobbishness Sampson wryly labels the Pox Britannica.

SOB I. Britain's tendency to enshrine anachronisms--often with the cheerful alibi, "It may seem odd, but it works"--dangerously widens the gap between the efficient, forward-looking elements of society and what Sampson terms the "isolated and defensive amateur world'' that dreads and resists change. Government officials take it as a cardinal rule that "nothing should ever be done for the first time." Businessmen, in the words of Imperial Chemical Industries' go-getting Chairman Paul Chambers, have a "sentimental softness for inefficiency."

Britain's malaise, says Sampson, is what Nikita Khrushchev (or one of his speechwriters) once termed "the decay of overriding purpose." The Victorians, Sampson points out. "were pushed forward by a profound belief in progress and the imperial mission.'' Today Britain's rulers "have become dangerously out of touch with the public, insensitive to change, and wrapped up in their private rituals.''

With a lively eye for their tribal rites, Anthony Sampson ranges sportively from TV tycoons to the Bishop of Birmingham, whose license plates are inscribed SOB 1.* and on to the Queen, whose ancestors, he notes, include a pubkeeper and a plumber. He writes with wit and erudition ,of the "Old Freddies" who rule the City and the new real estate plutocrats who own it, the "medieval islands" of the universities, the House of Commons, which Judge Sir James Cassels defines as "six hundred men all thinking a great deal of themselves and very little of each other."

The most hopeful portent, Sampson believes, is Britain's bid for membership in the European Common Market; ultimately, the Establishment may even boast a few old Sorbonne ties. Otherwise, as Editor Walter Bagehot warned a century ago, the British "may at last fail from not comprehending the great institutions they have created."

* No significance," says the Bishop's secretary.

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