GREAT BRITAIN: Quota, The Goddess

Britain’s literate, left-wing New Statesman and Nation, which is apt to make rude noises at all critics of Socialism (particularly if the critics are American), has discovered that in Socialist Britain the good old manners have gone to hell. A New Statesman essayist who sounded just a little like a learned Colonel Blimp charted the decline & fall of civility in Britain.

British men, he noted, no longer take off their hats as they walk by London’s Cenotaph (monument to Britain’s war dead), or for the passing of a funeral or the flag. Women no longer bow when they meet; autoists no longer defer to skittish horses and their nervous riders on their way to Hyde Park’s Rotten Row. Women stand in buses and trains while men and boys sit in comfort (a form of rudeness common even in non-Socialist communities).

Instead of manners based on privilege, the British, he said, have devised a new set of manners based on rights. There is “dour deference for the first comer, the man at the head of the queue.” A “ritual of the queue” has evolved, in which women take part with stock phrases like “This lady was before me, I think,” and “Would you keep my place for me?”

The queue, thinks the New Statesman’s chronicler, “must answer some deep-seated need of our time…No one can push in ahead by sheer strength and skill and win the prize—a fortune or a dozen boxes of chocolates—which the majority won’t get. But equally, no one will be quite left out—all will get their two ounces of jujubes* by mere waiting and shuffling along at intervals…

“The vacuum left by the abandonment of religious ritual and social ceremony has been filled by a new rite—a worship of The Rules and the strange gods behind them. ‘No, I’m afraid we’re right out of those—we’re waiting for our quota,’ says the stationer, with a mixture of exasperation and reverence for the goddess Quota that was once accorded by anxious Greek farmers to Demeter, bringer of harvests. ‘I’m full up now—only eight standing inside—I can’t take any more,’ chants the bus conductor, with all the complacency of a Calvinist separating the few elect from the multitudes of the damned…Justice and discipline are perhaps producing a new civility, hard, graceless and colorless, but safe.”

* Candy rationing, ended by the Labor government in a burst of optimism (TIME, May 2), was clamped back on last week. The planners had figured wrong: Britain was hungrier for candy than they had thought, and supplies on hand soon ran out. The new ration was the same as before: four ounces a week. To Britain’s melancholy moppets that meant a couple of four-inch chocolate bars or a small bag of gumdrops.