Too comfortable to care?
John Peyton
We still preserve the belief that we in this country are at least as good as other people; we are therefore affected by a profound and debilitating disappointment that again and again our performance does not match up to that belief. The widespread feeling that individual effort is both unnecessary and inef fective affords unrivalled and abundant opportunities for the malcontent, the mischief maker and the destroyer. It would be wrong to suppose that those "tight knit groups of politically motivated men" (Mr Wilson's words) have finished; they have on the contrary been busy: they are as assiduous as maggots and as destructive.
I shall not even attempt to propound solutions to the many problems which confront us, because there are no ready-made ones available; they will, if we ever find our way to them, be the product of the patience, under standing and resolution of many people.
Further, I am convinced that until and unless we get a clearer understanding of the mess we have got ourselves into we shall lack the spur to reject some of the grosser imbecilities of our time and the will to move on as we both could and should to better things.
I am not speaking from a brief for any party, section or class; I do so out of a con cern for our country—for the whole of it — and, I hope it does not sound too pretentious, for those human values, the presence of which distinguishes men from pigs.
We have in the three decades since the war exercised most perilously our considerable capacity for stuffing awkward facts under the carpet, for pretending that they are not there and for hoping that, even if they are, they will presently disappear. we were not left at the end of the war with a great new industrial system, but with one which was in large part at any rate run down, derelict and out of date. We had to face not only the long and inevitably sad untidy retreat from Empire, but also the erosion of a trading system which had afforded us the means of earning enough to pay for the half of our food and the great part of our raw materials which we are obliged to buy from overseas. Morevoer, since we had at least been on the winning side and had not suffered either the depredation or devastation of our continental neighbours, we were not conscious of the same pressure to put the bits together again and to reshape our national life. If we had an aim, it was to get back to times which could never come again—to an irrecoverable past.
Almost deliberately we have chosen to use up rather than to build up; to give preference to today's needs and leave tomorrow to look after itself; to concentrate lazily and flabbily upon our due rather than our duty. Preferring talk to action, we have snarled up the processes out of which decisions emerge.
There was an ancient Greek community which used to make its decisions only when drunk. If, exceptionally, a decision was soberly reached, care was taken to see that it was ratified only in inebriation. Perhaps such ways would offer some advantage over our own somewhat costive procedures. We have muddled up equality and fairness and have sought to level things out as between the hard worker and the layabout, the saver and the spendthrift, the success and the failure. We have been anxious to get as much as possible and to do as little as possible for it; to make as many things as possible free or artificially cheap. (This unaimed shower of benefits is welfare gone mad: we have now become the first country in the world to make contraceptives freely available on demand.) We 'lave masked our greed, at least from ourselves, with talk of compassion and by the painless process of giving away as bounty that which we did not earn. In other words we have debased the very currency of freedom by refusing to match our efforts to our appetites.
In no area of our affairs has this unreality shown itself so clearly as in what we call industrial relations, but which could be more revealingly described as the search for human relations in industry. Over a period of five years we have been four times as ready to down tools as the Japanese, thirteen times as ready as the Germans. We have come near to accepting that the right to strike must prevail even over the safety of the community.
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