Politics
An unpopular front In Monday's Guardian, Mr John Evans, who is Labour MP for St Helens and shadow minister for employment and in- dustrial relations, described how he was arrested while picketing outside Parkside Colliery and held in police custody for a few hours. He suffered several indignities. First of all, the police van with Mr Evans in it drove away so fast that 'we were flung all over the place'. When he arrived, he had to surrender his newspaper, spectacles and other possessions. Since he had been out of bed since 4.30 am, and it was now about seven am, Mr Evans felt that he 'could do with a cup of tea', yet he was deprived of tea until 1.30 pm, when it came with ham, chips and peas. When he wanted to tele- phone his solicitor, the line was in use, and he had to ask several times before he was allowed to telephone. When the solicitor arrived, there was no 'consultation room'. Mr Evans also had to share a lavatory that did not work with a number of miners, one of whom had 'foul smelling stockinged feet'; another used the lavatory and made a 'foul smell'.
The piece is entitled 'The dignity that is taken away with your laces' (Mr Evans had to surrender them as well), and although it is written with restraint it is clearly sup- posed to make one feel outraged at the way the police are treating our fellow citizens. But what sort of outrage? Mr Evans is not trying to confirm the claims made by Mr Arthur Scargill that the modern British police are little better than the Gestapo. He is not complaining about anything which could remotely be described as totalitarian. What annoys him is that he was not treated with enough respect. The 'dignity' that he lost with his laces is a Pooter-esque sense of his own importance unrecognised by others. One hopes that his case has been taken up by the St Helens Mercury (if such there be) — 'MP held in cell with miners — I asked for a cup of tea three times, says shadow minister'.
Perhaps the best sentence in Mr Evans's article comes when he describes the fast drive in the police van. Because the jour- ney was so bumpy, he says, '. . . I was quite relieved when we stopped at St Helens Police Station'. This is not compa- rable with the reaction of prisoners being let out of their cattle trucks and herded into their death camps. The great virtue of Mr Evans's description of his tribulations is that it is completely honest, and it illus- trates how difficult it is to be convincingly left-wing in Britain today. It is difficult to find a proper grievance: it is hard to use the language of violent denunciation without sounding ridiculous.
This has always been a problem for the Left in Britain. A comfortably off young graduate was always able to feel guilt at his own easy circumstances, contempt for his parents' way of life and compassion for the less fortunate; but he was never able to state with great conviction that Britain was an oppressive state, and he had to admit that the British people for whom the revolution would be fought were seldom seething with discontent. The traditional way of getting round this, used even by people as honest as Orwell when, in the 1930s, he was still more or less undisillu- sioned, was to speak of Britain as being in a slumber from which she would eventually awake. Socialist fervour could therefore transfer itself to foreign parts. Where Britain seemed too dully comfortable to deserve the attention of intellectuals, the Soviet Union and the Spanish Republic were the holy places to be rescued in the crusade against Fascism.
Today the unquestioning international- ism of socialism has weakened. We have seen enough of enough socialist govern- ments to be able to repress the sense of excitement that was felt about the New Soviet Civilisation. Socialists still have soft spots for Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh and the rest, but there is no longer any country (unless it be Nicaragua) which serves as a model and about which no criticism can be breathed. Socialist internationalism now derives its small remaining strength from its communal hate figures. Down with Reagan, Pinochet, Thatcher. Down with Israel, South Africa, Turkey. But up with whom?
The consequence is that British socialists have had to fall back on their own re- sources. Since it is no longer possible to pretend that a new age of international enlightenment is imminent, socialism has to retreat and circumscribe its aims. Yesterday it was the world, today it is Militant Liverpool, perhaps Mr Evans's St Helens. In terms of political method, this may well be more effective — experiments can be performed in Islington, for exam- ple, which would not be possible in a less ratified and wider sphere. Power needs its base. There must now be more revolution- ary socialists occupying positions of power in British society than at any time in our history, although we have a government and an electorate which have decisively repudiated them.
The difficulty is that a socialism which is active in this way is much less attractive than the grander and more apparently noble political creed of 40 years ago. An Arthur Scargill or a Ken Livingstone has persistently to misrepresent what is hap- pening in Britain to an extent repugnant to common observation. The stormtroopers of Mr Scargill's imagination are actually the overworked constables who were so slow with Mr Evans's tea. The 'most reactionary Tory Government in history' which is destroying local democracy is one and the same as the administration which has driven taxation and public spending to unparalleled heights. Many people still want to believe these accusations, of course, but they are more easily disproved than claims about Franco's atrocities or the inspiring results of Stalin's collective farms could be in the 1930s. It follows that to be a dedicated, unswerving socialist in modern Britain, you have to repudiate your fellow citizens in a way that was not necessary in the past. You have to believe that all the public authorities lack integrity, that the press and the universities and even most trade unions are, despicable lackeys, and that everyone you meet who tells you otherwise is either a fool or a knave. This creed is bound to have its adherents, but it unlikely to attract large minds or generous hearts.
Given that socialism in Britain has be- come more parochial, and more bitter, resentful and petty in its preoccupations, it has become more necessary than ever to attract new recruits by indirect means. So it is that cause after cause is added to Labour's repertoire. Some, like feminism, are already closely related to Marxist interpretations of human behaviour, but others, like opposition to animal experi- ments, pro-Rastafarianism or support for Irish Republicanism have no natural con- nection with socialism or even with one another. Although most good socialists reject Professor Hobsbawm's call for a popular front of anti-Thatcher parties, these random alliances on the Left are composed through similar motives. The problem is that they make up an unpopular front. Those who fanatically oppose bloodsports are outnumbered by those who dislike fanatics.
Yet with all these drawbacks, sodalism in Britain could still prosper. The sense of injustice and the false equation of inequal- ity with injustice are as strong as ever as political sentiments. If you are disposed to look for wrongs that cry out to heaven for vengeance, you will find them in Britain today, as in every place and every tittle' Modern British socialism is not under- mined so much by its contradictions or even its dullness, as by the recalcitrance of the British worker. In the face of the working miners, it is not enough to say that British workers are docile and submissive. Many of them support their docility with , passion,' and are prepared to risk hated and violence to retain their oppressed condition. They have thought about the matter long and hard, and they have decided against Mr Scargill and socialisal. At the sight of this, even an intellectual, as Orwell might have said, ought to stop and think.
Charles Moore
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