Dark Womb of Defeat
By BERNARD LEVIN
WE were talking, as we usually are these days, of the Labour Party. The Labour MP was speculating about the election for a sticcessor to Aneurin Bevan, and we examined the chances of the likely contenders. 'Just a minute,' said one who had been silent for some time. 'What election are you talking about?'
'The election for Deputy Leader of the Labour Party,' 1 said. He banged the table. `But that's Gaitskell's job!' he shouted.
Cruel, and even unjustified. But the Clause Four fiasco, which has got the wolves baying their certainty that the time is ripe to rush in and pull the stag down (see Mr. Foot in the Specta- tor's correspondence columns this week), need not have happened this way. Immediately after the election, Mr. Gaitskell's hold over his party was, paradoxically, stronger than ever before or since. If he had called the post-mortem then he could have torn up Clause Four without anybody lifting a finger to stop him, and Clauses One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine and Ten for good measure. But he waited, fatally, until the end of November, by which time the wolves had had time to gather. Even then it might have been possible to swing the party into the twentieth century and a sporting chance of once again winning an election; but Mr. Gaits- kell's loyalty to his own code would permit him to do no more than indicate the lines along which he wanted the party to move, and then hope that they would move that way by a kind of capillary attraction.
They didn't. The Labour Party remains com- mitted to the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. It is true that they have always been committed to this nonsense, and that nobody—not even Mr. Foot - -seriously wants it to be carried out. The Labour Party has never, in modern times, fought an election on a platform containing any serious reference to such a programme, and whatever happens in October it will never fight on such a platform in the future. But the damage has been done. The word has gone out into the land that the Labour Party is still the party of nationalisa- tion. despite three successive intimations by the electorate, with increasing emphasis, that nation- alisation—whether of everything or something— is not required. The electorate will draw its own conclusions, and if it shows no signs of doing so the Tory Party will do so for it.
Not that this was ever necessary. There are already plenty of reasons for the electorate's in- creasing reluctance to vote Labour. A notable batch are to be found in the latest instalment of the Mark Abrams survey for Socialist Commen- tary. I have examined each of the earlier sec- tions of this investigation; each has told the same story of voters' growing lack of support for a party which, in the last analysis, is simply out of date.
The current dose of this medicine is the least palatable of all. It deals with the attitudes of young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. (As Dr. Abrams is at immediate pains to point out, it would be a sad error to treat them as coffee-bar teenagers; almost half the girls in this age-group are married, and a quarter of the boys.) Now if there is one popular electoral conception that seems always to have been supported by the facts, it is that the younger the voter, the farther Left his views. Dr. Abrams's researches suggest that this was not true last October. And the most ominous detail to be extracted from his figures is not the simple fact that 52 per cent. of his sample came down on the Conservative side and 43 per cent. on the Labour; it is when the figures are broken down farther that the horrid truth emerges. Only 10 per cent. of middle-class young people support the Labour Party, which is substantially less than the propor- tion of middle-class people over twenty-live who declare themselves Labour supporters. Two re- flections follow; the first is the obvious one, that if the Labour Party is losing support among the young middle-class people--traditionally the source from which it has drawn its idealistic support (cf. the way in which the dormitory suburbs went Labour in 1945), its ill-health is not merely chronic but almost certainly incur- able. For the second fact that emerges from a study of these figures is that the tendency for those questioned to 'upgrade' themselves in terms of social class—already noted in previous instal- ments of the survey among the electorate As 3 whole—is more marked among younger people than older. In other words, more and more young people regard themselves as belonging to a class less and less inclined to support the Labour Party.
This is not, as a, matter of fact, surprising. Examine the younger people's reactions to the tables of political-party attributes which Dr Abrams's survey presented to them. Eighty pet cent. of them think that 'Stands mainly for work- , ing class' applies to the Labour Party more than to the Conservatives; 63 per cent. think that 'Out to help underdog' is similarly more applicable to the Labour Party. The figures for those over twenty-five are respectively 69 per cent. and 49 per cent. In other words, the traditional picture of the Labour Party as the party of cloth caps and calloused hands is much more strongly held by younger people. Yet these are the very attri- butes of a political party that the younger people, in common with their elders, consider unimpor cant. This lesson is rubbed in even harder when we look at the table of party images; the respon. dents were asked what sort of people supported which party, and the younger voters, almost always more strongly than the older, plumped for such types as 'skilled craftsmen, ambitious people. scientists, forward-looking people' as Conservative supporters. And pat comes the sup porting conclusion: these are the types with which the younger voters tend increasingly to identify themselves.
The trouble is, of course, that Mr. Gaitskell does not need to be told any of this; he knew it all long ago. And the death-wishers among his opponents will only be comforted by the infor mation, for it means that they can remain-- apparently for ever—in the warm, dark womb of defeat. It is a well-observed politico-psychologi cal phenomenon—meaning that I have just made it up—that the members of the 1LP are the happiest and most secure people in British politi cal life, while it is the Tory supporters, certain of victory for the indefinite future, whose disturbed psyches arc always calling for flogging, hanging. castration of homosexuals and permanent in carceration for neurotics.
More than ever, the truth is clear. The break up of the Labour Party after Scarborough would not be the disaster that is widely assumed; would be the best thing that could happen to it And this is especially true now that the bust-up looks certain to come now on the proper issue not Clause Four or defence but the square con stitutional issue of who runs it and who makes its policy. Mr. Gaitskell is now under the rare maritime necessity of driving full speed for the rocks, in the hope that when his ship splits in two the funnel, the engines and the sensible members of the crew remain on the sharp end, while thc blunt end goes down with the bilge and the cargo. And these, after all, have long been indistinguishable.
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