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THE POLITICAL EVENTS of the last half century, apart from the few dramatic moments, are apt to become confused in the recollection of those who have lived through them. British Politics, 1918 to 1964 by L. J. Macfarlane,* although intended mainly for the use of technical students obliged to know something of liberal studies, provides the general reader with a useful summary. The "progressive" tone of the writer, who is a tutor at Ruskin College, via the London School of Economics, is likely to help students who wish to show examiners that they are up-to-date in their attitude.

Mr. Macfarlane gives a clear picture of the main fluctuations of the power struggle, the personalities of the champions and their efforts to exploit opinion to the advantage of party or personal ambition as each crisis arose. The book might be compared to a military study intended to instruct officers in strategy and tactics. Chancellors like Philip Snowden, hampered by "academic economics," appear as handicaps to their parties; while exponents of modern weapons such as deficiency spending are shown as effective leaders. To maintain the currency, reduce expenditure and balance budgets, we are told, causes deflation, cuts back purchasing power and aggravates a bad economic situation. Since Mr. Macfarlane must know what examiners require, the authorities in education evidently regard these things as axioms. So modern economics endorses public dishonesty and to that extent influences history.

In his concluding remarks Mr. Macfarlane does not mention this or any other moral consideration. He ends on a note of optimism. The aims of earlier reformers, he says, have been achieved in the general affluence, (although some might say that science rather than political wisdom is the cause). As the Tory party is "the apostle of economic planning" and the Labour party emphasises control rather than nationalisation both are "reformists" and when out of office need fear no change likely to provoke them to break the rules of the game. He notices briefly that some persons are still homeless but does not link this in any way with the high prices of land which, as some published figures have shown, make it more difficult than before for persons of average means to find space to live. The plight of those on small fixed incomes is not mentioned; they are certainly not a political force likely to hamper the inflationary policies from which they suffer.

Although the rating question and the land question have aroused controversy throughout the period of Mr. Macfarlane's survey neither is mentioned. Perhaps this is because both allegedly reformist parties have patently failed in their efforts to meet these problems, so the political balance is unaffected.

Mr. Macfarlane notices that despite the growth in the national income the distribution of wealth has not greatly changed. Considering the amount of soak-the-rich legislation this suggests that there may be forces which escape political efforts to improve on economic law. Reading of the vast fortunes made by land speculation some persons might wonder if landowners are not wealthier than before.

A critically-inclined science student might notice from this book that deficiency spending with its related machinery, as a means of boosting the economy and "curing" unemployment, appears to be the only notable politico-economic discovery of the last half-century. Comparing this with the phenomenal progress of science he might be impressed by the contrast in the methods of enquiry. While politicians, without seriously challenging their existence, dismiss economic laws as irrelevant to modern conditions scientists continue to build on fixed or natural laws shown to be sound however old their discovery. On further investigation the student might find that inflationary policies such as manufacturing credit and debasing the currency have been practised by rulers since ages ago and reputable historians have always condemned the ultimate effects.

As politics is, in Lord Morley's phrase, "one long second-best," society owes much to those politicians who in that rough arena strive for sound principle as honestly as conditions allow. But politicians in general are the creations rather than the creators of history which is governed by the main flow of thought. "The movement of ideas," says Lord Acton, "is not the effect but the cause of public events." But we would add that this movement often derives from the effects created by deeper ideas or habitual assumptions not immediately apparent.

Surveyed from this standpoint the last half century marks as profound a change as one might find in any fifty years of British history. In 1918 as to-day land monopoly was unthinkingly accepted as natural by the general public. The subject was questioned in the Snowden Act of 1931 only to be effaced by the economic crisis; so its far-reaching effects persisted throughout the period. But the reversal of opinion on other subjects affecting the life and work of ordinary people can be summarised as progressive repudiation of the basic tendency, however confused, to regard thought and action as a personal responsibility, in favour of delegating this responsibility to rulers and their experts in the art of control: a repudiation, in fact, of the liberal ideals hitherto accepted as the especially British contribution to human progress.

War-time deterioration in thought was reflected in the success at the 1918 election of Lloyd George's vulgar appeal to make Germany pay for the war and by some wizardry, left hazy, to create "a land fit for heroes." But even in this atmosphere common sense was not abandoned. After four years of an inflationary regime of high prices and restrictions people were not prepared to accept government as the master rather than the servant of their interests, or to believe that producers and traders, competing at their own risk in a free market, were less capable than officials and monopolists of supplying personal requirements. The duty of government to work towards a stable currency and liberation of trade was acknowledged. Welfare measures including education were regarded as helps to the poorer sections, not regulations to be imposed on all. The normal citizen, with his savings protected by honest government and his living costs reduced by free competition was supposed to be capable of providing for himself and his family. Although some protective tariffs and subsidies were granted it was not contended that these were justified on economic grounds but for military defence. The Russian planned economy was condemned as absurd as it regarded trade as a collective not an individual operation.

And despite the immense problems created by unprecedented international debt, intensified by the protectionist madness of other countries, this British confidence in freedom under economic law proved justified. Although British currency was fixed at an artificially high level, handicapping exporters, from 1924 trade revived, living costs fell, and 1928 was a moderately prosperous year. But all this time the accredited exponents of economic law remained blind as ever to the fact that their science, as they expounded it, could not explain the persistence of unnatural poverty and unnnatural unemployment.

Then in October 1929, with the crash on the New York stock exchange, the storm burst. The American government and financiers called on Europeans for immediate repayment of loans they could not possibly meet; the credit on which industry depended was destroyed. Mass unemployment descended upon the United States, to an extent never before known (among primary producers especially), and began to extend to other industrial countries, notably high-tariff Germany. Although free trade Britain suffered less, by December 1930 unemployment figures reach two and a half million. The ensuing panic could be compared to that produced by a dangerous epidemic for which medicine could provide no remedy; for the economic experts could not agree on any cause deeper than the immediate factor. It was in this panic atmosphere that, without an election, a socialist prime minister with protectionist colleagues was appointed to power in Britain. Common sense in economic matters was abandoned. Having ho clue to the ultimate source of their tribulations, the great public, seeking a scapegoat, blamed free competition. Under the umbrella of protectionist tariffs, marketing regulations were imposed and economic planning acquired the prestige of a magic word capable of supplying a universal panacea. The great aim of raising prices was achieved and further consolidated by the inflationary policies that helped the planners to perform their miracles. The monopoly interests became entrenched and the economics of natural law was supplanted by the economics of political control which by its command of publicity now exercises a virtual despotism over the formation of opinion. Subsequent developments have been only an extension of these ideas born in panic. But the land monopolists did not lose their heads. The Snowden Act was quietly rescinded.

Mr. Macfarlane treats the great depression as little more than an incident in the difficulties of the Labour Government of the time. But history which does not probe the origins of an event that did so much to destroy faith in freedom is of little service to the general public who suffer the consequences.

The depression was certainly precipitated by special factors such as international debt and it was prolonged in Britain by the return of protectionism. But major depressions had occurred before without these complications. George Schwartz recently quoted the latest theory that the depression was caused by "a super-abundance of productive power making for stagnation." He rejects this Luddite philosophy but offers no alternative. Mr. Macfarlane attributes its severity to "the dramatic fall in the prices of food and raw materials." An effect is not a cause.

Analysis, New York, 1947, undertook an exhaustive enquiry not handicapped by that tacit understanding in all publicised economics that the four-letter word, land, must be mentioned only in a whisper. This enquiry, through all the maze of secondary factors such as mortgages, debts and interest fluctuations, traces the ultimate cause to the influence of land speculation, thus endowing in present-day conditions the verdict of Henry George's classic Progress and Poverty.

Just before the 1929 crash and depression, an article in the Magazine of Wall Street said: "Every panic in our country has been preceded by an orgy of land speculation . . . the culmination of every period of prosperity is a land boom, and then comes panic."

So land monopoly has been and remains an influence without which historical events cannot adequately be explained. It explains how the planned economy universally condemned in the West a half century ago is now accepted as evidence of progress.

The historian can trace effects and causes but he is no crystal-gazer able to foresee the exact reaction of opinion to events. The present chaos of industrial strife must herald some change but what direction it will take is not yet apparent. Events in Russia and the Communist states might however give some indication. Long experience has taught these governments that human nature cannot forever be thwarted, that the ultimate urge to work is not to be stimulated by the humbug of targets, export drives and to supply planners with material, but to enjoy the fruits of one's labour. While the West continues to increase taxes and controls the Communist states show the first signs of reducing them; and those peoples have not been educated to believe that private monopoly of land is sacrosanct. Tolstoy hoped that despite "the noisy teaching of socialism" the Russian people, living closer to natural conditions, might realise earlier than the West mat land value is the property of the community.