Foreign News: A New Outlook

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Spring had come gently to Britain. Chestnuts were pushing out baby buds, and clotted cream was off the ration and was being spread thickly on Devonshire scones. Talk of peace (if not peace itself) was in the air. A queen would soon be crowned; the sound of hammering could be heard all over Mayfair as viewing stands went up.* Rab Butler's budget matched what seemed to be a common British resolve: to make the coronation year a gala occasion.

Britons did not fool themselves about their new budget. When it came down to plain shillings and pence, the tax cuts were small; no Briton was going to need larger pockets. But the tax cuts were a well-timed tonic for the British spirit. A London lady read about them, calculated that they would save her £70 this year, and promptly asked a painter to paint the front of her house for the £70.

Risks and Gain. Whether Rab Butler's budget results in a durable coronation-year glow or a mere one-day spark depends largely on a gamble he is deliberately taking. He wants tax savings plowed back into business, not distributed as profits.

But Britain's business and labor alike have grown unused to the risks —and gains—of an adventuresome economy. Through years of encroaching government, they have become accustomed to subsidized industry, protected markets, guaranteed full employment. Recently, Rab Butler's new National Productivity Council tried to persuade union representatives that more and cheaper production is Britain's only hope. The council got nowhere, for union men have long memories of un employment and living on "bread and drip." Said one delegate: "If you ask a Tyneside worker to turn a ship around in two weeks instead of four, he wants to know what you would expect him to do with the other fortnight.''

It is the same with many businessmen. The 39-year-old boss of a family-owned box factory in Cheshire knows that he could double his business. "That wouldn't thrill me," he says. "I consider myself normally British in that I don't want to get too big . . . We have always been able to sell all we wanted. Where you get people who have been working together for a long time, you just can't break them of their habits. There is a tempo that goes with the business and gets ingrained into it . . ."

In a Rut. Yet there were signs that some winds were blowing Rab Butler's way. "We are getting out of our immediate difficulties," said Stephen Burman, a Midlands industrialist, last week, "and we can retrieve our place as a leading world power if we get down to it. But we have had life too easy; there has been a safety-first attitude . . . Every year I send a manager either to the Continent or to the U.S. to look for the best machinery for the job we do ... but many others are in a rut and won't follow the lead.

"A new outlook is needed here ... I think our younger executives are beginning to get the spirit . . . Mind you, if we do wake up, all of us, then heaven help the rest of the world." If there was enough of that spirit around the old islands, Rab Butler could plan on even better news to relate in the second year of the Elizabethan Age, come Budget Day, 1954.