BRITAIN: Harold Wilson: 'A Sense of Timing'

"The Englishman's truly distinctive disease is his cherished habit of waiting until the 13th hour," wrote British Historian Arnold Toynbee last November. Events have since proved him right. It took a serious pound scare and a disastrous inflation rate of 26% to prod Britain's Labor government into coming up with what Prime Minister Harold Wilson called "a plan to save our country" from a "general economic catastrophe of incalculable proportions" (TIME, July 21). Last Tuesday, after two days of passionate, often bitter debate, the House of Commons approved the government's emergency package by a vote of 264 to 54,...