important element in the defeat. This was the party's lack of
understanding of the people, a defeat emphasized by the politician
quoted at the start of this chapter. There were times during the
campaign when Socialist speakers seemed to confuse their audiences
with those of 1945, 1935, or even 1925. This was understandable, for
the Labor Party owes much of its present importance to its position
in the twenties and thirties as the party of protest. There was
plenty to protest about. There was poverty--black, stinking poverty,
which wears a hideous mask in the bleak British climate. There was
unemployment--the miners stood dull-eyed and shivering in the streets
of the tidy towns of South Wales. There was the dole. There was, in
London and other big cities, startling inequality between rich and
poor, such inequality as the traveler of today associates with Italy or
France or West Germany's Ruhr.
Memories of those times scarred a generation. The bitterness spilled
out of the areas worst hit and infected almost the entire working
class. During the 1955 election I talked with a group in Merther
Tydfil in Wales. They were working, and had been working for ten years
at increasingly higher wages. They were well dressed, they had money
to buy beer and to go to see the Rugby Football International. The
majority--young fellows--seemed satisfied with their lot. But one
elderly man kept reminding them: "Don't think it's all that good, mun.
Bad it's been in this valley, and it may be again."
Just as the Democrats in 1952 harked back to the days of Hoover and
Coolidge, so the Labor orators in 1955 revived the iniquities of
Baldwin and Chamberlain. They saw behind the amiable features of R.A.
Butler and the imposing presence of Anthony Eden the cloven hoofs of
the Tory devils. They warned, with much prescience, that the economic
situation would deteriorate. They cajoled and pleaded. They waved and
sang "The Red Flag." It didn't work.
One statistic is important in this connection: since 1945, millions
who had voted for Labor in that election had died. It is reasonable
to assume that a high proportion of them were people with memories
of the twenties and thirties who would have voted Labor under any
circumstances.
Some died. Others changed. The spring of 1955 marked the zenith of
Britain's first post-war boom. A very high proportion of the population
felt that they had left the hard road they had traveled since 1940, and
had emerged from war and austerity into the sunny uplands of peace and
prosperity. They felt that to a great degree this change had been due
to their own efforts, which was true. They believed they had earned the
right to relax. It may be that a decade hence Britons will look back on
that period as a golden echo of the great days of the Empire. Perhaps
never again will Britain know a comparable period of prosperity and
peace.
Given this primary circumstance, it was almost impossible for a party
of protest to win an election. The industrial urban working class to
whom the Socialists chiefly appealed were doing nicely. The workers had
houses and television sets (known in Britain as "the telly"); bicycles
and motorcycles were giving way to small family cars. There had been
a steady rise in the supply of food, household appliances, and other
items for mass consumption.
A large group of Labor voters were consequently not so interested in
the election as they had been in the past. They voted, but in smaller
numbers. Some votes switched to the Conservatives, but I do not regard
this as a substantial element in the Tory victory. What did hurt Labor
and help the Tories was the apathy of many Labor voters. Repeatedly I
visited Labor election centers where a few elderly and tired people
were going through the motions. The Tory centers, on the other hand,
were organized, lively, and efficient.
For decades the Labor Party had promised the industrial workers
full employment, higher wages, social security. Now there was full
employment, wages were higher, present medical needs and future
pensions were assured by national legislation. To a great degree these
things had been achieved by the Labor governments of 1945 and 1950. But
monarchies can be as ungrateful as republics, and the Tory boast that
its government had ended rationing and produced prosperity probably
counted as much as the benefits given the industrial working class by
the socialist revolution carried out in six years of Labor government.
Another factor operated against the Labor campaign. There was then and
still is a perceptible drift from the industrial working class into a
new middle class. Later this drift must be examined in detail. It is
part of the pattern of constant change in British history, a change
that provides much of British society's strength. It is a change in
which new blood constantly flows upward into other classes, a change
in which the proletarian becomes lower middle class and the lower
middle class becomes upper middle class in respect to income and social
standing.
Here we are concerned with the political change. In many cases
the industrial worker who becomes a foreman and then a production
chief moves politically as well. He may still vote Labor, but it is
increasingly difficult for him to identify himself with the proletariat
or with Marxist doctrines. He lives in a better home, away from his old
associates. His new friends may spring from the same class, but they
are no longer preoccupied with the political struggle; often they are
enjoying the fruits of its victories.
Nor is he worried, politically. For the Tories' return to power in
Britain in 1951 did not produce a reactionary government. Sir Winston
Churchill, once regarded by the workers as a powerful and unrelenting
enemy, appeared in his last administration as a kindly old gentleman
under whose sunny smile and oratorical showers the nation prospered.
Why, he was even trying to arrange a talk with the Russian leaders! The
absence of openly reactionary elements in the Conservative government,
despite the presence of such elements in the party, and the promotion
of moderation by Conservative speakers encouraged a gradual movement
of the industrial working class away from the standards of pre-war
socialism.
The changes in British society between 1945 and 1955, the people's
refusal to respond to the old slogans in their new prosperity,
the damaging split within the Parliamentary Labor Party all are
contributing to the evolution of a new Labor Party that seems to be a
better reflection of its electoral support than the one which went down
to defeat in 1955. This does not mean, of course, that it is better
fitted to rule Britain.
Almost all the leaders of the Labor governments of the post-war years
have gone. Ernest Bevin and Sir Stafford Cripps are dead. Clement
Attlee has passed from the House of Commons into the Lords. Herbert
Morrison and Emanuel Shinwell are back benchers in the Commons,
exchanging grins with their political enemy and personal friend Sir
Winston Churchill.
These men represented the old Labor Party. Bevin, Morrison, and
Shinwell were hard, shrewd politicians, products of the working class
they served. Cripps and Attlee were strays from the old upper middle
class who had been moved to adopt socialism by the spectacle of
appalling poverty among Britain's masses and what seemed to them the
startling incompetence of capitalist society to solve the nation's
economic and social problems.
This group and its chief lieutenants were bound, however, by a
common fight. They could remember the days when there was no massive
organization, when they had stood on windy street corners and shouted
for social justice. They remembered the days when "decent people"
looked down their noses at Labor politicians as unnecessary and
possibly treasonable troublemakers.
It was inevitable, I think, that this group would pass from the
leadership of the Labor party. When they did, however, the party lost
more than the force of their personalities. It lost an emotional drive,
a depth of feeling, that will be hard to replace.
Fittingly, the new leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party, Hugh
Gaitskell, is an exemplary symbol of the new party. He is a man of
courage and compassion, intellectual power and that cold objectivity
which is so often found in successful politicians. He represents
the modern middle-class socialists just as Attlee two decades ago
represented the much smaller number of socialists from that class.
Attlee, however, led a party in which the working-class politician
was dominant. Gaitskell is chief of a party in which the middle-class
intellectual element and the managerial group from the unions and the
Party Organization have become powerful if not dominant.
Clement Attlee was leader of the party for more than twenty years.
Gaitskell has the opportunity to duplicate this feat. But he must first
heal the great schism that has opened in the movement in the last five
years, and to do so he must defeat or placate the left wing and its
leader, Aneurin Bevan.
Although the split within the Labor movement distresses all good
socialists, it has added notably to the vigor and, indeed, to the
gaiety of British politics. Aneurin Bevan was moved to flights of
oratorical frenzy and waspish wit. Nor is it every day that one sees
Clement Attlee temporarily discard his air of detachment and descend
into the arena to entangle his party foes in the streamers of their own
verbosity. It was a great fight, and, fortunately for those who like
their politics well seasoned, it is not over yet.
For the quarrel within the movement represents forces and emotions of
great depth and significance. In moments of excitement men and women
on both sides have described it as a battle for the soul of the party.
It may be more accurately described, I think, as a battle to determine
what type of political party is to represent the labor movement in
Britain.
Since the center and the right wing of the movement today dominate the
making of policy and fill most, but not all, of the important party
posts, it is the left that is on the offensive. But the left itself is
not a united band of brothers. It has its backsliders and its apostates
who sometimes temper their criticisms when they think of minor
government posts under a Labor government headed by Hugh Gaitskell.
But, personalities aside, convictions are so strongly held that there
seems to be little likelihood of an end to the offensive.
What, then, does the left represent? One definition is that it
represents those elements in the party who seek to complete the
revolution of 1945-51. They want the extension of nationalization to
all major industries and some minor ones. Aneurin Bevan, who enjoys
making flesh creep, once told a group of Americans that he wanted
to nationalize everything "including the barber shops." Extreme, of
course, and said in jest; but "Nye" Bevan is an extremist, and many a
true word is spoken in jest.
The left wing would move, too, against the surviving citadels of
pre-war England such as public schools and other types of private
education, and the power of the Church of England. It would impose upon
Britain an egalitarianism unknown among the great powers of the West.
It would limit Britain's defense efforts--this was the issue on which
Bevan broke with the party leadership--to forces barely sufficient
for police operations. It would liquidate as quickly as possible the
remains of the Empire. Finally, it would turn Britain from what the
radicals consider her present slavish acceptance of United States
policy to a more independent foreign policy. This would mean that
Britain would quit her position at the right hand of the United States
in the long economic and political struggle with the great Communist
powers and adopt a more friendly attitude toward Russia and Communist
China. Bevan has descried, along with a great many other people,
important economic and political changes within those countries, and he
pleads with the Labor movement for a more sensible approach to them.
Naturally many members of the movement's center and right subscribe to
some of these ideas. The admission of Communist China to the United
Nations is an agreed objective of the Labor movement. It is even
favored "in due course" by plenty of Conservative politicians. The
explanation is a simple illustration of British bipartisanship. China
means trade, and Britain needs trade. There are other considerations
involving long-term strategic and political planning, including the
possibility of luring China away from the Russian alliance. But trade
is the starting-point.
The left wing boasts that it speaks for the fundamentalists of
socialism, that it echoes the great dream of the founders of the party
who saw the future transformation of traditional Britain with its
economic and social inequalities into a greener, sweeter land. There is
and always has been a radical element in British politics, and, on the
left, the Bevanites represent it today.
The term "Bevanites" is inexact. The left-wing Socialists include
many voters and politicians who dislike Aneurin Bevan and some of his
ideas. But the use of his name to describe the group is a tribute to
one of the most remarkable figures in world politics today. Aneurin
Bevan has been out of office since 1951. He has bitterly attacked all
the official leaders of his party, and he has come perilously close to
exile from the party. His following, as I have noted, is subject to
change. He often says preposterous things in public and rude things in
private. He has made and continues to make powerful enemies.
"After all, Nye's his own worst enemy," someone once remarked to Ernie
Bevin.
"Not while I'm alive, 'e ain't," said Ernie.
Bevan is a man of intelligence, self-education, and charm. At ease he
is one of the best talkers I have ever met. He has read omnivorously
and indiscriminately. He will quote Mahan to an admiral and Keynes to
an economist. He has wit, and he knows the world. He likes to eat well
and drink well.
Bevan, in his eager, questing examination of the world and its affairs,
sometimes reminds his listeners of Winston Churchill. Each man has
a sense of history, although the interpretation of a miner's son
naturally differs from that of the aristocratic grandson of a duke.
There is another similarity: each in his own way is a great orator.
To watch Bevan address a meeting is to experience political oratory at
its fullest flower. He begins softly in his soft Welsh voice. There
are a few joking references to his differences with the leader of
the party, followed by a solemn reminder that such differences are
inescapable and, indeed, necessary in a democratic party. At this
point moderate Socialists are apt to groan. As Bevan moves on to his
criticisms of the official leadership of the movement and of the
Conservatives, it is clear that this is one orator who can use both
a rapier and a bludgeon. He is no respecter of personalities, and at
the top of his form he will snipe at Eisenhower, jeer at Churchill,
and scoff at Gaitskell. He is a master of the long, loaded rhetorical
question that brings a volley of "no, no" or "yes, yes" from the
audience.
Much of the preaching of left-wing Socialism is outdated, in view of
the changes in the urban working class. But Bevan is the only radical
who is capable on the platform of exciting both the elderly party
stalwarts who hear in him the echoes of the great days and the younger
voters who, until they entered the hall, were reasonably satisfied with
their lot. This is a man of imagination and power, one of the most
forceful politicians in Britain. One secret is that he, and precious
few others, can re-create in Labor voters, if only momentarily, the
spell of the old crusading days when it was a movement and not a party.
As Bevan typifies to many anti-Americanism in Britain, it should in
justice be said that he is not anti-American in the sense that he
dislikes the United States or its people. Nor could he be considered
an enemy of the United States in the sense that Joseph Stalin was
an enemy. Bevan believes as firmly as any Midwestern farmer in the
democratic traditions of freedom and justice under law.
But in considering the outlook on international affairs of Aneurin
Bevan and others on the extreme left of British politics there are
several circumstances to keep in mind. The first is that, due to early
environment, study, or experience, they are bitterly anti-capitalist.
The United States, as the leading and most successful capitalist
nation in the world, is a refutation of their convictions. They may
have a high regard for individual Americans and for many aspects of
American life. But as people who are Marxists or strongly influenced by
Marxism they do not believe that a capitalist system is the best system
for a modern, industrial state--certainly not for one in Britain's
continually parlous economic condition. In power they would alter the
economic basis of British society, and possibly they would change the
government's outlook on trade with the Communist nations. This means a
friendlier approach to the Russian and Chinese Communist colossi and
a more independent policy toward the capitalist United States. The
attractions of such a position are not confined to Aneurin Bevan; one
will hear them voiced by members of ultra-conservative factions of the
Tory party.
For a man who vigorously opposes all kinds of tyranny, Bevan has been
rather slow to criticize the tyranny of the secret police in the
Soviet Union or the ruthless methods of those Communists who have won
control of some British unions. There is in Bevan, as in all successful
politicians--Roosevelt and Churchill are the best-known examples in our
day--a streak of toughness verging on cruelty. This may explain his
apparent tolerance of some of the excesses of totalitarian nations.
Again, as some of his followers explain, Nye expects everyone to
realize that such tyrannies are culpable and to understand him well
enough to know that he would never give them the slightest support. Or,
they suggest, Bevan takes such a comprehensive view of world affairs
and has such a glittering vision of man's goals that he has no time to
concentrate on minor atrocities. Perhaps, but the excuse is not good
enough. The great leaders of Western democracy have been those who
never lost the capacity for anger and action against tyranny whether it
was exercised by a police sergeant or by a dictator.
Bevan has made a career of leading the extreme left wing in British
politics since 1945. He is sixty this year. If he is to attain power,
he must do so soon. How great is his following? What forces does he
represent?
The most vocal of the Bevanites are those in the constituency labor
parties. If you wish to taste the old evangelical flavor of socialism,
you will find it among them. Here are the angry young men in flannel
shirts, red ties, and tweed jackets, the stoutish young women whose
hair is never quite right and who wear heavy glasses. They are
eternally upset about something; they don't think any government, Labor
or Conservative, moves fast enough. They pronounce the word "comrades,"
with which laborites start all their speeches to their own associates,
as though they meant it.
The majority are strongly impressed by what has happened--or, rather,
by what they have been told has happened--in Russia. You can get
more misinformation about the Soviet Union in a half-hour of their
conversation than from a dozen Soviet propaganda publications. For in
their case the Russian propaganda has been adulterated with their own
wishes and dreams.
Some of them have been members of the Communist Party in Britain.
Others have flirted with it. My own impression is that most of them
rejected the discipline of the Communists and that, although they do
not want to be Communists, they have no objection to working with the
Communist Party to attain their ends. They know very little about the
history of the Social Democrats in Eastern Europe who thought in 1945
that they too could work with the Communists.
The left-wing radicals are not confined to the constituency labor
parties, but these parties are their most successful vehicles for
propaganda. For the CLP's present resolutions to the annual conference
of the movement, and these resolutions are usually spectacular,
combining extreme demands with hot criticism of the dominant forces
within the movement. The resolutions endorsing the official policies of
the party leadership attract far less attention.
The radicals of the CLP's are supported on the left by other dissident
elements within the movement. Some of these are union members who
oppose the authority of the Trades Union Congress within the movement,
considering it a reactionary brake on progressive or revolutionary
policies.
There is also a considerable group of union members who make common
cause with the political opponents of the TUC but oppose it principally
on its position in the industrial world. They see it as too temperate
in its objectives for wages and hours, too timid in its use of the
strike weapon, too unwieldy in organization, and too old-fashioned in
its approach to modern developments in industry such as automation.
In this opposition they are encouraged by the Communists. The Communist
Party is without direct political power in Britain. In the 1955
election it polled only 33,144 votes and failed to elect a single
candidate. But it has attained considerable indirect power in some key
unions in the British economy, and as the present leadership of the
TUC is moderate and fairly democratic, the party wages unceasing war
against it.
One method is to win control of unions. Where this is impossible the
Communists encourage opposition to the TUC--opposition that often
needs little encouragement. On both the political and the industrial
fronts the Communists support Bevanism and the extreme left wing
because these elements weaken the Labor movement, which up to now has
combatted Communist infiltration and sternly rejected invitations
to form a common front. Basically, the Communist Party in Britain
is just as strongly opposed to the Labor movement as it is to the
Conservative Party. This is true of the Communists all over Europe in
their relations with social democracy and conservatism. The difference
is that because of the common roots in Marxism, it is easier for the
Communists to infiltrate the unions and the socialist political parties.
Bevan is not the only spokesman for the radical left wing. R.H.S.
Crossman, a highly intelligent but somewhat erratic back-bench MP is
another. Crossman's political views are often somewhat difficult to
follow, but in the House of Commons he is capable of cutting through
the verbosity of a government speaker and exposing the point. Mrs.
Barbara Castle, a lively redhead, is a brisk, incisive speaker. Konni
Zilliacus, elected in the Conservative landslide of 1955, was once
ousted from the Labor Party because he was too friendly toward the
Soviet Union. Zilliacus is often immoderate, especially when dealing
with the ogres in Washington, but he has a considerable knowledge of
international affairs.
One of the most effective of the Bevanites in Commons until 1955
was Michael Foot, next to Bevan the best speaker on the Labor left
wing. Defeated in 1955 by a narrow margin, he provides the left with
ideological leadership through the pages of _Tribune_, a weekly
newspaper.
_Tribune_ is the only real Bevanite organ. The _New Statesman and
Nation_ is a forum for extreme left-wing views, but is more temperate
and stately. _Tribune_ is a battle cry flaying the Tories and the
official Labor leadership indiscriminately. Foot edits the paper and
writes in it under the name of John Marullus. Like Bevan, he was once
employed by Lord Beaverbrook.