Britain in Crisis

Report Outline
Threat of Economic Breakdown
Historic Parallels to the Present
The Arena of Political Struggle
Efforts to Stave off Disaster
Special Focus

Threat of Economic Breakdown

Political Ills Arising from Economic Problems

Britain has experienced such a succession of shocks since the end of World War II that it is difficult even for Anglophiles to grasp the full measure of the current crisis. Britain's long-established democratic and parliamentary institutions may ultimately be undermined if economic problems grow more critical and further erode public confidence in the ability of the political system to deal with them. The people are being subjected to the worst inflation in their history, to record postwar unemployment levels, and to falling production and declining business investment.

Britons see this combination of problems coming to a head early next year. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healy, has said 1976 will be the country's most critical year since 1940, when Britain stood virtually alone against the might of Nazi Germany. The growth of political extremism has added to, and perhaps fed upon, the pervasive discontent. The killing in Northern Ireland has spilled over into England in the form of terrorist bombings, even in central London. Parliament, returning from its summer recess on Oct. 13, will engage in the coming session in a prolonged debate over how far to go toward meeting nationalist demands in Scotland and Wales for self-rule. Lord Robens, chairman of the Vickers industrial complex and a former government minister, has gone so far as to say: “We are almost at the stage of the Weimar Republic before Hitler. The political consequences of that are a dictatorship of the right or left. I wouldn't care to say which.”

The British face the challenge ahead with a lack of confidence that results from a long and nagging national failure. For a generation both the Labor and Tory governments have prescribed a succession of remedies for the nation's chronic ills and none of them has worked. The consequence is that in 25 years Britain has slipped from being the second-richest nation in Europe, behind Sweden, to being one of the poorest. Britain's plight has become the subject of an almost endless stream of assessments both at home and abroad, especially in America. Among the recent commentaries columnist Vermont Royster wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Britain's undoing is its own doing. It has been brought to this by the calculated policies of its government and by their resigned acceptance by the people.”