THE STATE OF THE NATION
By WALTER TAPLIN
IN 194r Mr. Churchill, speaking of the Japanese, asked, "What kind of a people do they think we arc?" It is not quite im- possible that some sociologist in some surviving Japanese university was immediately ordered to produce the answer, adequately based on the latest statistics, so that Mr. Churchill might be floored with the right reply if he chanced to ask the question again ; Japanese solemnity has plumbed greater depths. For the British, if the possi- bility of an answer to a rhetorical question could have been en- visaged at all, somebody might have been stirred to a qualitative reply. But there • is a quantitative answer to at least part of the question. Clearly it is a very long and complicated answer, peppered with qualifications and reservations, but so far as the ordinary daily life of the British people is concerned, it exists.
In most important respects the statisticians have the British public taped. A large number of its characteristics and a vast area of its activities are covered by more or less adequate figures. The diffi- culty is to produce a reasonably compact picture from the vast mass of material. In a new book, The Condition of the British People, 1911-1945 (Gollancz, 6s.), Mr. Mark Abrams follows the method of comparing the present with an earlier state. He is able to tell us that, as a nation, we are more numerous, older, richer and socially more homogeneous than we were in 1911, the year of the last pre-war census. Also as a nation, for individuals • play no separate part in the world of statistics, we are rather better housed, rather better fed, more productive of material goods, have smaller families, and are tending within towns to prefer the suburbs to the centre, and within the country as a whole to prefer the Midlands and the South-East to other regions. Mr. Abrams, in his hundred pages of well-digested and well-presented facts, tells us several more things about the British people, but these are enough at one time for unaccustomed stomachs. They may yet prove to be even more than enough for the organs of Government as their impli- cations become more fully apparent.
The inseparability of statistical statement from expert interpre- tation is clearly shown in the above statement that we are more numerous than we were in 1911. The population of Great Britain in that year was rather less than 41 millions and is now approach- ing 47 millions. More important is the qualification, which the population experts are never tired of making, that the 47 millions are older than the 41 millions and are producing fewer children. Present indications (they will be further tested by the family census which the Royal Commission on Population is now taking) are that round about 1955 the population will become stable, and round about 1965 it will begin to decline. We are increasing our numbers at a diminishing rate. As a matter of fact, we have been doing it since the middle of the nineteenth century, but it is only recently that the decline has become so steep that an actual fall in numbers has become imminent. The increase in the birth-rate of the past few years cannot stem the tide. The fact that the people of Britain are growing older and soon will begin to grow fewer dominates the picture.
Can the increase in our material wealth be maintained at such a rate as to enable us to carry the increasing weight of unproductive
old age? Between 1924 and 1938 real income per head rose some
20 per cent., from £87 to £1o3 per year. During the war the rate of increase has accelerated, though the increase has not been
reaped as consumers' goods. If, while transferring our productive resources from war to peace uses, we can revolutionise the efficiency of our older industries, solve our international balance-of-payments problem and, with a falling working population, increase our production at a rate sufficient to outstrip the increase in • the proportion of non-earners we shall win out. But it does not look easy on paper, and it will not be easy in fact. The race against old age will only go to the very strong. The odds are on the tortoise.
In the meantime, comfort can be taken from the fact that the in- creased incomes per head are on the whole going where they are most needed. For while real income per head of the whole popu- lation rose by zo per cent, over the whole period 1911-1938, the improvement in the lot of the average member of the working-class is estimated at about 5o per cent. The hard case of poverty remains with the aged, with the families with several young children and with the unemployed and under-employed. It is also clearly con- centrated in the North of England, Scotland and Wales, as are all the related evils of heavier death-rates, disease and overcrowding. But the income structure, taken as a whole, has continued to bulge in the middle. The highest incomes have been cut by tax until it is virtually impossible to have a net income of £4,000 a year after tax, and there has been some slight betterment at the lower levels. So far as incomes are concerned, we are growing more like each other.
All this, and much besides, can be demonstrated in figures. Overcrowding, as measured by the number of persons per too rooms in occupied dwellings has fallen from 96 in 1911 to about 78 at present, though the damage caused by the war has led to more sharing of homes, so that the number of families per too rooms is about the same as in 1911. An average family just before the second world war was spending over 30 per cent. more on food, in real terms, than an average family in 1914, and there has been no slipping back in diet during the war just ended. The average family of 1939 was 3.59 persons, as against 4.35 in 1911. The popu- lation of the suburbs of thirteen very large towns went up by over so per cent., and the numbers in the overcrowded centres went down in the same period. And between the two wars the popula- tion of the Midlands and the South rose by 11.6 and 14.6 per cent. respectively, while the increase was much smaller in the North, in Scotland and in Wales. Books like Mr. Abrams'—for, after all, his is only the latest in a long series of such volumes—perform the in- estimable service of fixing in the heads of a large number of people these basic figures and orders of magnitude which are the starting- point not only of statistical study, but also of social progress. The rest is detailed research into a multitude of special problems.
The often expressed misgiving about our ability to overcome the colossal social and economic problems which face us is certainly not based on a fear that the necessary machinery is lacking. In fact, the ordinary citizen who stops to think is more likely to be impressed by the sheer mass of official organisation meant to do him
good than at any scarcity of it. Every major problem seems to have its corresponding organisation for providing a solution. Popu- lation has its Royal Commission, backed by a distinguished and furiously active body of experts. The National Income is the sub- ject of an annual White Paper which accompanies, and even occa- sionally overshadows, the annual Budget_ Employment policy is a major preoccupation of the Government, which is presumably de- voting vast resources to the building up of a bureaucratic machine to fulfil its commitment to full employment. Social insurance has its own Ministry, shortly to go into operation. Housing is named as Social Problem Number One, and its various phases are being parcelled out among various Government Departments. Machinery is everywhere. And every individual whose happiness in all its material aspects depends on its smooth working waits for the touch of the dais ex machina to set it all going
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