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Britain's Struggle for Survival: The Labor Government After Three Years
- Abstract
It is characteristic of our age that at the time of the 1945 General Election one could see fairly clearly what problems the Labor government was facing, and that it is just as difficult today as it was then to predict either success. or failure. This is the age of the unresolved dilemma, of the struggle which never slows down and never leads to a decision. It is as though the world were suffering from a disease which is simultaneously acute, chronic, and not fatal.
In Britain we have lived for three years in a state of almost continuous crisis, like one of those radio serials in which the hero falls over a precipice at the end of each instalment. The supreme calamity is, of course, always averted, but the end of the story never seems to be any nearer. Bankruptcy has been put off and put off by American loans, by “austerity,” and by the spending of reserves, and when those expedients cease to work it may be put off still further, possibly for decades, by a successful drive for exports: but the fundamental problem of making Britain genuinely solvent without sinking the standard of living to an unbearably low level remains untouched.
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