Britain and America
Low ratings
Christopher Fildes
Britain's credit — economic, political, social — is being destroyed in the United States. For that, we have ourselves to blame. We need that credit, and we could still have much of it; but we are letting our case go by default.
As much can be discerned, dimly and intermittently, from home, when the latest American commentator publishes his latest draft of Britain's obituary. Such reports can be dismissed — as the Prime Minister has sometimes chosen to do — as cocktail-circuit chatter. Or they can be accepted as showing how deeply our problems trouble our great ally. The second is nearer the mark, but neither hits it.
To travel in the United States is to have our rating made salutarily and painfully clear. The importance of Europe recedes in the transatlantic perspective, and Britain looks no more important than anywhere else. Quite how we propose to carry on or muddle through is not thought a matter of any great consequence in itself. Some put it gently, some less so. "Why," comes the question in New York, "should we care about the ups and downs of a third-rate economic power which is bust anyway?"
Solvency, no doubt, is a topic that New Yorkers should have the grace to avoid. And certainly there still seems to be an audience for tales of British woe — Time magazine with a long and evocative report of the troubles of a Midland engineering works, the New York Times on the "evaporated euphoria" of the North Sea. The explanation comes from Washington: "Yes, indeed, people here are interested in what goes on in Britain, but that is because it makes a convenient bogey-man for the economists. They can all say, and they all do say: 'now, do as I tell you, and drink up your medicine, or you'll all grow up to be like the British'." British businessmen selling services to American customers confirm that answer. "Yes," says one, "that's exactly right, we're the awful warning." And another: "Britain and New York City are held out as the example of how to do everything wrong without really trying."
Our friends in all this are puzzled, dismayed, and anxious for information. "It must be terrible for you, over there," they say, "with that inflation — what is it now? Thirty-three per cent?" To answer that — correcting the figure to more than twice what the United States finds acceptable for itself — is to begin to understand the sensations of a refugee.
It is hard, thereafter, to take the philosophi
cal view of Britain's standing in America — that some of the criticism is just, that the rest will sort itself out, and that we only betray our insecurity by these constant glances at the transatlantic mirror. And such philosophy gets short shrift on the exchanges. The United States remains Britain's biggest single export market, and Britain the United States' biggest single area of direct investment outside North America. The tottering pound, the ten-shilling dollar are American attitudes to Britain expressed in action.
So whose business is it to set matters right? The impression is of unco-ordinated attempts, with varying degrees of success, mostly mounted from this side of the Atlantic. Thus the head of the Treasury, Sir Douglas Wass, has quietly joined the cause — preaching the British gospel to the bankers and industrialists of Pittsburgh. Sir Douglas's political master, Mr Denis Healey, used the International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington to say how patiently the unions were behaving while we waited for other economies to move forward and give us a tug — a display of Britain poor but honest in which the honesty seemed, on the day, to take second place. Mrs Thatcher's was another ambiguous performance: what, after all, would we think if a presidential candidate came to London saying that the United States had reached the eleventh hour, and democracy itself was on trial? It was a City of London initiative that resulted in twenty-one leaders of Anerican business being given a red-carpet tour of Britain, and if the visitors appear unconverted, perhaps the next such tour (coming soon) will do better. And an invasion of New York planned for late in the year — hard-sell for the City's services — may do better still. But all these tip-and-run raids on American opinion are no substitute for continuous and apparent effort on the spot.
That must reflect on Britain's permanent presence in the United States, our Washington embassy — reflect harshly, no doubt, for events may be casting the Ambassador and his staff in roles they never sought to play. British ambassadors in Washington have, as often as not, been public figures on one or both sides of the Atlantic. Such is not the present Ambassador's style (who, without prompting, would identify him as the Hon, Sir Peter Ramsbotham?). His Washington posting crowns a distinguished diplomatic career, and he is understood to be enviably well received by Dr Kissinger. But beating the drum, making sure that others beat it, even being convinced that it should be beaten — these may require other qualities. "I am sure," says a British-born businessman now flourishing in America, "that the embassy people are Nery good round the diplomatic circuit, and I know they are very nice people to meet at dinner-parties. But I never heard of them doing anything in public about American attitudes to Britain as a country which is incompetent, old-fashioned, pretty well bust, and no longer to be taken seriously." And an economic pundit with a national following puts it shortly: "Do you have an ambassador here, just now?"
To Sir Peter personally, that is no doubt cruelly unfair. But the cast of mind it reveals is a fact, and to change it will require a political decision. It will mean accepting that American criticism of Britain — cocktail-circuit or no — must in every sense be taken seriously; must be heeded when it is fair, must be refuted when it is false, must be met by a sustained effort to take our own initiative and make our own case. Events may force that decision on us; but how much better to take it now.
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