Part 11

Few things demonstrate more strikingly the change in the status of the British manual worker than his insistence on a television set as a "necessity." Cars, radios, and, earlier, gramophones were available only to the middle class or wealthy in pre-war Britain. For the first time they are within the range of the manual worker.

Few families budget the considerable sum spent each week on beer, the obligatory trips to the local movie theater, or gambling either through football pools or bets on horse races. But it is not unusual in these new circumstances to find men who spend £2 or £3 a week for such purposes. "Why the bloody hell not?" a worker in Liverpool asked. "I've got me job and I don't 'ave to worry." The permanence of his job and of high wages had become an accepted part of his life. He was one of those who had not been moved by the Labor Party's dire forebodings of unemployment and the dole under Conservative rule. To him these were as shadowy and distant as the Corn Laws and Peterloo.

The new class has money, security, and leisure: this is the promised land. According to theories of some reformers, the worker, freed from the oppression of poverty, should be expanding intellectually, worrying about the future of Nigeria rather than the football fortunes of Arsenal. My opinion is that the opposite is true, that with the coming of the good life the worker has gradually shed his responsibilities (some of these, in fact, have been stripped from him) and has lost the old desperate desire to improve his lot and make himself and his class the paramount political power in the land.

There is no need to save, for the state provides for all eventualities the worker can foresee. There is no compulsion to ensure that the children get an education that will enable them to rise above the circumstances of their parents. For the circumstances are so good, so unimaginably higher than those into which the fathers and mothers of this class were born, that there seems to be nothing further to be sought. Why should a boy be given a good education--"stuffing 'is head with a lot of nonsense 'e'll never use" was the way one father put it--when he can make £10 a week after a few years in a factory? The schools are there, they are free, but when the time comes the boy can leave the school and take up a man's work in the factory.

There seems to be a conviction among working-class mothers that a girl needs a little more schooling to fit her for an office job. But the men of the class, proud of the money they are earning and the "rights" their unions have won, see no virtue in an office job or the higher education that fits one for it.

For the manual worker has found security, and that is what he is interested in, that is what he has sought through the long, bitter history of industrial disputes in Britain. He is not interested in and he does not share the standards of the old middle class or even of the artisan class that preceded him.

Charles Curran, in a brilliant article on "The New Estate in Great Britain" in the _Spectator_, put it this way: "One word sums up the New Estate: the word 'security.' It is security in working-class terms, maintained and enforced by working-class methods. The traditional values of the middle and professional classes form no part of it; among wage-earners these values are meaningless.

"To the middle-class citizen, economic security is a goal to be reached primarily by personal effort. It is a matter of thrift, self-help, self-improvement, competitive striving. But the manual worker sees it differently. To him, any betterment in his conditions of life is essentially a collective process--something to be achieved not by himself as an individual but in company with his fellows. He will organize for it, vote for it, strike for it, always with them. It is 'Us' not 'I.' Eugene Debs, the American Socialist leader, put this attitude into one sentence when he said, 'I don't want to rise from the ranks; I want to rise with them.'"

In this psychological situation it is ludicrous to appeal for New Elizabethans among the men and women of the new class. For they have no great admiration for individual enterprise, for risk or sacrifice. Among the many men I have talked to in the New Towns, I never met one who was interested in saving enough money to buy his own small business, to strike out for himself. The ideal seemed to be a community of equals protected from economic dangers by full employment and high wages, politically lethargic, unstirred by Socialist or Tory. Everyone earned about the same amount of money, spent it on the same things, and appeared to think and talk alike.

Yet theirs is a nation that desperately needs the imaginative, inventive mind if it is to overcome its economic difficulties.

The paramount emphasis on security found among manual workers may be regrettable. But in view of Britain's past it is natural and understandable. These, after all, are the descendants of farm laborers who worked twelve hours a day and lived in hovels. The grandfathers and grandmothers of the young people in the New Towns knew the dank, dirty poverty of the slums of London and Liverpool. There must be among the miners at Peterlee men and women whose female ancestors dragged coal carts through mine tunnels on their hands and knees.

The new class begins with a strong bias in favor of the Labor Party. It is never allowed to forget the inhumanities of the past or the long struggle of the unions against entrenched capital. It is reminded at every election that all it has today is a result of the efforts of the Labor Party. This is not true, but we are talking about politics. Finally, in every new housing development or New Town there must be an aging group who remember with fierce-eyed resentment the long periods of unemployment and the marginal existence that were the lot of many working-class families a quarter of a century ago.

The Welsh, in particular, have never forgotten. And hundreds of thousands of bitter, talkative, excitable Welsh workers have left South Wales in the last twenty years to work in other parts of Britain, carrying with them their hatred of the Tories and their zeal for "the movement." When Aneurin Bevan, that most Welsh of Welshmen, describes the Tories as lower than vermin or genially compares them with the Gadarene swine, he is expressing a sentiment strongly held by a considerable percentage of his fellow countrymen.

The geographical redistribution of the working class altered the political map of Britain. Housing estates and New Towns introduced solid blocs of Labor votes into traditionally Tory constituencies. This was a factor in the Socialist victory of 1945 and it is still a factor today. The constituency of Melton, for instance, was long considered a safe Liberal seat. Then it became equally safe for the Conservatives. But the advent of a housing development and several thousand new votes made this rural constituency insecure. The influx of a new type of voter is one of the main reasons why this must now be considered a marginal constituency by the Tories.

But the effect of the geographical redistribution is being matched and balanced in many constituencies by the effect of their new economic status upon the voters of the working class. They now have something to conserve: jobs, good wages, pleasant homes. This does not mean an immediate conversion to Conservatism. Among many, particularly the older age groups, the memories of the past are still strong. But the achievement of a new economic status has resulted in a lessening of the fervor and energy for the Socialist cause. A class that puts security above everything else is not likely to be won by a Labor platform that endorses more nationalization and the ensuing upheaval in the British economy. Its younger members, many of whom have never been jobless, are unimpressed by dire prophecies of the return of the bad old days under Tory rule because they themselves have never experienced such a period.

Nor should we forget that in each general election the Conservative Party wins a substantial share of the working-class vote. Even in the catastrophe of 1945 the Conservatives estimate they won between 4,000,000 and 4,500,000 votes among manual workers. In 1951 about 6,000,000 electors of this group voted Tory. Of course the vote for Labor rose too: it is estimated that in the general election of that year 52 per cent of the working class voted for Labor. But Labor was defeated by the coalition of middle-class and working-class votes for the Tories.

Nonetheless, the Tories continue to gain in the areas where the new working class has reached a new economic status. In 1945 the Labor Party won Chislehurst in Kent, normally a safe Conservative seat. The influx of working-class voters was the principal cause. Ten years later Chislehurst was safely back on the Conservative side.

The Conservative Party is thus faced with a difficult question. Like all major parties, it is a coalition of various economic and social interests. In the last decade a new interest, that of the working class, has become vital to the party. But the Conservative government's efforts to meet the wishes of that group, particularly its insistence on the continuation of the Welfare State, clashes directly with the interests of the old middle class, which has suffered a loss of social prestige, economic standing, and political influence at the hands of the working class.

The rebellion among Conservative voters of the middle class against the government's policies, reflected in their refusal to vote in by-elections, cannot go unchecked without damaging the Conservatives. That this is fully realized by the party leaders was shown by the warnings they gave the Tories against seduction by political groups of the extreme right.

What kind of people are the new working class? You will not find them portrayed in the novels of Angela Thirkell or, indeed, any other English novelist popular in America. But veterans of World War II may recognize them as the slightly older brothers of the British soldier they knew in Africa, Italy, and France.

They are not at all reserved; reserve is the province of the upper-middle-class Briton. They are friendly, incurious, and polite. For the first time in history they are satisfied with themselves and with their lot.

I mention this as a curiosity. When I first went to England to work before the war I was struck by the powerful interest shown in the United States. An American in a working-class pub was bombarded by queries about the organization of the unions, John L. Lewis, the absence of a labor party in the United States politics, the techniques of mass production in industry. The young men were eager to know and anxious to improve.

Today one encounters the same politeness but less interest. After the preliminary and obligatory question about the "Yank corporal" named Jackson who lives in Chicago and do you know him, the talk is likely to trail off into inconsequentials. The English, as opposed to the Scots, Welsh, and Irish, are a people notably difficult to arouse and, equally important, difficult to quiet once they are aroused. But in recent years the pubs have been quiet. The new working class has what it and its predecessors wanted. It is not excited either by the prospect of Tory rule or by the infiltration of the British Communists into the union structure.

It would be aroused, however, by any policy that appeared to endanger its new position. That is certain. And consequently both major parties will be circumspect in their approach to the new class.

Socially, the new class is modern. Increasingly it is making use of new techniques in living which were out of the economic range of its fathers and mothers. The old family life built around the kitchen and the pot of tea on the stove has been replaced by one built around the television set.

For the first time in their lives the young people of the New Towns and the housing estates have enough room in their homes to plan and build. The three-piece bedroom suite is as important as the television set as an indication of economic status. The "do it yourself" craze that swept the United States did not "catch on" among the working class in Britain for the simple reason that its members had always done it themselves. A great deal of the painting and decoration and some of the furniture-making is done by the man of the house in his spare time.

The class is not notably religious. The Catholics and the Methodists support their churches, but the response to other faiths is not ardent. The British are not "a pagan people," as some critics have charged, but there certainly is little enthusiasm for conventional religious forms.

The working class is a definable class. Thus it takes its place in the graduated ranks of British society. Within the class, however, there is very little snobbery. I have mentioned one instance: the resentment of the dwellers in the New Towns when they are classed with the people of the housing estates. But in a community in which all the men work in the same or similar factories and in which everyone knows almost to the penny what everyone else makes, pretense of economic superiority is difficult.

Here is the new British workingman. He moved to a New Town or a housing estate from a slum or near-slum. If he is in his late thirties or forties, he fought in the war and his wife knows more about the effect of high explosives, flying bombs, and rockets than most generals. He is living in what is to him comparative luxury: a living room, a clean and, by British standards, modern kitchen, a bedroom for the children, a modern bath and toilet. He can walk or cycle to his work, and if the weather is fine, he comes home for lunch. In the evening there is "the telly" or the football-pool form to be filled out or the new desk he is making for the children's room. Some two or three times a week he drops in at the "local," the neighborhood pub or bar, for a few drinks with friends from the factory. Even here his habits are changing. The actually potent "mild and bitter" or "old and mild" that was his father's tipple has been replaced by light ale--"nasty gassy stuff" the old-fashioned barmaids report.

It is a quiet life but to our subject a satisfactory one. He reads the _Daily Mirror_ rather than the _Daily Herald_, which was his father's Bible, but he is only occasionally aroused by international problems. He did get excited about the idea of arming "those bloody Germans," but when the leaders of both the Conservative and Labor parties accepted the necessity he went along with German rearmament. But he was never particularly happy about it. In general, however, he is not interested in world affairs. There are one or two fellows at "the works," he will tell you, who get excited about China or Suez or Cyprus. Here it should be noted that he is more nationalist than internationalist. He doesn't like it when British soldiers are killed by the bombs of Greek Cypriotes, chiefly because the Army is no longer a professional force but one composed largely of conscripts of National Service. Young Tom from down the street, a nice lad, has gone out there with the Green Howards.

There he is: content, complete, complacent. His contacts with the rest of the world, British or foreign, are limited, and this is especially true of his contacts with the old middle class.

The old middle class itself is intensely interested in this new kind of working class. Partly this is true because the new class is blamed for many of the reverses that have fallen upon the middle class. Partly it is because of political spite. Partly it is jealousy. Whatever the dominant reason, the feeling is there, and the middle class, harking back to the first Socialist boasts in 1945 about remaking bourgeois Britain, will tell you: "They started it."

This class (here we are talking about the professional men, civil servants, Army, Navy, and Air Force officers, the higher but not the highest ranks of business and industry, the clergy of the Church of England, and the retired pensioners of these groups) fights hard to resist the uniformity that the last fifteen years have imposed upon it. It finds itself unable to organize to win higher salaries, and it knows that the taxation of the last decade has closed the gap between it and the new class of industrial workers. Finally, its more intelligent members are aware that it too is being challenged from within--that there is arising in its ranks a new group which from the economic standpoint can claim to be middle class but which has very little in common now, socially or politically, with the old middle class. Yet, as both groups claim a certain superiority over the class of manual workers, it is safe to predict that the two groups will unite and make common cause in defense of their standards. Interestingly, this is already happening in the field of education, where the sons of the physicists, engineers, and scientists who are among the leaders of the new middle class are going to the public schools that were one of the solid foundations of the old middle class.

Such schools, incidentally, are one of the bones of contention between the political leaders of the Labor Party, which represents the majority of the working class, and the old middle class. This class has pressed the Exchequer for a tax allowance for public schools--i.e., private education. The Socialists replied that such an allowance would be a private subsidy to a system that spreads inequality. To this the Tories of the old middle class retorted that part of the British freedom was the right of the parent to decide how and where his child was to be educated. They added a reminder that if the new working class were to save a bit on installment payments for television sets and the football pools, it too could send its sons to public schools. The answer, of course, is that the new working class cares little for schools, public or national.

The change in the composition of the middle class brought about by the introduction of new members reflects a change in Britain's industrial life and, to some extent, her position in the world. The administrators, managers, and technicians of the new industries such as plastics and electronics, the leaders in the newspaper, television, radio, and movie industries are becoming as important as the lawyers, judges, general officers, retired pro-consuls who once led the class. Just below these leaders is a steadily increasing group of newcomers to the class who have worked their way out of the working class since the war. Industrial designers and chemists, buyers, advertising men, production engineers--all these have come to the top.

This group reflects modern Britain and her problems. The colonial governor is less important to it than the expert on foreign markets. The scientist is infinitely more necessary to the country's progress than the soldier.

There is an important difference in income between the new entries into the middle class and the professional men who formed its backbone in the past. On the whole, the incomes of the new group are a good deal higher. It is engaged, for the most part, in industries, businesses, or quasi-public organizations that are expanding. Moreover, many of its members augment their incomes with expense accounts.

But these differences in types of activity and in income are only the beginning of the differences between the two segments of the middle class.

Many members of the new group have just arrived, pushed to the top by the necessities of war or of Britain's long economic struggle. The percentage of public-school graduates is lower than in the established middle class. Attention to that class's recognized totems is much less. The new group is less concerned with the Church of England, the Army and the Navy--the Air Force and the production of new weapons are, however, its special province--the Foreign Office and active politics. These it has left largely to the established middle class, and frequently the interests of the two groups clash. For example, the conflict within government between the traditionalist view of the Navy as vital to Britain's defense and the view that all that matters is the big bomber today and the intercontinental ballistic missile tomorrow is essentially a clash between two groups in the same class.

The new group is not primarily managerial, although managers make up a considerable percentage of its total. It includes a great many creative workers, architects, scientists and engineers, and a surprisingly high percentage of men who have risen without the aid of the Old School Tie.

The group has had less education and less leisure than the old middle class, and, consequently, its approach to culture is different. Its interest in the arts is limited, its taste in literature tends toward Nevil Shute rather than Thackeray. But it has a furious curiosity about Britain and the world: it devours magazine articles and books. Like the new working class, it has reached income levels that seemed out of sight fifteen years ago, but, unlike the new working class, it is not content to rest in its present position. For it knows enough of the world and the country to doubt that the present security is enough.

The middle class in Britain over the centuries has developed a marvelous capacity for altering while maintaining roughly the same façade. This process is going on now. The sons of the new group within the middle class are going off to public schools and Oxford and Cambridge rather than to state schools and the red brick provincial universities that trained their fathers. But because this group has an abiding interest in technical education, its members are anxious for the spread of such education in the old classical schools.

It should be noted that the trend toward the public schools and the great universities is not due entirely to snobbery. As an industrial engineer told me, "That's still the best education in the country, and my son's going to have it." He himself was the product of a state school and a provincial university. Obviously he enjoyed talking about his boy's public school.

Consequently, the two groups within the middle class are mixing slowly. But the old middle class is on the defensive; its standards are not those of the new group, and with the continued rise of the new group this defensiveness probably will remain. As Britain's world political and military responsibilities decline, the men and women charged with overseeing her new position as an exporting nation--in which salesmanship and industrial techniques are paramount--will find their importance increasing.

Once again we find a new group that, like the new kind of working class, has very little to do with Merrie England. Its roots are less deep. It is not intimately concerned with the institutions that the old middle class served. In its outlook toward the world it is much more realistic and modern. Yet it is gradually assuming the forms of the old middle class--the schools, the regiments, the clubs. These institutions inevitably will change as a result of the admission of the new group. However, if the outward form remains unchanged, the British will be content.