Ageing Albion
By BERNARD LEVIN
Fon. years now we have been told that the bloody country is going to the bloody dogs. Yaurig people are disrespectful to their elders, surtax is ruining us, they're letting the niggers in all over the place, and when we try to teach the wogs a lesson, just look what happens. The 1°rY Party's gone bolshie, de Gaulle and Adenauer are carving up Europe between them. half PM has to take orders from a damn Yankee ualI his age, the biggest merchant banker in the city is a Hamburg Jew, and Willie Home's play comes off soon after coming on. Those of us who have long believed that this catalogue, though perfectly true, contains many cif the facts that make the country still worth living in, who feel that whatever the Labour Government's faults at least it has to its credit that it did give the Empire away, who follow the successive chapters of the Argylls' marital rela- tions with a devotion and relish that an earlier age reserved for the numbers of David Copper- field, and feel that while it can provide such bad, the aristocracy cannot be wholly uad, whose only interest in a religious revival Is a hope that if one takes place it will start, or at any rate finish, with the Reverend Timothy Beaumont being burned at the stake, who actually prefer the Germans to the Danes, who are glad Britain is a second-class power, who cheered when Hugh Fraser bought Harrods, even if only in the hope (which has since proved vain) that he would abolish a system of payment that was out of date in the reign of King Stephen, Whn think, in short, that everything which the h 1°°cIY-dogs school of thought finds bad is good, iind everything it finds good is bad, we have ong riciWn that history was on our side, that the etkintry was positively hurrying into the \s'entieth century with a smile on its face, and that it was quite possible, and indeed even likely, t at the Prime Minister was not such a fool as hn e looked. The battle is over, the right side has Wan, and all that remains is a prolonged rh°PPing-up operation. And here comes a chopper to chop off our heads. It is wielded by Mr. Anthony Sampson*, 40,Than with what must be a satisfying number i; achievements under his belt for one born in 4.,26- He was the distinguished editor of Drum daring the years of its greatest significance, his knowledge on Africa have contributed greatly to our 0,tiumiledge and understanding of the wind of a'tange, and might indeed be said to have puffed 1„tungful or two into it, and for three years he I," a weekly column in the Observer—l'able 41IC Now he has taken no slighter a theme than .41 the words with which he starts—`the work- ID11 of Britain—who runs it and how, how they is tall, there, and how they are changing.' The order tb tall, and no one will be less surprised than it.e author to learn that he has not entirely filled b' Who could? Nor will followers of Pendennis e astonished to discover that his disarming soatcrnentwell aware that among roughly 40'°°0 facts some will inevitably have errors' is t to be put down to mock-modesty (there is ton . (I- Jur ANATOMY and Sto OF BR htonITAIN. B .)y Anthony Samp- todder ug, 35s one hilarious paragraph, about Mr. Sidney Bernstein, which is wrong in almost every single factual particular, and it is not unique). But withal, Mr. Sampson has written a good book, and which is more, a necessary one. For his thesis, which he argues with great cogency and no heat, is that the bloody country is going to the bloody dogs after all. The difference between his argument, however, and that of those with whom I started is in the identity of the dogs.
Mr. Sampson's dog is one which is to some extent unavoidable. Many of the most important British institutions—Parliament, the trade unions, the educational system, the City, the Treasury—were built, or developed their essen- tial characters, in a different age. This in itself is of no importance; there is nothing wrong with an institution's being old. There is nothing wrong, for that matter, with its being surrounded by ancient and outmoded ceremonial, like the Royal Family or the law, for such things are picturesque and harmless (it is typical of the silliness outside their real work of people like Mr. John Osborne that they spend so much time being exercised about the monarchy, which has long since ceased to hold any real interest, let alone significance, for a serious student of our society). But the danger in continuing to use ancient instruments for governing, making, organising, running, lies in the fact that most of them were developed to meet a particular set of challenges and problems, and that while the challenges have been changing, the institutions have not. They are consequently out of date, in the most significant and harmful meaning of the phrase.
This Mr. Sampson demonstrates. But the cunning of his method is that he does not argue. His method is descriptive, not analytical; for the most part he comes no closer to comment than a neatly-planted zeugma (the Belgian royal family, unlike our own, 'is attended by a large household and heated controversy'), and when he does go so far as to comment, about the Immi- gration Bill (`contemptible'), or Mr. Butler (`per- petual ambiguity'), the result has great force, not only because he has chosen his ground so well, but also—and mainly—because for the most part he has not stood on that kind of ground at all.
His method is to pile up the facts, higher and higher, big and little ones, important and un- important, familiar and strange, right and wrong, until he has a mound of them about so high. Then he gives a little push, and stands back, and the whole thing comes tumbling down. There are individual cases, treated by this method, which are gems of unstated statement; his account of the struggle over British Aluminium, for instarice, is a frighteningly illuminating account of what happens when people like Lord Portal stop being soldiers and become business- men, and when firms like Lazards try to 'save British Aluminium for civilisation' by the un- conventional method of selling it to an American firm offering less than the take-over bidders. Or take his account of the honours system, in its declining Macmillan days; the reader gets a fine sense of the shabby unimportance of gaining a set of initials borne equally by a rabble of politi-
cal hacks in the nastier corners of Leicestershire, but he can search Mr. Sampson's words in vain for the precise point at which the author makes his own views plain.
Yet his views are plain, for all that. Britain is faced with a vast range of problems, industrial, financial, social, political, diplomatic, military.
She is failing hopelessly to meet some of them. This is largely the fault of the men who run the
country and the way in which they run it, or, more justly, of the rigidity and inflexibility of our institutions and methods, which have made the men what they are. He rejects the con- spiracy theory so beloved of Tribune; but he erects a far more alarming, as well as convincing, one in its place. Indeed, one of the threads that runs through the book is the bewilderment of many of those whom the conspiracy-theory would indict, who instead of meeting hard- facedly in panelled rooms to carve up the coun- try spend much of their time wondering what has hit them. (If anybody thinks that the Civil Service is hidebound in its jargon and its
bureaucracy, he should look at Mr. Sampson's description of Shell, whose `deadening fatuity'— the phrase, untypically, is Mr. Sampson's—has changed letters reading 'we would prefer to defer •
alteration of these prices until the necessity occurs' to 'we suggest that the question of possible alterations to the present transfer prices should be considered in the event of competi- tion arising when they may be reviewed in the light of the situation at that time.') Bagehot is Mr. Sampson's hero (I can think of many worse), and Bagehot was quite worried enough about the state of the country a century ago. If Bagehot could see us now, Mr. Sampson implies (incidentally, I am sad that like everybody else in this country—it really is going to the dogs—he thinks that `infer' and 'imply' mean the same thing, and while I am on the subject I do wish he had not become besotted with the word "peck-order') he would be even more worried, and would have every right to be.
But what to do about it? Ah. Going into Europe may help, of course, by a kind of throw-'em-in-the-deep-end effect. If the present Government were sufficiently unselfish—honest, you might almost say—they could do something about it. If the Labour Party were less rigidly conservative and a good deal more intelligent, they might. If the conspiracy-theory were true, if groups of men did really meet and plan the future of the country, that might do it, too. But of course, one of the merits of a book like Mr.
Sampson's is that it shows. us all that the problems are not susceptible of that kind of solution, that there is nobody to say 'Let there be light,' and even if there were there would be fifty more who, with the best will in the world, would in fact produce darkness. We can only hope that enough of us will see the danger in time, that the tempo of change and reconstruc- tion will quicken, that some serious long-range looking into the country's future will take place, and that the results will start to become apparent before the bloody dogs get us all. Mr. Sampson, in his provision of so much of the vital information, has certainly done his bit. Now who's for tennis?
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