In the search, which we must all now be making, for a simple explanation, or a vivid visual image, of the facts that control our take-home pay, our standard of living, and our prospects for the future, an aerial press photograph published on Friday told me more, at one glance, than I found comfortable.
It showed some of a batch of 10,000 cars, parked near Coventry because they could not be sold. The company is said to have produced 30,000 vehicles which are so far unsold. All these cars ╤ and more also from other makers ╤ are awaiting buyers who would have to drive them on our crowded roads using petrol which must be imported, is too expensive for economic use, and could be made still dearer or quite unobtainable at one strike from OPEC. At the same time, some workers in the car industry are striking to protect their standard of living, as Hugh Scanlon explained yesterday.
No one photograph could show more concisely the flimsy assumptions on which so much of our society is based:
1. That more and more people will earn enough to be able to afford cars;
2. That the public will support the spending of enough social capital to finance the road and parking system needed for so many cars;
3. That we shall always be able to import enough petrol at a reasonable price to run all these cars;
4. That an increase in car ownership is a condition of the fuller life that all the politicians, Communists included, promise us;
5. That since we had cheap petrol once, Britain must be made strong enough to get it again.
No political party, and no trade union, has made a point of warning its members that it is at least risky for a country which has had, so far, to import all its petrol, simply to bank on producing more and more cars. Naturally, Coventry, Oxford and Luton want this to happen. The unions and investors in the car industry want it to happen, and the politicians want it to happen so that vast redundancies in the car industry can be avoided.
To look from the air at that field of unwanted cars made me wonder, for a moment, how Britain ever became rich in the first place. The British car industry, like that of the Japanese, depends on a one-way flow towards the importers, and this is flat contrary to the pattern of trade on which Britain grew rich. Our ships once left British ports with valuable merchandise and came back loaded with the goods of foreign parts for use here, or for processing and re-export. With oil the story is quite different. The tankers come, unload (at mounting cost to consumers here) and sail away ╤ empty.
The mind clouds at the thought of what the shipmasters of London, Glasgow and Bristol would have said, one or two hundred years ago, about the arrival in a British port of the equivalent of one modern tanker, say, the Globtik Tokyo (476,292 tons), which unloaded and then departed without even half a pound of Orkney cheese on it to sell abroad.
Britain grew rich over the years because of her wool, fish, tin, coal, her seamen, her fighters, her small population, her craftsmen and inventors. The imports she needed could be bought cheap for a variety of reasons, including colonialism. The terms of trade and politics have now changed. The British are not the only people who want sugar, for example.
No one can blame the coalminers at home for cherishing what remains of their economic power. One of Kipling╒s jingles, like a TV advertisement, points to our change of life:
╥Oh, where are you going to all you Big Steamers, With England╒s own coal, up and down the salt seas?╙
╥We are going to fetch you your bread and butter,
Your beef, pork and mutton, eggs, apples and cheese.╙
In Kipling╒s time, ╥England╒s own coal╙ could buy quite a lot of groceries overseas. Between 1909 and 1913 the annual average export of coal was 65.5 million tons, with a peak of nearly 73.5 million tons in 1913; total exports in 1973-4 were 2.1 million tons, having fallen from a post-war peak of 19.2 million tons in 1949.
I am not one of those who believe that the British are now the idlest people in the world, and have lost in luxury the inventive power and enterprise they once had. Most of us do not live in luxury even yet, and an inventor will invent: certainly the criminal finds ways to outwit the security technologists. But nobody should waste a single moment in the belief either that the world will guarantee us an easy living because we are so nice, tolerant, democratic, and poetic; or that we can ever again force the world to behave in that way.
