An English burglar recently broke into a games manufacturing company and stole a fortune—in fake Monopoly money. The crook's confusion is not as funny as it sounds. So serious is Britain's continuing inflation that the current gibe by critics is that Monopoly pounds may soon be worth as much as the real thing.
Inspired by the early success of U.S. controls, Edward Heath's Conservative government has imposed a variety of price restraints. Even so, food prices have gone up 7.2% since January, and consumer prices as a whole 4.3%. The inflation rate is still 9% per year. To slow it, Heath this month announced his Phase III—to a national chorus of "Let's-wait-and-see" doubts. Sometimes indeed it seems as if the whole country is suffering from what Author Arthur Koestler calls the "Struthonian Effect" —or the Ostrich Syndrome.*
Inflation, caused at least in part by the worldwide rise in commodity prices, is only one of Heath's problems. Projections show that if the economy does not pick up, Britain, which started off the '60s as one of the richer countries in Europe, within a decade or so may be competing with Portugal and Spain for last place in terms of per capita wealth. In the past decade, Britain's gross national product has risen more slowly than any other European nation's, and the country has had the lowest growth in such consumer goods as cars, telephones and television sets.
Britain's wage costs have risen faster than those of any other major industrial country in the world during the past three years. In a recent speech Victor Lord Rothschild, head of the government's think tank, the Central Policy Review Staff, declared: "In 1985, we shall have half the economic weight of France or Germany. Our difficulties and dangers are as severe and ominous as they were in World War II, though, of course, of a different sort."
Heath's solution has been to push Britain into the Common Market—a step he accomplished last January—and give a hearty shove to industrial expansion with subsidies and tax incentives. Though he now claims that "the results are beginning to show," all that his opponents can see is inflation and the huge Common Market trucks that now lumber along sleepy English roads. So big are the Continental juggernauts that ancient English villages are literally being shaken to their foundations. Instead of decreasing, as everyone expected, popular opposition to the Common Market has grown into a clear majority.