Britain has a new Prime Minister but no sense of a new beginning, no lifting of the heart. James Callaghan is all too familiar, both in person and in what he stands for. Some people may find this familiarity reassuring; he is no wild man. Others will find it depressing. There is, of course, much to be said for dull politicians: but when the conventional ideas to which they subscribe are as inadequate to the situation as the ideas of the British Labor Party are to Britain’s plight today, then dullness becomes dangerous.
When Mr. Callaghan was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1960s, he did try to learn some economics, but the result was wholly unfortunate. The silly-clever notions of that terrible Hungarian double-act,-Lord Kaldor and Lord Balogh, were superimposed on . traditional Labor Party shibboleths, . such as the belief that wealth consists (in George Schwartz’s phrase) only of things which hurt if you drop them on your toe. When Callaghan appeared on television to explain what had gone : wrong, he looked like the secretary of . a small-town Christmas club explaining that somebody had stolen the funds.
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