78
PARTISAN REVIEW
panicular, have managed to extract wage increases that have
compensated for losses in purchasing power. They have, so
to
speak,
exported the cost of inflation
to
other strata whose market capacity
is weaker. By contrast, white collar strata, especially in nonunionized
sectors, shopkeepers, pensioners, the retired, the inhabitants of small
towns and provincial backwaters have suffered serious setbacks in
their traditional standard of living.
Such reductions in living standards in a period of continuing
creeping inflation are not a matter of economics alone. Decline in
income, but also in savings, upsets the capacity of these people to
plan rationally for their future, and it upsets their traditional
standing and rank in the existing scheme of things. The welfare state,
to be sure, has set a floor for the standard of living below which only
certain marginal groups-recent immigrants in particular-are likely
to
fall. But even in this respect there are some danger signs. The
national health service, for example, is in a crisis ; the waiting lists at
understaffed hospitals have been lengthening, and the brightest and
most promising of young medical people have begun to emigrate, or
at least to entertain the thought of emigration. Moreover, the bottom
set by the welfare state is pretty low, much lower than the standards
to which the bulk of the population has become accustomed. This is
why things begin to look nasty indeed .
True, the Labour government has passed, or is about to pass, a
number of worthwhile measures. Land speculation, for example,
which in recent years has returned enormous profits to skilled
operators, will be seriously curbed by a bill now passing through the
last stages of consideration in Westminster. But as a whole , Harold
Wilson's government has seemed so far to be as helpless in the face of
inflation as everybody else. Wilson has now persuaded the major
unions to limit their wage claims and to accept a most un–
Rousseauian "social contract" of voluntary restraint.
It
may work, of
course, but I have not met many Labour supporters who really believe
that it will. Such restraints seem to me to have a chance only
if
there
is a general sense of social solidarity, a kind of Durkheimian consen–
sus as did exist during the war. But I see no evidence of this. On the
contrary, the contentions between classes and strata seem to be more
pronounced today than they have been since the Great Depression .
People may no longer feel ''I'm alright, Jack," but they certainly
