Britons are too happy

It strikes me that we don't hear much any more about New Year resolutions and yet only a generation or two ago this was the time when parents, and even chums, used to say, 'And what is your New Year's resolution?'

In my boyhood, there were certain automatic answers. You told your parents it was not to smoke or to get your homework done on Friday night so that the weekend larking around was not plagued by guilt. It was always something you invented mostly to show that you meant to improve your character, which in both Britain and America then was a flourishing industry. But in spite of these quaint protestations, people were much the same as they are today and making your parents feel relieved was the main thing. To your chums, you had more realistic aims, to put together a complete collection of cigarette cards of the days' sporting heroes or to... to make the first eleven, or to try and collect all the works of Bix Beiderbecke. 

There's a hangover of this Victorian tradition which is peculiar to commentators and I've noticed that among my journalistic friends its coming on is indicated by a chronic cough and fiddling around unnecessarily with papers and newspaper cuttings. The time has come to review the year and say where we've come and where we're going. This impulse is so compelling among journalists that few of us stop to ask ourselves if it adds anything at all to human knowledge. 

Well, through a rather lazy Christmas time, I've had the chance to do a lot of desultory reading and as usual most of it's been done in history, biography and the memoirs of living or lately dead statesmen. I suppose that from half a dozen books I've read or skimmed, there isn't one which didn't wind up saying what was wrong with the world and how it could be put right. And yet all these public men were writing about events of 20, 30 years ago and it's plain as can be now that what they thought was wrong at the time was not what it later turned out to be and their last chapters were recipes for curing the wrong diseases. 

And if the men and women on the inside of government sense so little the real movements that are going on in the world till they get up and hit you, how much less can people on the outside of government, including commentators and journalists, how much less can they know of what's going on under their noses – or perhaps just now I should say 'behind the closed doors' – of the White House or 10 Downing Street or the Lok Sabha. 

I've been reading some pretty lurid stuff lately including a novel about a black childhood in America and a very solemn history of horror movies, but nothing, for sheer excitement, has touched a work I came on for the first time, and which I recommend to anybody over, say, 50, who thinks he knows what was going on in Britain during the first three years of the Second World War. It bears a thrilling title, namely – wait for it! – 'The War Cabinet Papers from 1940-1942', from roughly the evacuation from Dunkirk to the victory of El Alamein. I thought I'd read up this period pretty thoroughly, apart from the fact that I was there and writing all the time and I marvel that politicians, the politicians in the government anyway, are so tolerant of us journalists and often treat us as equals. 

Incidentally, though we've all come to moderate our idolatry of Mr Churchill and we know, by now, that he could be impulsive and maddening and dictatorial, still, I never realised, never before appreciated the tremendous burdens of decision he bore from dawn to midnight, day after day, year after year. 

From the newspapers of the time and from my memories, I should have said that Churchill, once he was prime minister, was worried about getting the expeditionary force out of France but apart from that colossal and frightening duty, a general is screaming that nobody's paying attention to his division trapped in Northern France. Somebody else is nagging the PM about a possible invasion of Greece, another soldier, organising the home defences, reports that we'll have to build concrete emplacements all along the south coast of England, while another general is saying the Germans will go in through Ireland and the north-west coast. A Cabinet minister reports that London has three anti-aircraft guns. A military deputation is cabling from India that 'must have guns and ammunition'. Reconnaissance shows German tanks and landing craft moving into the Channel ports. There are practically no tanks in England. Malta is cabling the prime minister, 'How about us?' And the Navy's at him about the best way to defend the Mediterranean bases and, in odd moments, Churchill is firing off cables to Roosevelt saying, 'Help!' And so on and so on. 

Now all this may seem dead history and a long way from 1978, but what it tells me is that there is no need whatsoever to review the American year or anybody else's year, because in a month or two, we'll discover not so much that we were wrong in our comments, as that we were commenting on the unimportant things. 

But there's one American commentator who has shifted his telescope to Britain and what he has to say is as refreshing as it's unexpected. It's unexpected because it's not what you expect any conservative, American or British, to say, ever, about Britain and British society. He is Mr George F. Will. 

He's young. He's a sharp and thoughtful writer. He has a wry wit, but not at the expense of a freewheeling intelligence and he's just been in London. I'll try and give you the gist of his piece which has the tantalising title of 'How unhappy should Britons be?' He begins by recalling a time, in the late 1940s, when I suspect Mr Will was about seven, when Mr Churchill, who was then the opposition leader, asked some assistant for statistics on infant mortality. The young man obliged and Churchill looked them over in despair. 'Young man,' he said, 'when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was prime minister than when anyone else was prime minister. That is a political statistic.' 

Well, Mr Will goes on to notice what is all too true, that foreigners – interested, but rarely disinterested – love to collect economic statistics about Britain in order to mourn over them. Americans, in particular, he notices, love to... to score points off Britain and hold her up as a warning example of the wages of sin. And the sin is that of using too much of the national income on social services and financing those services through punitive taxation. 

By the way, he points out that while Britain taxes at a rate of 38 per cent of its gross national product, some West European countries – Germany, Sweden, for instance – tax much higher, but Mr Will doesn't think Britain's troubles rise from an excessive provision for social welfare. He thinks they've been coming on for a century or so, ever since the vote made people think that their pay was not merely for work done but should also pay for social wages like pensions and medical services. 

Britain's problems arise, he believes, from a failure if you like, nothing more or less than a failure to match the huge economic growth of most other European nations, competitors, but – and it's rare for a conservative to say this – he's quite sure that the quality of life for most people, for 'most' people, has risen more since VE Day than it rose between the Battle of Waterloo and VE Day. Even so, Britain has not been getting rich as fast as her neighbours. 

In other words, how keenly do Britons regret lagging behind? Most Americans, he says, assume that the British must be as unhappy about this situation as Americans would be if they were in it. Americans, he concludes, are sort of sore that the British aren't as unhappy as they should be. And what do Americans do about it when they look on this warning example? Well, they fear they may go the same way and they begin to exercise what Mr Will calls 'a growing desire for a shift back in favour of personal, rather than public, disposal of income.' In other words, they don't want government to take most of their money and then spend it on their behalf. And this is true not only of personal wants, but of providing public services. 

We've just had an hilarious example of it. A young New York couple, like millions of other Americans and I guess Britons too, have become increasingly frustrated by the decline in the postal services. Lovers hang on the mail for days on end, businessmen howl that a letter mailed to an address six blocks away takes four or five days to arrive. Well, the Brennans – that's their name – the Brennans, of course, pay taxes to maintain a postal service that does not serve, so last year the Brennans started their own postal service. Now the cost of a letter anywhere in the United States is 13 cents. The Brennans whipped around businesses and promised to deliver letters the same day downtown for 10 cents. They have 300 customers, they don't depend on messenger services, which depends on a telephone call and the cost of that. They drive around town, they and two helpers. They deliver over 2,000 letters a day. They are satisfied, the customers are delighted. 

You think this is a heartening example of good old Yankee enterprise, initiative? Not so. It is deeply anti-social. So said a judge who stopped them from unfair competition. With whom? With the United States postal service. The Post Office says the law gives it a monopoly. But isn't monopoly in restraint of trade a well-known American sin punishable by the courts? It depends which courts you go to. The Brennans say that the Post Office monopoly is unconstitutional and allows for an unlawful tax on the users of its services. And they're taking it up with a higher court. 

And at this point, I abandon all pretence of objectivity. I pray as a New Year's resolution that the Brennans win. I trust the social services of the Post Office get a bust in the chops. 

Otherwise, a Happy New Year to you all.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

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