GREAT BRITAIN: The Art of the Practical

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Above all, Britain seemed to be a nation of wheels: helmeted couples on motor scooters, farmers' wives on motor bikes, families wedged like chocolates in baby cars. In eight years of Tory rule the number of car owners in Britain had doubled; there is now a car for every 3½ families v. one for every seven families in 1951. Purchases of electrical appliances are up by a third, furniture by a fifth, largely financed on the "never-never," as Britons call the installment plan.

Off to the Midlands. Good times, piled atop the welfare state, have created a British social revolution of dimensions hardly foreseeable even five years ago. In thousands of new municipal housing estates, streets are jammed with parked cars: there are few garages, because builders never guessed that so many low-income renters could be car owners. Refrigerators and washing machines—luxuries reserved for the few when Labor last held power in 1951—are now commonplace in workers' homes despite a steep purchase tax. TV aerials, ten times as many as in 1951, march out over green farmlands where only a few years ago laborers' cottages were lighted with oil lamps.

Another facet of the new Britain is its increased social mobility. The slum dwellers of London's grimiest streets are moving in thousands to "new towns" in the countryside and to jobs in newly built chemical and plastic plants near by. In South Wales, where coalpit closings evoke bitter memories of post-World War I soup kitchens, Laborites now complain: "Our boys are going to the Midlands." And it was among the humming steel mills and automobile factories of the Midlands that the laboring man of property led the biggest swing to the Tories.

The Successful Greek. Such a panorama of peace and prosperity was a far cry from the bitter confusion that Macmillan inherited from Sir Anthony Eden in the aftermath of the Suez invasion less than three years ago. Not since Winston Churchill took office as German armies poured across Western Europe had a British Prime Minister gone to Downing Street under more unhappy circumstances. Unemployment was rising at home, living costs were rocketing toward record heights, the pound faltered as gold and dollar reserves plunged to a five-year low. Internationally, Britain's prestige was at its lowest ebb in modern history. The U.S. had publicly repudiated Britain, the alliance was strained, President Eisenhower had quietly refused to invite Eden and his ministers to Washington. The Commonwealth itself, led by India and Canada, had condemned Britain's act of violence.