The state of the nation
nce that time the smell of the Fourth Public has grown steadily stronger to the at where the nation is in danger of becom- literally ungovernable. France showed t this could happen to a modern, civilised, sperous country. The symptoms are now ginning to appear in Britain. The anarcho- ist tendencies of the militant student corities—and the total failure of univer- Y authorities to know what to do about lo—are merely the most colourful sym- I of this. It is tempting to imagine that the solu- tion lies in the formation of a national, coalition, government. The idea of a coalition is always attractive to the British people— at least, when they do not have , one—and its formation might initially cause a tem- porary resurgence of public confidence, without which government ultimately be- comes impossible. But, of course, it is not going to happen—not in the foreseeable future, at any rate. No Conservative would dream of serving under Mr Wilson, and if (which is highly unlikely) Mr Wilson were to be by whatever means removed, the Labour majority in Parliament would seek salvation not through coalition but through a new leader.
Fortunately. the impracticability of a coali- tion is no great national loss. It is impossible to believe that the initial restoration of public confidence would not quickly dissipate and lead to a new disillusionment still more dam- aging than the present. The only enduringly plausible role for a coalition government is that of sinking internal differences in the face of a common external threat. This is obvi- ously the case in time of war; it was also true of the formation of the only peacetime coali- tion this century, in 1931. The threat was economic, but it vim§ still external : a crash that began on Wall Street was leading to a world-wide slump.
