NEXT WEEK THE SPLIT SOCIETY . Next week we begin
the publication, in four instalments, of Nicholas Davenport's The Split Society, a special study of the alienation of the British working class over the past forty years. A radical, as interested in sociology as in economics, his experience uniquely qualifies him to undertake such a task. He went into the City in the,1920s and began a career which took him into the City Establishment: he is now Deputy Chairman of the National Mutual Life Assurance Society, of which Lord Keynes was once chairman.
In the Twenties and Thirties he became con- vinced that financial mismanagement was un- necessarily splitting British society and divorc- ing the working class from the ruling class. After the war, as a member of the National Investment Council, he had an intimate know- ledge of Dalton's financial policy and saw how completely he failed to persuade the working class that a radical change in the structure of society was intended.
Nicholas Davenport has been one of the most trenchant critics of the Treasury and Conservative 'stop-go' economics. In The Split Society he argues that the alienation of the working class was completed by Selwyn Lloyd when Chancellor, but that the social split can still be healed if financial and economic policies are changed and if the two halves of the nation unite in running a planned economy. In the last instalment he challenges both sides to change their conven- tional attitudes.
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