The Struthonian Country

An English burglar recently broke into a games manufacturing company and stole a fortune--in fake Monopoly money. The crook's confusion is not as funny as it sounds. So serious is Britain's continuing inflation that the current gibe by critics is that Monopoly pounds may soon be worth as much as the real thing.

Inspired by the early success of U.S. controls, Edward Heath's Conservative government has imposed a variety of price restraints. Even so, food prices have gone up 7.2% since January, and consumer prices as a whole 4.3%. The inflation rate is still 9% per year. To slow it, Heath this month announced his Phase III--to a national chorus of "Let's-wait-and-see" doubts. Sometimes indeed it seems as if the whole country is suffering from what Author Arthur Koestler calls the "Struthonian Effect" --or the Ostrich Syndrome.*

Inflation, caused at least in part by the worldwide rise in commodity prices, is only one of Heath's problems. Projections show that if the economy does not pick up, Britain, which started off the '60s as one of the richer countries in Europe, within a decade or so may be competing with Portugal and Spain for last place in terms of per capita wealth. In the past decade, Britain's gross national product has risen more slowly than any other European nation's, and the country has had the lowest growth in such consumer goods as cars, telephones and television sets.

Britain's wage costs have risen faster than those of any other major industrial country in the world during the past three years. In a recent speech Victor Lord Rothschild, head of the government's think tank, the Central Policy Review Staff, declared: "In 1985, we shall have half the economic weight of France or Germany. Our difficulties and dangers are as severe and ominous as they were in World War II, though, of course, of a different sort."

Heath's solution has been to push Britain into the Common Market--a step he accomplished last January--and give a hearty shove to industrial expansion with subsidies and tax incentives. Though he now claims that "the results are beginning to show," all that his opponents can see is inflation and the huge Common Market trucks that now lumber along sleepy English roads. So big are the Continental juggernauts that ancient English villages are literally being shaken to their foundations. Instead of decreasing, as everyone expected, popular opposition to the Common Market has grown into a clear majority.

Ever quick to seize on the popular issue, ex-Prime Minister Harold Wilson recently promised the Labor Party Conference that if he became Prime Minister again, he would renegotiate Britain's contract with the Common Market--as if the other members would actually let him. In one of the worst puns of the year, Wilson said that the fanfare of Britain's entry into the market was now drowned out "by the strains of Pompidou and circumstance." The Labor Party's own solution to Britain's problems: what Wilson proudly calls the "most radical" program of nationalization of land and industry since the postwar government of Clement Atlee. The new nationalization would include land for industrial and residential development, the trucking industry, shipbuilders, parts of the drug, machine-tool and construction industries, as well as the new North Sea oil and gas development. Although the new Labor platform is popular with the rank and file, it is clearly the fuzziest scheme for economic change since George McGovern's 1972 welfare program. Roy Jenkins, Wilson's former Chancellor of the Exchequer, expressed doubt about the plan. "It is no good taking over a vast number of industries without knowing how or by whom they will be run," he said. "Let us promise no more than we can do."

Lovable Bloke. The polls show that British voters are dissatisfied with both parties. In the past year, the tiny Liberal Party, led by the effervescent Jeremy Thorpe, has won four out of eight by-elections. Most voters may not know what the Liberals would do to solve their problems, but they seem to prefer untried faces to the old ones that have failed. In Parliament the Conservatives now have 322 seats, Labor 287, and the Liberals 10. Popularity polls, however, now show the three parties with about one-third each. There is a real possibility of an even three-way split in the next general election, within the next 18 months. That would give Britain its first minority government since 1929. "There is a chance, just a slim chance that Labor might manage to sneak back to power on the shoulders of those who think it is somehow safe to vote Liberal," warns Lord Carrington, the Tory chairman. "The fact is that a vote for the Liberal Party is the next worst thing to a vote for Harold Wilson."

Britain's real economic problem may not be its politicians but its lazy and inefficient workers and managers. Many Britons apparently do not care if their country is half as rich as France or Germany--as long as they do not have to work as hard as Frenchmen or Germans. Says Koestler: "The same lovable bloke who risked his life on D-day to keep the country free would not lift a finger at the Ford plant at Dagenham to put the country back on its feet."

* Koestler derives Struthonian from struthio, Latin for ostrich.

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