(6 of 9)
During the past year there have been other signs that the nation is growing increasingly impatient with many of the flourishing inconveniences and inequities that make life not so good in Britain. Highways are so crowded that by 1980 there will be only 18 inches of main road for every car. (However the government announced last week that it has approved an 80-mile bridle path across the Sussex downs.) The tax system of Britain blatantly favors the gambler, speculator (whose capital gains are exempt) and expense-account swashbuckler.
Of nearly 4,000,000 houses that were built before 1880, 50% have no bathrooms, and at least 500,000 are officially designated as slums. Britain in the next 20 years will have to build a minimum of 300,000 houses a year. The shortage is compounded by a steady influx of office buildings into downtown areas and an exodus of city dwellers to the suburbs, where land grows ever more scarce and costly. Outside London, the government may even be compelled to build new towns in the Green Belts, as Britons call the jealously preserved rural areas around their cities.
One of Britain's most perplexing problems is the lopsided growth of the Southeast, which already has 27% of the island's population and attracted 80% of all the new office buildings that have gone up in the past decade. Though the government offers massive incentives to industries willing to settle in the north, it has had little success. In Birmingham or London, Britons do not have to be told that they never had it so good. The message is in every store window, crowded restaurant and shiny traffic jam.
Nonetheless, Britain's prosperity is poised on a knife edge. In the past decade, its economy has grown only 2½% per year on average; in 1962 it rose only 1%, whereas in the Common Market even a 4% growth rate is considered disappointing. Since 1950, balance-of-payments crises have brought Britain to the brink of bankruptcy six times. By draconian measures the government succeeded last year in boosting exports 3% for a new $11 billion postwar record, helping to maintain gold and hard-currency reserves. However, it was only able to achieve stability by cutting back credit and curbing industrial expansion. "Other countries have had their economic miracles." sighs a Manchester journalist. "Britain has had its crises."
Britain needed urgently to expand its markets and broaden its shaky financial base. Once inside Europe, British industry was confident that it could substantially boost exports to the Six. It also anticipated a heavy influx of investment capital from U.S. and other foreign companies eager to have a British toehold in the Common Market. If Britain were finally excluded from Europe, investment would continue to dwindle and Britain might be forced as a result to make drastic cuts in its living standards. Meanwhile, it may either retreat behind high tariff walls or else return to its classic ideal of free trade, possibly in association with the U.S. and European nations outside the market.