The Unfashionable Angries

By JUDITH PAKENHAM T AM a new radical but I'm not sure what it 1 means. That doesn't worry me much, just as I could never see the point of arguing the meaning of 'socialism.' But to the unconverted or the curious, precise definitions of the deity always seem necessary. Therefore, messianically speak- ing as one of those new young unfashionable angries who vote Labour, I'll put my ideals under the microscope and twiddle the knobs a bit. But first, do not be disappointed to see straightaway only all the conventional 'isms' of the Left—a wish for a free and egalitarian community, a truly participating democracy achieved by the fairest possible distribution of wealth, the greatest possible diffusion of power, above all, since our methods must also be democratic, by fostering the will to good among all men. If socialism has to be brought into it, that to me is socialism.

Don't be downcast when I admit, too, that I often damn England and decide to emigrate, and not only because of the weather. Our vast incubus of frivolous snobberies makes us pay for every five-year span with a further twenty years of vicious stagnation. Don't we even take two steps back for every one step forward? But I'm still here and still hoping. I find some of the reasons in my background and upbringing. I was brought up in a conventional upper-class hothouse, board- ing-school, private day school, three Oxford years: a county life of ponies and tennis parties, a London life of deb dances. Yet I accepted very early on that our family were Outsiders on the Inside. Not simply because of personal idiosyn- crasies or religious peculiarities (meaning Catholics). But we were against the present order —we were only in it to change it. We understood the underdog and automatically spoke for him in arguments with school friends and so on. One of my first political commitments was to Nasser. I remember a furious row I had with a girl over school lunch at the time of Suez, when without either current or historical information, I hotly defended his nationalisation of the Canal. I dimly saw I was sacrificing my chance of winning (by arguing for a constructive belief in the UN and the rule of law) through my instinctive wrath with Tory jingoism. On the other hand, it is a strange fact that I hardly ever even talked to any- one with a lower-class accent until I went to Oxford. My childhood friends and all my in- fluences were Tory and upper-class.

This double-focus background has bred a lot of confused values. When after the last general elec- tion I began to read the newspapers and wake up politically, I was often fed up with trying to hold the balance, and even more with the uncertain social position I had to occupy if I was to go on trying to do so (not quite at home with-Top People, whom I understood as individuals but dis- liked in the collective; not quite at home with others, for the reverse reasons; and obscurely conscious that both resented me). I made quite a few decisions at Oxford, either to go for the world of bloodies, upper-class Fascism, or to believe dourly in the revolution, and die. (Which I prac- tically did on the march back from Aldermaston that year.) Maybe a lot of gloomy young don't- knows share the same sense of senseless mental blocks between people in this country. That famous sense of frustration which we young, thinking, forward-looking (`fun-loving') people are supposed to feel comes because everyone else seems to accept, in fact to approve of, this state of affairs. Or if ever they doubt, they only substitute introspective self-pity for action. Personally guilty and generally fed up with our three national night- mares of class, complacency and incompetence, they still feel that they can't do anything about it, that the thing's too big anyway, and that you can't expect anything from the politicians, who are either ridiculous or gutless.

But my upbringing also sets me grandly apart from many angries. For I am, or think I am, mili- tant. Luckily I also inherited my parents' tremen- dous enjoyment of politics, and of the intricacies of manoeuvre which must precede action in a democracy. This goes with another inherited atti- tude, belief in the possibility of attaining some measure of the ideal through specific, man-made action. The magic is, that you can be as ardently idealistic as any disappointed visionary, but, also, never disappointed. You can believe in man's per- fectibility, yet never despair that he sins. (Note the Christian Socialist in that.) So the strains of 'onward, radical soldiers' pro- vided the hymn tune to my growing-up. But I'm not my parents' shadow—I sometimes even differ from them. For example over the Common Market, where I call myself pro-Europe, but anti- Market as it is now and looks like being for the time. When questions of sovereignty arise, I find I believe in a proper patriotism, my country pos- sibly right now and again, my country with a role to play--if we can ever stop playing the meaning- less quiz about first- and second-class power status. My parents never explicitly indoctrinated any of us, being tooribusy indoctrinating others. There were no high old times when we were all forced to sing the Red Flag round the Christmas tree, nor vetoes on violently disagreeing with them on anything at all. No, I indisputably woke my- self up to the political world, theory and prac- tice—and only since leaving Oxford. There was a vague humanitarian motive, there was a strong curiosity—I wanted to see the people behind the news, I alsia wanted an authentic background for my arguments. I think I was started off by read- ing The Stagnant Society. Helping in last year's spring crop, of by-elections up North was a com- plete milestone. The North had merely been a literary concept before then, a landscape for Mrs. Gaskell or for the Industrial Revolution, The theme of the two nations, the limited geography of the Affluent Society all struck me, 1 may say, several months before it became big stuff in the serious press last autumn. Hard conditions, dirty old towns, Victorian slums and the fear of the sack, kindled radicalism within me. Perhaps this explains why I emphasise what I do, in trying now to describe what I mean by a radical.

First, I am sure that there is a natural right and a natural left in politics. Second, that we are all political animals. There isn't anyone who hasn't at least ten 'political' opinions, even if they are only anti-government grumbles, and, in the em- bracing sense in which I define 'political,' a mul- titude more. Possibly on temperament alone, one can discern the sheep and the goats, Milton and Shelley. Some, in highly political atmospheres, practically from birth, like the brother of mine who at an early age positively refused to go to circuses, which were cruel to elephants and tigers. Of course in every reactionary there's a radical trying to get out, even—who knows?—out of Mr. Macmillan, and one should type the fascist beast only in the sense that the radical within appears to have given up the struggle for the time being.

Political Ieft and right, the urge to freedom, the urge for leadership, equates to our main psy- chological drives, self-assertion, self-extinction in a parent figure. It mirrors all intellectual activities, philosophy, religion and the arts—you find every- where the same struggle to obtain perfect har- mony between utter chaos, anarchy, and utterly repressive order, tyranny.

Where on the seesaw does the radical stand? On the one hand, every little authoritarian these days pays lip-service to liberal ideals, those be- ing the OK ones in this century. Tory friends have often insisted that we were both equally egalitarian, and that if actions spoke better than words, their sincerity was greater than mine' be- cause the Tories had done more towards an equal society than Labour had. Fact aside, I won't accept such external criteria as the most im- portant for a radical.

The first criteria are emotional. Has he a natural urge to rebel, natural sympathy with the hard done by, a natural desire to change the status quo which is inevitably unfair to someone? That said, I re-admit result, as opposed to inten- tion, into my criteria. The Liberal cause has drawn its strength from two opposite types of rebels, one whole heart, the other whole head, and neither to me is, taken singly, truly radical. The love of logic and a rational management of our affairs produces in a stuffy society like ours, inefficient from too much tradition, the left-wing progressive. But he could easily become a Dr. Beeching, or a Mussolini for that matter, given a tradition of right-wing not left-wing opposition. The Tory Radical is this-sort of creature. Then there is the romantic revolutionary, whose pipe- = dreams of perfection in this life have been hardened by Marx into doctrinaire gloom. People on the extreme Labour left have been like this ever since capitalism reared its ugly head again in the Thirties, and Communism began to look pretty depressing too. I'm continually annoyed that their defeatism has to infect people of my age, who have never heard of Keir Hardie, and are quite happy to watch the telly while waiting for some celestial vision.

But crossbreed these two types, and you have got the genuine pure radical. The romantic lacks courage, which seems to me the second criterion of a radical. After all politics is doing, not thcoris- ing. He lacks it often, paradoxically, for the same reasons which make the rationalist progressive a splendid servant but a dangerous master (lack of nerve is never his trouble). Their humanitarian feelings are generalised; both are to blame for not working at being aware. Of others. Of each one. Acutely. What they feel, and why, and how would they like you to help. This should be the sensitive core of radicalism, the point behind all that jazz about the sanctity of the individual. In bad times, when everyone votes Tory, it can only be this outgoing wish to do good that can give the dogged conviction to go on voting Labour. in good times, when we're in power, it alone can keep the incipient paternalist in each of us in leash.

If I have any personal slant on Utopia, it's in the direction of the community idea. Town and country planning fascinates me because here Political action deals legitimately with those in- definable values of life in the round which the facts. figures and gunboat approach exclude. People must feel that all is meat for political action—if you are to avoid the 'them and us' gap between the politicians and the voters which cripples British democracy, The means are implicit : I could never become a Tory, for I feel we encamp squarely on the opposite banks of an abyss, left and right. I'm not vowed dogmatically to Labour. As a radical.

back the majority opposition party, even if, lust assuming a Liberal Resurrection, it trailed its right foot in the Establishment camp. Still I'm happy to be Labour. We have a left-wing pro- gramme, hard-hitting and co-ordinated—and we are also beginning to make it known.

But we won't succeed unless we are truly radical too. Are we?—I'm not sure yet. It is diffi- cult to fight the old wealth/ birth snobberies, and at the same time, as egalitarians, to stand against the new meritocratic snobberies. We are fighting the former on a new tough platform of efficiency. We argue, of course, for greater economic efficiency to achieve our traditional goals of economic equality, via measures of social in- surance and welfare benefits, education and sweeping tax reform. We also point out that com- pensation for redundancy and planned expansion of industries into jobless areas, and greater Material benefits for the less comfortably placed, Would do a lot to get rid of the sense of social in- justice and the evils of economic insecurity which Poison our industrial relations and make our balance of payments problem so intolerable.

I still think we don't propose enough anti- snob measures. We are just beginning to notice Our managerial revolution, with its horn-rimmed elite of the eleven-plus, enjoying the corporate wealth and the corporate privileges of the new feudal kingdoms which modern capitalism has developed within the traditional kingdom of society. But its peculiar nastiness here is the way It sucks up to the old style. Public school, birth, wealth, snobberies are busier than ever, adding Panache to a pushing world. If Labour pushes equal opportunity too hard, the 'opening for bright young lads' slogan, we will find ourselves toeing all the old snob lines. We must spike the big guns of power, the City, Whitehall, the take- "e, tycoons and the white-settler directors, all the kings of the hunt-ball world, for English snobbery turns more on the prestige of power than any particular one of its component parts, birth, wealth or brains.

Why not campaign to make public enterprise more attractive to the voter, by showing how varied are the forms it can take before involving monolithic control, Why not much, much more on (a) industrial democracy, (b) co-operative en- terprises, in housing, industry, etc., (c) citizen initiative in local, regional and central govern- ment?

The puzzle remains: what happens to initiative if there is not the snob reward of power? I don't know. The only right attitude, nevertheless, can be one which places high prestige value on the talents with which a man carries out important work, yet continues to hold the man himself, in his human status, in equal esteem with others who have not those particular gifts.

I do hope the Labour Party won't sidestep this difficult problem of balance. The Liberals and the less awful young Tories are already finding equality of opportunity an easy wicket. But we should damage our ideals if we ever tried, as many say we should, to take up our grass-roots and walk, to the arms of the white-collared voter.

By all means, let's lose our class-image—that's what equality of respect should mean. But don't let's lose the workers. Or, indeed why not, they might lose us.