Great Britain: The Shock of Today

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The signs and symbols of prosperity are everywhere in Britain, crowding the past, complicating the present. Along rolling Roman roads and winding country lanes, past sleeping Norman churches and whitewashed farms, weekend traffic flows like an invading army. London's raw new office buildings jostle Georgian mansions; a Hilton hotel stares impertinently down onto Buckingham Palace. Bowling alleys and dance halls are packed each night of the week. On city rooftops, TV antennas stand as thick as the English archers at Agincourt.

In one decade, the number of cars on the roads has doubled (to 6,000,000), though the entire island boasts only 190 miles of expressway. Most Britons earn twice as much as they did in 1949, and they are gambling and betting their lolly at the stupefying rate of $3 billion a year. One of London's most exquisite 18th century houses opened recently as an opulent gambling club. In the past two years, bingo palaces and betting shops have mushroomed throughout the country, which some now call "the windfall state." These days, more than 3,500,000 "insular" Britons go abroad each year—mostly to the Continent, where darts and marmalade and tea at 4:30 are now an accepted part of the rites of summer. Britons are better educated and in better health than ever before—and need pay no doctors' bills.

Yet, for all their heady new affluence, the British today feel disturbed and insecure. Their troubled mood is indefinable but inescapable. It is a sense of unease in which is blended the awareness of national decline, the conscious sense of failure to find new outlets for their energies, a feeling that many of their hallowed institutions and traditions are increasingly irrelevant to a formidably changed world.

Two Rings. The nation's commerce and industry, its education and ethics, were all developed to meet the challenge of global power. Its history books and literature reverberate with the names of soldier-heroes and the battlefields on which they won and held an empire: Omdurman and Lucknow, Quebec, Khartoum, Mafeking. In every corner of their island, statues and street names still celebrate a glory that has passed. "You used to open the atlas," muses a Manchester businessman, "and half the world was red. Now Britain is just a little red speck off the coast of Europe."

Suez cruelly demonstrated to the world that it takes power to be a Power. But even then, Britons could not come to terms with the harsh reality of vanished might. Their feeling of shock today is all the greater because it has been so long delayed. As if by some malevolent design, a whole series of frustrations and failures has beset Britannia in a few short months, deepening the nation's angst. The abrupt U.S. cancellation of the Skybolt missile rudely exposed the fact that Britain's "independent" nuclear deterrent is in fact almost wholly dependent on Washington. There was a time when U.S. Presidents sought Britain's counsel—and even approval—before taking any major initiative in world affairs; in the Cuban crisis, the most perilous of the last few years, the celebrated Jack-Mac telephone rang just twice.