From: Kenneth Younger, Ferdinand Mount, Quintin Hogg. MP, Maurice Girodias,
Tom Driberg. MP, Auberon Waugh. Tibor Szatnuely.
The Dissolving Society
SIR, 1 listened to Lord Radcliffe's address on 'The Dissolving Society' with growing irritation. ending in a sense of outrage. I felt the same about your summary of it and your leader on 'The English Sickness.' Not that ! disagree with all Lord Radcliffe's points far from it. Of course Britain has lost confidence in her 'old conventions. customs and principles'— not surprisingly since many of them grew up in an entirely different world from today's. Of course the unprecedented pace of change in this century has made it difficult to find a new 'philosophy of living' and to consolidate it. But, unlike Lord Radcliffe, 1 find it neither surprising nor depressing that, having begun abandoning the old, we have so far failed to project the new.' We share this predicament with most of the world. It is in no sense a peculiarly English Sickness. Lord Radcliffe, and you too, sir, are apparently offering as your remedy a return to the old, rather than an increased effort to project the new, and you also seem to believe that, in a world moving at increasing speed around us, we should give up-'the attempt at continuous adjustment and 'call a halt' in order to 'put down roots' (your words). Surely h a policy would be possible for Britain only if. e had really been moving too fast, but of how m ny major aspects of British life is this really true? Has our reforming zeal really led us to tear up the roots of Parliament, of our business and trade union structure or of our education? Have we really shown that we helieve change to be a good in itself? How can Lord Radcliffe think this, for instance, of a nation which is now suffering a major strike largely, we are told, because it hasn't got around to altering a Merchant Shipping Act passed three years before he Diamond Jubilee? I am shocked that a great judge can take such an unbalanced view of the evidence. If it is true, as you assert and I doubt, that the rest of the world is talking of 'the English Sickness,' they surely mean. that Britain is changing too slowly rather than too fast. Lord Radcliffe's own recommendation is that we must 'get back quickly to the active realisation of.cior identity as a nation,' but he nowhere explains what he thinks this might do for us. Indeed he discounts the possibility of creating a common national pur- Pose or national leadership and seems to have nothing in mind beyond the negative concept of combating -the mistaken belief that internationalism can be a substitute for nationalism.' If one tests this highly tendentious formulation against the facts, one finds that so many features of our national life—not only political and economic policy but social and cultural habits—are now inevitably subject to world-wide influences, that our real difficulty is to adjust ourselves quickly enough to world-wide trends, Lord Radcliffe does us-no service by pretending that our thinking has become excessively international, when in fact we are only just beginning to move. It is not even true that modern Britain ignores or rejects her past, as anyone can confirm who has watched British history being made vivid on his television screen, from Hastings to our own times. If we now see it in a wider context than our fathers did, this is a gain.
Even Lord Radcliffe refers to 'this new sentiment or world sympathy' as a hopeful factor, which should
bc given practical expression. I do not see how he helps to do this by making his one and only recom- mendation a plea for getting back to national identity,
zi concept to which, I repeat, he nowhere attempts to
give any positive content. So I find Lord Radcliffe's picture of modern Britain distorted and his advice sterile, producing in me the very impression of fatire and decadence which he seems to detect in the rest of us. Corning from a man of Lord Radcliffe's dis- tinction. this kind of talk strikes me as a sin against
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