New Aggressiveness : In Britain Today, Fair Play Is Passe

LONDON — During the winter of 1932-33, an aggressive young athlete named Douglas Jardine led England’s national cricket team to a sensational victory against the game’s most powerful rival of the day, Australia.

For his efforts, Jardine was forced to relinquish his job as team captain and give up playing for his country.

He had broken no law. He did not even violate the rules of the game--at least officially.

But Jardine’s controversial winning tactic of ordering his bowler--like a pitcher in baseball--to intimidate the Australian batters by throwing at them rather than by them had so offended the English sense of fair play that Jardine’s reputation never recovered. He was never again allowed to represent England in international play.

The depth of that reaction reflected a curious and longstanding English trait: an attachment to such Victorian Era virtues as fairness and restraint and a distaste for no-holds-barred competition.

Phrase Still Counts

“Britain--to its true glory--is the only country in the world where the phrase ‘it isn’t fair’ still counts in an argument,” Hungarian-born social critic George Mikes wrote in the early 1960s in a book entitled, “How to Be Inimitable.”

But in recent years, a new, more aggressive mood has settled over this country as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has attempted to restore a competitive vigor. Now there are perceptible signs of erosion in the old-fashioned English sense of fair play.

Moderate political views are noticeably less popular, and the art of compromise is also on the wane. Strikes, when they occur, are more bitter than in the past. A new intensity has entered Britain’s business, social and sporting communities, bringing with it some questionable moral standards.

At Odds With New Spirit

The once common emphasis on fair play, the belief that the chips are rarely down and that one shouldn’t overreact--all components of a more laid-back British view of life--are basically at odds with this new aggressive spirit.

“You can’t survive in modern international markets as a small nation off northern Europe if you play as gentlemen amateurs in a game where professionals are willing to cut corners ruthlessly,” summed up Cambridge social historian Corelli Barnett in an interview. “Fair play is a Victorian concept, which, like many other Victorian concepts, is on the wane.”

The erosion of fair play and other such concepts saddens some Britons, who say such values underpin the country’s remarkable social stability. But others, happy advocates of change, say good riddance to these traditional values, which they hold at least partly responsible for Britain’s economic decline.

For better or worse, these qualities have long been hallmarks of the British character most admired by foreigners. Despite the pressure for change, a sense of fair play retains some influence.

Many Britons still tend to denigrate cleverness in favor of honesty, consider it “poor form” to be seen to be working too hard and sometimes express a curious preference for honorable failure rather than unscrupulous success.

R. A. (Rab) Butler, the Tory politician who never achieved his goal of becoming prime minister, and America’s twice-failed presidential candidate, Adlai E. Stevenson, remain among the political figures most venerated here.

But the newer views make it unlikely that anyone will ever again say admiringly of a public official, as Lord Chancellor Frederick E. Smith once said of British Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain in the 1920s, that he always played the game and always lost.

“Rather than being good but fair losers, I believe Britain today would rather be a land of shame-faced winners,” social critic Mikes said in a recent interview. “As this transformation goes on, it’s going to translate into more pushing.”

Observed social scientist Ralf Dahrendorf, the designated warden of Oxford’s St. Anthony’s College: “A tremendous semi-visible conflict of values has been played out over the last eight years (since Thatcher took office). It will undoubtedly end in a new melange.”

But the assault on these values comes not just from Thatcherism.

Social scientists, for example, point to a steady loosening of Britain’s age-old class system that preceded Thatcher’s 1979 election as one cause for changed values. A once-powerful upper-class ethos that character was more important than achievement and success has faded. At the same time, members of Britain’s working class have steadily climbed upward and adopted a middle-income life style, occasionally rising all the way to the top.

In Thatcher’s Britain, it is the self-made--not the well-bred--man who has emerged as a national role model.

Among the most influential members of the current British Cabinet are Lord Young, the secretary for trade and industry and the son of Lithuanian immigrant parents, and Cecil Parkinson, the secretary for energy whose father was a railroad worker. Brash young entrepreneurs such as Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and computer wizard Alan Sugar demonstrate that Britain will reward and applaud businessmen who have little more than hustle and a bright idea.

“Values like fair play, tolerance and restraint are based on a certain type of social cohesion and a low level of social mobility,” said George Gaskell, a social psychologist at the London School of Economics. “Competitiveness runs against fairness.”

Influx of Foreign Ideas

The relentless intrusion of international business competition and the influx of foreign ideas also have influenced a country adjusting to both its loss of empire and its former insularity.

Nowhere is this more evident than in London’s financial community, the City, where last year’s deregulation transformed a life style as much as it did an equity market.

Dubbed “The Big Bang,” deregulation opened the country’s domestic equity and government bond markets for the first time to foreign competitors, ended an era of lucrative fixed-price broker commissions and ushered in computerized, off-the-floor trading.

Foreign banks, a rarity here in the early 1960s, today outnumber their British counterparts in London by roughly 2 to 1. The market in government securities, once the cozy preserve of two British firms, is today a 26-sided international free-for-all.

In the process, the City’s once-leisurely pace and its “old boy” network have been elbowed aside by battalions of young workaholic brokers pushing for six-figure salaries in an uncharacteristically cutthroat atmosphere.

While this new breed of British yuppie helps define the new frontiers of success in modern Britain, he receives little reward for playing fair and losing.

Not surprisingly, the City has been rocked by repeated scandals in the last year. Among those who lost their jobs earlier this year in the City’s most sensational case of wrongdoing in a generation were Ernest Saunders, chairman of the major British company, Arthur Guinness & Sons, and Christopher Reeves, the chief executive of a pedigreed London investment bank, Morgan Grenfell.

No one has pressed Britain harder to shake its more leisurely, contented life style than Thatcher. She has consistently extolled the virtues of profit, success, self-help and hard-nosed competition. By nature suspicious of compromise, she has pursued her goals with an aggressive sense of purpose uncommon among British prime ministers.

In the process, she has brushed aside many of the time-honored but unwritten restraints of her office and precipitated some of the sharpest confrontations this century between the government and important British institutions.

For example, she broke with a long tradition of political even-handedness by packing the British Broadcasting Corp.’s governing board with her appointees rather than maintaining the previous balance of political views, and she has twice intervened directly with BBC programming--an unprecedented action.

Her conviction that the 1984-85 miners strike had to be broken led to a bitter, often-violent confrontation judged by social scientists as far more divisive than the equally dramatic 1926 strike, when striking miners and police played soccer on the village greens of mining towns.

Thatcher also has purged the upper echelons of her own Conservative Party of prominent moderates, many of whom personified a more restrained era. Tory architects of compromise such as former Northern Ireland Secretary James Prior and former Foreign Secretary Francis Pym have been dismissed to the party’s rear ranks.

“They were one-nation Tories who accepted a certain rhythm of British life,” noted Dahrendorf. “They believed that a modern economy didn’t go with old British values.”

Many students of British society argue that in a nation with no formal constitution and relatively few statutory restraints, any significant erosion of these traditional values carries ominous implications.

“The British government is comprised of interlocking customs and practices, and one of these customs is a self-discipline not to use all available power,” said Shirley Williams, president of the Social Democratic Party and a former Labor Party minister. “Civil liberties in this country rely entirely on the restraint of government. We have no checks and balances, no explosive legislative inquires like the (U.S.) Irangate hearings.”

Despite the new mood in Britain, few predict any wholesale abandonment of time-honored values.

“Society is changing in a way that carries implications for defining what’s fair and what’s right and wrong,” social psychologist Gaskell said. “But the change isn’t radical; that’s not our way.”

For those who follow the English national game of cricket, however, change is already apparent.

Fifty-three years after Jardine authorized the attack on Australia’s batsmen, England’s own national team early last year faced a brutal onslaught from a West Indies team that resulted in serious injuries to English players--requiring hospitalization--but raised barely a murmur of protest here.

Such aggression has become an accepted part of such international encounters. Cricketers who once batted bareheaded or in felt caps now wear hard helmets and clear-plastic visors to protect the face.

David Frith, editor of the prominent Wisden Cricket Monthly, noted, somewhat sadly, that international cricket is no longer the place for gentlemen amateurs.

“Today, everyone plays with aggression,” Frith said. “But then cricket has always been a reflection of the society around it, so I guess there’s no reason why it shouldn’t go this way.”