(2 of 9)
Back on the Dole. Britain's insecurity has been exacerbated by 14 long months of haggling with the Europeans. Swallowing their pride and reversing centuries-old tradition, the British decided in mid-1961 to cross the Channel and make common cause with the Continent. Then last week, just as they were within sight of their goal, Charles de Gaulle of France contemptuously closed the door on perfidious Albion.
Even at home, the storm signals were flying. Once again the lines of unemployed workers are lengthening outside labor exchanges. The half-forgotten word "dole" is back in the language. Britain's overall unemployment rate of 2.6%, though mild by U.S. standards, is at a four-year peak and still rising. Moreover, most of the 600,000 men without jobs are concentrated in a few dozen "black spots" in the north, where in some communities up to 14% of the work force is on the dole ($13 a week for a married man).
In Merseyside, amid the dingy jungle of slums that surrounds Liverpool, unemployed dock workers pick through garbage tips in hopes of finding salable salvage. Shipyards are working at half capacity; 15 new factories are shuttered. In the northeastern shipbuilding cities of Hartlepool and West Hartlepool, 13.7% of the male work force is idle. The last new ship built there was completed 18 months ago.
In affluent Britain, unemployment is even harder to take than it was in Depression days, when hardship was the rule rather than the exception. "Today," says Joe Dyson, a Hartlepool shipyard plater, "we have been leading different lives, with nice little homes and little luxuries. A man on the dole now has more to lose than he ever owned in the '30s."
Brave New Nothing. It was with grim memories of the Depression, and of the "submerged third" of the population which was chronically undernourished before the war, that the first postwar Labor government engineered the most far-reaching social upheaval since the Industrial Revolution. In today's welfare state —or the "opportunity state," as the Tories prefer to call it—physical and material well-being is shared by all segments of society for the first time in British history, blurring the once rigid frontiers between Disraeli's "two nations" of privileged and poor.
In this "peaceful, humdrum, hell-free, deChristianized life," as Culture Pundit Sir Kenneth Clark describes it, many Britons feel merely fretful and frustrated. In the euphoric '50s, a new crop of playwrights and novelists, mostly from the grubby lower reaches of provincial life, hammered furiously at the deadening smugness of their society. It was a time when many of their countrymen were groping for a new sense of purpose and national identity. "Nobody thinks, nobody cares," cried Jimmy Porter, the non-hero of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. "There aren't any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it'll just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you."