Spectator's Notebook
IT is not only blinkered Marxists who are dis- lcomfited by the disappearance of the proletariat in the West. Many a doughty labour fighter of the bulldog breed finds it sad on occasion. When a strike threat was called off recently the union boss said it was the result of suburban snob values which force the womenfolk to force their menfolk into hire-purchase expenditure on television, motor-cars, washing machines, and the like. 'I don't agree,' he said, 'with this keeping up with the Joneses. I wish we could get back to the spirit of thirty years ago—with today's better living standards.' And so he neatly summed up one of the backward-looking attitudes which are keeping the labour movement from that re- formation it so badly needs. For all the lip-service to 'today's better living standards,' 1 suspect that many a union leader looks back with real nostalgia to the days of the big biddable bat- talions of the cloth-capped, and their pre- maturely aged wives. Does it never occur to them that 'working people' want television sets, motor-cars, washing machines, and the rest, like other people who had them before, including the Joneses, just because they think they're good things to have? Great ideals of high thinking and plain living for the people may be noble on the lips of philosopher-kings like Eamonn de Valera, but not on those of union bosses who had better snap out of it if they don't want to see their affluent societies giving them the bird.
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