Ready to Knock Hell

In Washington last week, Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson accomplished one miracle--he made President Lyndon B. Johnson look like a fashion plate. As newsmen crowded into Johnson's White House office they found Wilson slouched on a couch by the fireplace, pipe in hand, wearing a wrinkled dark grey suit, greyish socks, brown shoes, and a tie colored a muddy green.

Toddy, Tobacco, Telly. But Wilson seemed completely at his ease, and with every reason. As Britain's first Socialist head of government in 13 years, Wilson from the beginning has acted like a man with an overwhelming mandate instead of the narrow four-vote majority with which he squeaked into office last October. At home, he has proved deft and effective in managing the balance-of-payments crisis that nearly shipwrecked the pound. Tough as any Tory, he slapped higher taxes and fees on those workingman staples toddy, tobacco and the telly, and the rank and file scarcely noticed, so busy were they applauding his simultaneous thwack on the expense-account set. Abroad, Wilson has managed to get on agreeably with the leaders of France and West Germany--no easy feat, particularly in Paris. Despite anguished cries from the pacifist left of his own party, Wilson has supported the U.S. in Viet Nam and made plain his intention to keep Britain's far-flung military establishment intact and in service to the West from Aden to Malaysia.

Before his brief visit with Johnson, Dean Rusk and other Administration officials, Wilson stopped off in New York for some plain talk to what he once called the "gnomes"--the world financiers. Assembled by the Economic Club of New York at the Waldorf, they got a Yorkshireman's earful. Wilson began by ribbing those "who have backed with good money" their belief that Britain would be forced to devalue the pound and who are now "licking their wounds, as I warned them they would." He added the neatly cynical point that if he had intended to devalue the pound, "political considerations would have dictated doing it on that very first day" when he took office --thus enabling him to blame it on the defeated Tories.

Unlike Canute. Wilson then outlined an ambitious ten-pronged Labor program for "Britain's industrial regeneration," adding, to his American business audience, "Given the response of which our people are capable, be under no illusions we shall be ready to knock hell out of you."

It was a fiery and fighting speech and an impressive affirmation of Wilson's determination to continue to defend the pound, and use every orthodox monetary and fiscal tool to get Britain's creaking economy moving again. Not everyone was convinced that Wilson's new budget (TIME, April 16) can do the job as well as he hopes. One banker reminded the Prime Minister of the fate of King Canute who ordered the tide to recede -- and ended up a wetback. Replied Wilson cockily: "I, unlike Canute, have waited until high tide before giving my command."

High tide or not, the wave of speculation against the pound has eased in the world's money marts. In any case, if Britain really tries to knock hell out of the U.S. economically, chances are Wilson will have to stick to the kind of orthodox techniques that he prescribed in his new budget fortnight ago -- techniques that bitterly disappoint old line Socialists. But the latter, who cling to the old simplistic view of the U.S. "robber baron" economy, are a dying breed, if for no other reason than the astonishing performance of the U.S. economy, which through a combination of Keynesian devices and tough business competition, has sustained an un precedented four-year period of industrial expansion.

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