Part 8
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.
_Tribune_ does not confine its activities to news and editorial comments. Each year at the annual Labor Party conference the newspaper stages what is usually the liveliest meeting of the week. During the rest of the year it sponsors "brain trust" meetings throughout the country at which the Bevanite ideology is expounded and defended.
The tabloid _Tribune_ is a good example of the old "hit him again, he's still breathing" type of journalism. It does a wonderful job of dissecting and deflating the stuffed shirts of the right and left. But it is monotonously strident. The _New Statesman and Nation_, although not so avowedly Bevanite as _Tribune_, may carry more weight with the radical left. It is a weekly of great influence.
This influence is exerted principally upon an important group of intellectual orphans--the young men and women whose education surpassed their capacities and who now find themselves in dull, poorly paid jobs, living on a scale of comfort much lower than that of the more prosperous members of the urban working class. They are dissatisfied with the system and the government that has condemned them to dreary days of teaching runny-nosed little boys or to routine civil-service jobs. Not unnaturally, they welcome political plans and projects which promise to install them in posts worthy of their abilities as they see them.
Politically they are on the extreme left. The _New Statesman_ encourages their political beliefs and assures them that their present lowly estate is due to the system and not to their own failings. The members of this group are poor. They are occasionally futile and often ridiculous. But they are not negligible.
That wise man Sir Oliver Franks said once that the political outlook of this group would have an important effect on Britain's political situation ten or twenty years hence. My own conclusion is that this group, like the Bevanites in the constituency labor parties, and the dissidents in the unions, wants to remake the Labor Party in its own image and then, when the party has come to power, remake Britain.
The left-wing radicalism of Britain--what we call Bevanism--is thus a good deal more important than the occasional rebellions of a few MP's on the Labor side of the House of Commons. It represents in an acute form the evangelism that is so strong a part of the nonconformist tradition in Britain. It rebels against the present direction of the Labor movement and the Parliamentary Labor Party. It wants, not a Britain governed by the Labor Party, but a socialist Britain.
Can it come to power? Movements of this kind usually win power during or after some great national convulsion. A war or an economic depression comparable to that of 1929-36 would give left-wing radicalism its chance. But either might give right-wing radicalism and nationalism a chance, too. To win, the Bevanites would have to defeat the mature power of the great unions and the undoubted abilities of the present leaders of the party.
The great unions are the result of one hundred and fifty years of crusading agitation. The labor movement began with them. They have money and they have power. The "branch" or "lodge" is the basic unit of organization within the union. Every union member must belong to it. In an individual plant or factory, the workers of the various unions are represented by a shop steward, who recruits new members, handles grievances, and, as the intelligence officer for the workers, keeps in touch with the management and its plans.
There are regional, district, or area organizations on a higher level for the larger unions. Finally, there is a national executive council of elected officials which deals with the national needs of the unions. At the top is the Trades Union Congress, a confederation of nearly all the great unions.
The unions have grown so large--the Amalgamated Engineering Union, for instance, includes thirty-nine separate unions in its organization--that it is sometimes difficult for the TUC or the national executive of an individual union to control its members. But the moderate political outlook--moderate, that is, by Bevanite standards--still prevails at the top, and the system of card voting, under which all the votes of a union are cast at the annual conference according to the decision of its national executive, insures that the moderate policies of the union leaders will be approved at the conference.
The imposing voting strength of the unions has been employed at successive conferences to maintain the policies and leadership of men like Attlee, Morrison, and Gaitskell. The steamroller in action is an impressive and, to the Bevanites, an undemocratic sight. But it does represent millions who advocate a conservative policy for the labor movement and who, at the moment, are satisfied with evolutionary rather than revolutionary progress.
The left-wing constituency labor parties create a great deal of noise. Those which support the moderate leadership are less enterprising in their propaganda, and, because criticism is often more interesting than support, they make fewer headlines. But, despite the agonized pleas of the left wing, hundreds of CLP's are satisfied with the general ideological policy of the movement and its leaders. This is a manifestation of the innate conservatism of the British worker. Just as the Conservatives of twenty years ago distrusted the brilliant Churchill largely because he was brilliant, so thousands of Labor voters today distrust the brilliant Bevan.
This group puts its faith in the ebb and flow of the tides of political opinion in a democracy. It was downcast after the 1955 election, but it did not despair. "Give the Tories their chance, they'll make a muck of it," said a union official. "We'll come back at the next election and pick up where we left off in 1951."
The moderate section of the labor movement enjoys the support of the only two national newspapers that are unreservedly Labor: the tabloid _Daily Mirror_ and the _Daily Herald_. The _Mirror_, with an enormous circulation of 4,725,000, consistently supported Hugh Gaitskell for leadership of the party. So did the _Herald_, but it is a quieter paper than the brash tabloid, and its influence in trade-union circles, once great, seems to be declining, although the TUC remains a large shareholder.
The election of Gaitskell as leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party on Attlee's retirement was a severe blow to the Bevanites. But the tactics employed by Gaitskell in his first months as Leader of the Opposition were probably even more damaging to Bevan's hopes.
Bevan came out of his parliamentary corner swinging at the new leader. In the past this had provoked Herbert Morrison, then deputy leader, and even Attlee to retaliatory measures. Gaitskell paid no attention to Bevan, but went about his work of presiding over the reorganization of the party machine and of leading the party in the House of Commons. Bevan huffed and puffed about the country making speeches on Saturdays and Sundays. But as his targets said little in reply, the speeches became surprisingly repetitious. Moreover, with the establishment of the new Labor front bench in the Commons, Bevan took one of the seats and became the party's chief spokesman, first on colonial affairs and then on foreign affairs. It is difficult to make criticisms of the party leader stick at Saturday meetings if, from Monday through Friday, the critic sits cheek by jowl in the House of Commons with the target in an atmosphere of polite amiability.
Bevan's bearing in the debate over the Suez policy increased his stature in the party and in the country. Indeed, his approach to the crisis impressed even his enemies as more statesmanlike and more "national" than that of Gaitskell. Gaitskell, of course, labors under the difficulty of being a member of the middle class from which so many Conservative politicians spring. They naturally regard him as a traitor, and criticisms by Gaitskell of Conservative foreign policy are much more bitterly denounced than those of Bevan. To the Tories, Bevan was speaking for the country, Gaitskell for the party.
The schism in the party is not healed. Too much has been said, the convictions are too firmly held for that. But Gaitskell has been successful in creating a façade of co-operation which thus far has been proof against Bevan's outbursts on the platform or in _Tribune_. However, the reaction of the two leaders to the Eisenhower doctrine for the Middle East demonstrated the width of their differences on a fundamental problem. The future of this struggle has a direct and decisive bearing on the future of the labor movement. If Labor is to return to power in an election that is unaffected by a national crisis, foreign or domestic, the schism must be healed.
As a major political party, the labor movement has been molded by many influences. Before the First World War, German Social Democracy and the Fabians affected it. The party then acquired the tenets of national ownership and ultimate egalitarianism in the most class-conscious of nations which give it its socialist tone. But a party so large covers a wide range of political belief. It is a socialist party to some. It is a labor party to others. Above all, it is a means, like the Republican and Democratic parties, of advancing the interests of a large number of practical politicians whose interests in socialism are modified by their interest in what will win votes.
The moderate center of the Labor Party now dominates the movement just as the moderate center of the Conservative Party dominates the Tory organization. In each the leader represents the mood of the majority within the parliamentary party. Macmillan is a little to the left of center among Conservatives. Gaitskell is a little to the right of center in the Labor Party. The identity of interest among the two dominant groups is greater than might appear from the robust exchanges in the House of Commons.
The radical wings in both parties are handicapped at this point by a seeming inability to understand that politics is the art of the possible. Herbert Morrison, a great practical politician, summed up this weakness of the radical left at a Labor conference. A resolution demanding the immediate nationalization of remaining industry--at a time when the country was prosperous and fully employed--was before the conference. Do you think, he asked, that anyone will _vote_ for such a program?
VI. _A Quiet Revolution by a Quiet People_
_Revolutions begin with infatuation and end with incredulity. In their origin proud assurance is dominant; the ruling opinion disdains doubt and will not endure contradiction. At their completion skepticism takes the place of disdain and there is no longer any care for individual convictions or any belief in truth._
F.P.G. GUIZOT
_Revolutions are not made; they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back._
WENDELL PHILLIPS
The changes in Britain since 1939 have been revolutionary. Yet because Britain is a nation with a highly developed political sense, the revolution has been fought not at barricades but in ballot boxes. And, seen on the broadest scale, what has happened to Britain and its people at home is part of what has been happening all over the world since 1939. The year that saw the start of World War II saw the beginning of a terrible acceleration of forces that for fifty years had been slowly, sometimes almost imperceptibly weakening Britain's position.
This book is concerned principally with Britain. But let us look at what has happened to British interests abroad since 1939. The Indian Empire is gone. The lifeline of what remains of the Empire is unraveling in Ceylon, Singapore, Aden, and Cyprus. The rise of the Soviet Union and the United States has dwarfed Britain as a world power, and the imaginative conception of the Commonwealth is not yet, and may never be, an adequate balance to these two vast conglomerations of industrial and military power. Britain's ties with some of the Commonwealth nations--notably South Africa--grow weaker year by year. The remaining colonies are moving toward self-government, as the British always planned, but it is doubtful whether after they leave the Empire nest they will be any more loyal or responsive to British leadership than Ceylon is today.
We are living through one of the most important processes of recent history, the liquidation of an empire that has lasted in various forms for about two hundred and fifty years. It is a tribute to the people who gave it life, to their courage, political flexibility, and foresight, that, despite the changes and the retreats, they are still reckoned a power in world affairs.
History has its lessons. In 1785 Britain had lost her most important overseas possessions, the American colonies, and the courts of Europe rejoiced at the discomfiture of the island people and their armies and navies. A third of a century later the British had organized the coalition that ultimately defeated Napoleon, the supreme military genius of his time, and were carving out a new empire in India, Australia, and Africa.
We need not drop back so far in history. When, shortly before the Second World War, I went to England, it was fashionable and very profitable to write about the decay of Britain. Some very good books were written on the subject, and they were being seriously discussed when this island people, alone, in a tremendous renaissance of national energy, won the Battle of Britain and saved the Western world from the danger of German domination. As generations of Spaniards, French, and Germans have learned, it is unwise to count the British out.
Yet an observer from Mars limiting his observations to the home islands would find reason to do so today. For the Britain of today resembles very little the Britain that, despite the long and, by the standards of that day, costly war in South Africa, greeted the twentieth century proudly confident.
Britain's old position as "the workshop of the world" has vanished. There are now two other Britains--two nations, that is, which depend largely on the production and export of manufactured goods to live. Both these nations, Germany and Japan, are the defeated enemies of World War II, and both of them were bidding for and getting a share of Britain's overseas trade before that war and, indeed, before World War I. The decline in Britain's economic strength did not begin in 1939.
The second world conflict, beginning only twenty-one years after the close of the first, accelerated the decline. Into World War II Britain poured both blood and treasure, just as she had in the earlier conflict. But 1914-18 had left her less of both. British casualties in World War II were smaller than in the first conflict, but the damage done to Britain's position in the world was much greater.
The differences between the Britain of 1939 and the Britain of 1945 affected much more than the international position of the country. A society had been grabbed, shaken, and nearly throttled by the giant hand of war. After that bright Sunday morning in September when the sirens sounded for the first time in earnest, things were never the same again.
I remember an evening in April 1939. It was sunny and warm, and the men and women came out of their offices and relaxed in the sunlight. The Germans were on the move in Europe, but along the Mall there was nothing more disturbing than the honk of taxi horns. London lay prosperous and sleek, assured and confident.
Six years later I came back from Germany. I had been in London much of the time during the war, but now I had been away for over a year, and I found the contrast between that September evening and the far-off evening in April impressive. It was not the bomb damage; there was more of that in Germany. But London and Londoners had broken their connection with the confident past. It was a shabbier, slower world, face to face with new realities.
The impact of the war on the average Briton was greater than on the average American because for long periods the Briton lived with it on terms of frighteningly personal intimacy. Americans went to war. The war came to the British. In the process an ordered society was shaken to its foundations, personal and national savings were swept away, the physical industrial system of the country was subjected to prolonged attack and then to a fierce national drive for increased industrial production. For close to six years the country was a fortress and then a staging area for military operations. By the end of the war and the dawn of an austere peace the nation was prepared psychologically for the other changes introduced by a radical change in political direction.
Mobilization of military and economic forces during the war was more complete in Britain than in any other combatant save possibly the Soviet Union. The result of immediate peril and the prospect of defeat, it began early in 1940. This mobilization was the start of the social changes that have been going on in Britain ever since.
The mingling of classes began. Diana, the rector's daughter, and Nigel, the squire's son, found themselves serving in the ranks with Harriet from Notting Hill and Joe from Islington. In the end, of course, Diana was commissioned in the Wrens and Nigel was a captain in a county regiment, largely but not entirely because of their superior education; however, their contacts with Harriet and Joe gave them a glimpse of a Britain they had not known about before.
Things changed at home, too. The rectory was loud with the voices of children evacuated from the slums of London or Coventry, and the squire spent his days farming as he never had before and his nights with the Home Guard. All over the country, men and women were giving up those jobs which were unnecessary in war and venturing into new fields. The assistant in the Mayfair dress shop found herself in a factory, the greens-keeper was in a shipyard.
The old, safe, quiet life of Britain ended. There were no more quiet evenings in the garden, no more leisurely teas in the working-class kitchen, no more visits to Wimbledon. People worked ten or twelve hours a day, and when they ate they ate strange dishes made of potatoes and carrots, and when they drank they drank weak beer and raw gin. These conditions were not universal. There were the shirkers in the safe hotels and the black markets. And, despite the bands playing "There'll Always Be an England" (a proposition that seemed highly doubtful in the summer of 1940) and despite the rolling oratory and defiance of Mr. Churchill, there was plenty of grousing. It was, they said in the ranks, "a hell of a way to run the bleedin' war"; or, as the suburban housewife remarked in the queue, "I really think they could get us some decent beef. How the children are to get along on this I cannot imagine."
They went on, though. They were bombed and strafed and shelled, they were hungry and tired. The casualty lists came in from Norway, France, the Middle East, Burma, Malaya. The machines in the factories were as strained as the workers. Then, finally, it was over and they had won. Only a minute number had ever thought they would be beaten. But they were not the same people who had gone dutifully to war in 1939. Nor was the world the same.
"Well, it's time to go home and pick up the pieces," said a major in Saxony in the summer of 1945. He, and thousands like him, found that the pieces just were not there any more. The economic drain of the war had made certain that Britons, far from enjoying the fruits of victory, would undergo further years of unrelenting toil in a scarred and shabby country.
People were restless. They had been unsettled not only by the impact of the war but by the glimpse of other societies. Not until the last two and a half years of the war, when the American Army and Air Force began to flood into Britain, did people become aware of the size, power, and mechanical ingenuity and efficiency of the people who were so inaccurately portrayed by Hollywood. Some saw in Russia's resistance to the Germans and her final sweeping victories proof that the Communist society could endure and triumph no less than those of the Western democracies. Many who understood what had happened to British power during the war were convinced that if the country was to retain its position in the world, it would have to seek new, adventurous methods in commerce and industry and new men and new policies in politics. This conviction was held by hundreds of thousands who had once voted Liberal or Conservative but who in the election of 1945 were to cast their votes for the Labor Party.
The political history of the immediate pre-war period offers a reason for this change. The defeats of 1940 and 1941 were a tremendous shock to Britons. During the war there was no time for lengthy official post-mortems on the alarming inadequacy of British arms in France in 1940 or in the first reverses in the western desert of Libya a year later. But the polemics of the left managed to convince a great many people that the blame lay with the pre-war Conservative governments of Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin. When in 1945 the chance came to revenge themselves on the Tories, even though Winston Churchill, who had opposed both Chamberlain and Baldwin, was the Conservatives' leader, millions took the chance and voted Labor into office.