Part 7

Horny-handed sons of toil still rank among the party's leading politicians, but the post-war years have seen a steady increase in two other types. One is the union officer, whose acquaintance with physical labor is often somewhat limited. The other is the product of a middle-class home, a public-school education, and an important job in the wartime civil service. Hugh Gaitskell, the present leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party, is a notable example of this second group.

The party still includes intellectuals treading circumspectly in the footprints left by the sainted Sydney and Beatrice Webb. The intellectuals, perhaps in search of protective coloring, often assume a manner more rough-hewn than the latest recruit from the coal face. Incidentally, it was my impression that the defeat of 1955 shook the intellectuals a good deal more than the practical politicians. They departed, as is their custom, into long, gloomy analyses of the reasons for the defeat. They, too, may have been out of touch with the people.

Of course the defeat of 1955 did not finish the Labor movement in Britain any more than its victory in 1945 doomed the Conservative Party. True, the Labor vote dropped from 13,949,000 in 1951 to 13,405,000 in 1955 and the party's strength in the House of Commons fell from 295 to 277 seats. But the prophets of gloom overlooked the movement's immense vitality, which comes in part from its connection with certain emotions and ideals well established in modern Britain.

Within the movement the accepted reason for the defeat was the interparty feud among the Bevanites on the left and the moderate and right-wing groups. The moderates, representing the TUC and the moderate elements of the Parliamentary Labor Party, provided most of the party leaders in the election campaign. But in the year before the election the squabbling within the party in the House of Commons and on the hustings created a poor impression. One leader went into the campaign certain that the party had not convinced the electorate that, if elected, it could provide a competent, united government. These bickerings thus were a serious factor in the Socialist catastrophe.

They were related to what seems to me to have been a much more 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.