GREAT BRITAIN: Weakness & Strength

How grave was Britain’s economic sickness? Did the realization that Britain must sharply reduce her Empire commitments and step down as a first-rate power also mean that Britain at home could never recover?

This week the United Kingdom buckled down to work again. After three fuelless weeks, factories in the London area and the northwest could resume operations, but home use was still curtailed. Snow and ice were thawing, coal moving. Brewers were resuming beer production. Britons felt a little better.

The deeper sickness remained. The Crisis had upset the rhythm of production; the emptied industrial pipelines would be gurgling for many a month. Real recovery might not get started until midsummer, and that is when Britain must build up coal stocks for another winter. In consequence, the vital exports program may be affected right to the end of 1947.

Act of Faith. The temperature of The Crisis patient was charted in Britain’s dwindling dollar holdings and in her trade balance (TIME, Feb. 3). Britons asked themselves if a Government which had bet wrong on a shortage in coal might not also bet wrong on a shortage in dollars. Would Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton suddenly appear in Fuel Minister Emanuel Shinwell’s calamitous role? Or would the Government, now alert to dangers, try to save dollars by restrictions on such comparative luxuries as U.S. cigarets, Hollywood films, Texas grapefruit and dried eggs?

The British Government knows that more & more restriction is not the answer to its trade problem. On April 8, when Britain sits down at Geneva with the U.S. and 16 other nations to talk tariffs, the British are prepared to make an act of faith. They may surprise other delegates by offering to abandon a big part of the Empire preference system in return for tariff concessions in the hard-money countries, particularly the U.S.

Reasons for Hope. But in the long run, the British trade position depended on whether Britons can overcome industrial production difficulties at home. Last week John Osborne, TIME’S London bureau chief, set himself, his staff and his correspondents in the provinces to the task of finding Britain’s essential strengths and its valid hopes of survival and recovery. Osborne reported:

“The problem can be solved; it is not hopeless. Raggedly and slowly, but surely, the country’s human and material resources are being mobilized. That is an enormous gain; The Crisis which ended Britain’s short, uneasy sleep would not have come if that had been true last year.

“Britain has a lot of industrial know-how. Americans who think they have a national copyright on that term would do well to abandon the illusion. Britain has tangible industrial resources. Not all plants are worn out. Not all management is behind the times. Britain is not literally broke.

“The British spirit could slough into disastrous quiescence and defeatism. Britain cannot work out of its sore trouble unless the people give up much of the little they now have, but they have great capacity to do without.

“In part, Britain’s trouble is the strain placed on its immediate resources by the current culmination of a revolution that has nothing to do with Socialism: the revolution of patient, underhoused, underheated, underfed, underprivileged millions who now demand that share of good things which their fathers and grand fathers never had. Britain cannot immediately afford all that they want. But if the fact that they mean to have it is a weakness, then the more fortunate Americans have been on the wrong track all this time.

“I am betting that Britain will come through.”