HOW STRONG IS THE GOVERNMENT ?
What is more, it is doubtful whether .the Government's strength is dependent in an important degree on the fillip to national unity which has been given by the splendours of the Coronation or on the demonstration of Commonwealth unity given by the assembled Prime Ministers. The communiqué issued at the end of their talks on Tuesday was as careful as such announcements always are not to imply that the Common- wealth Governments accept any new obligations or acknowledge new debts to the existing British Government. If Sir Winston and his colleagues were at all dependent on tenuous and temporary emotional aids their position would be much less strong than it in fact is. ' But despite all outward appearances that position is not impregnable. Despite the steady improvement in the dollar balance the British economy is still very vulnerable. The recent sag in the export level can become a serious matter if the threat of further competition from other countries materialises, as it almost certainly will. And economic deterioration would automatically work in favour of an Opposition which, despite its cqnstant internal bickerings over Bevanism and the behaviour of trade unionists who accept fat jobs and titles, could immediately rally its followers on the cry that the Welfare State and the workers' living standards were in danger.
The Government's position can only be consolidated by further positive action to ensure that productivity rises and that violent movements in the general price level are ruled out. This is obviously a task of great technical complexity and difficulty and most of it falls on the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Fortunately his is the outstanding Ministerial brain, and so far as he is concerned there is little danger of a return to the old complacent Toryism under which intellectual effort was regarded as rather bad form. Mr. Butler will need the stimulus of support of the individual Conservative M.P.s, and here again there is a hopeful sign to be found in the activities of back-bench groups who do not necessarily regard the word "intellectual " as a term of abuse. The maintenance of the present power of the Government in fact depends on a combination of hick (in which the state of the international economy is dominant) and judgement on the part of individual Conservatives who have the intellectual resilience to realise that, however bright the political skies may appear, no Government can leave the new and still imperfectly understood " Mixed Economy " to run itself.
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