Profile of a People

He bathes more and keeps warmer, works shorter hours, earns more and strikes more. He gets longer vacations, travels less, spends less on food, clothing and tobacco, more on housing and cars--and, if he lives in London, he sees nearly twice as much winter sunshine as he did 20 years ago. Such is the Briton of today, according to a 220-page compendium of statistics published this month by the British government under the dry title Social Trends.

The first attempt by any government to give order and sense to the plethora of facts and figures that flow from various departments, Social Trends is an invaluable anatomy of British life. It is assembled by a team of only five statisticians, who cut freely across bureaucratic channels searching for equations to illuminate national habits on money, health, leisure, children, schools and sex. This month's tome is the third annual edition and, according to Lord Lionel Robbins, chairman of the Court of Governors of the London School of Economics, it is "the best report on the evolution of our society that has ever been established."

Dispassionately, it presents good trends and bad trends. Many material benefits are improving. Nearly 80% of British households are now equipped with either a fixed bath or shower (65% more than in Germany, the next best-scrubbed European country) and 34% even have central heating (which may surprise visitors who have shivered through British winters).

Pollution from smoke emission and sulphur dioxide is in decline. There are far fewer polluted rivers than there were in 1958. Infectious diseases have all dropped sharply in the past ten years, and the suicide rate sank in 1970 to the lowest point in 25 years. On the average Britons are now living ten years longer than they did 30 years ago. But they may be enjoying it less.

Britons are leaving their country in record numbers; some 30,000 a year have departed during the past decade. Why? One reason seems to be discontent with jobs. Work stoppages have soared by 466% since 1966; in the 15 years prior to that, they rose by only 41%. The unemployment rate of 822,755 is the highest in Europe, up by 75% in the past ten years. Yet, with the job market so discouraging, only 20% of British children remain in school after the age of 16, compared with 76% in the U.S.

Britain continues to have a much better criminal record than the U.S. Last year there were only 177 murders in all of England and Wales (pop. 48.6 million), compared with 1,581 in New York City (pop. 7.8 million). Yet the British crime rate is rising; it is up 60% over the past decade. Courts are even busier with divorces, which catapulted to 77,000 last year from 27,000 in 1961.

Some statistics on pregnancy are baffling. The abortion rate has jumped 264% in two years, but illegitimate births are still rising, up 44% in ten years. At the same time, slightly more than half of all British women are pregnant when they are married--which is the same percentage as 20 years ago.

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