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Today Britain is the strongest and most reliable U.S. ally, although Laborite suspicion of non-Socialist European countries acts as a brake on European economic cooperation.
Foreign policy, however, is scarcely an issue in the present campaign. In the assault on Labor's record-at-home by Conservative campaigners, voters will hear attacks in these three sections:
1) The economy as a whole.
2) Nationalization.
3) The welfare state.
There have been three great economic crises which will stand, fairly or unfairly, as black marks against the Socialist government's handling of the nation's economy. First there was the fuel crisis (February 1947), which brought the whole nation to a grinding halt in the depth of a terrible winter. Then came the convertibility crisis (August 1947), when the financial reserves drained away at an alarming rate until exchange control was quickly restored to plug the leak. Finally, there was last September's devaluation.
The average Briton is likely to assume that the government at the wheel must be to blame for these recurring jolts. But then his memory of each jolt tends to fade quickly as soon as the road gets smoother. The task of the Conservatives in this election is to make vivid recall of these crises to show, if they can, that they were blunders characteristic of Labor's rule.
Remember the Brontosaurus. Geoffrey Crowther, brilliant editor of the Economist, in a series of broadcasts this month put the British economic situation in careful perspective. Said he:
"In my opinion there isn't very much that's wrong with the British economy. Or rather, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there's plenty that's right with it ... Everyone who wants a job has a job and that's a great improvement on some past periods . . . There's rarely been a time when there was so little real poverty in the country as today . . .
"What I find alarming in the present state of affairs is the failure of the British economic machine to, adapt itself to the new circumstances of the postwar world . . . The salient fact is that those efforts [we have made] have not been enough . . . Our system is stiff and rigid and unadaptable. We all know what happened to the brontosaurus because he could not adapt himself to new circumstances, and the fear that I have about the British economy is that it is getting a little into the state of the brontosaurus . . .