A Spectator's Notebook

Pioneers, 0 Pioneers

no end.

If, that is, the Communist Party is not so stupid as to forbid him to take his seat, on the grounds that no Communist can be associated with a body like the House of Lords. But that the party almost certainly will be so stupid I am reminded by a new book, Comnizmisnz and British Intellectuals, by Dr. Neal Wood (Gollancz, 21s.). Dr. Wood is an American who made his study for, I take it, one of those American doctorates, and apart from the fact that he does not know the meaning of the words 'disinterested' or 'prior' (I sometimes get the feeling that I am the only man left alive who does), it does not markedly increase one's confi- dence in his knowledge and understanding of the British political scene to find him saying on his twenty-fourth page that 'No great stigma attaches to a Labour MP who associates with communists or writes for their publications.' Nor can any man claim to view Leftist politics in pre-war Britain with a dispassionate and accurate gaze if he re- prints one of Mr. Cockburn's pieces of light romantic fiction about the influence and reader- ship of The Week and appears to take Mr. Cock- burn's estimate at its face value.

Still, these and a few more minor blemishes apart, Dr. Wood's sad tale is interesting enough. At times it is almost unbearably nostalgic. The thrill one gets even today at the sight on a second- hand bookstall of the particularly nasty orange in which the Left Book Club publications were bound can be felt on almost every page, at any rate of the early chapters. Fascinated, we watch Bloomsbury falling back in good but melancholy order as the dog beneath the skin begins to show through; we hear the tramp of the Hunger Marchers above the high-pitched whinnying of Professor Bernal (Man, he told us in those brave days, would soon evolve into a fairly short cylin- der covered in some tough fibre); see the brave banners of the International Brigade. And what dead worlds are awakened by such an artless pair of sentences as this :

Young Tory MPs like R. A. Butler and Lennox-Boyd openly supported Franco. Harold Macmillan, however, remained a confirmed anti- Fascist.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive; my own earliest public memory is of a barricade being erected in the street outside our house, made mainly of barrows from the market farther up the road, against (I suppose) a Mosley-Fascist parade.

Where did it all go? The passion, the Popular Front, the belief in the sunrise--how did it all boil over and waste away? Just listen to this, for instance:

We shall build tomorrow

A new clean town

With no more sorrow Where lovely people walk up and down We shall all be strong We shall all be young No more tearful days, fearful days Or unhappy affairs We shall all pull our weight In the ship of state Come out into the sun.

I don't suppose that the Professor of Poetry at Oxford University would thank me (or Dr, Wood, for that matter) for reminding him that he wrote this, even though he was twenty-six years younger at the time. (But, leaving the politics aside, how did stuff of this kind come to be so highly re- garded? If the Left couldn't see through Stalin, could they not at least see through hokum of this kind?) Since the war, of course, or at any rate since 1948 (nobody had any excuse for remaining in the party after that date), the Communist Party has ceased to be interesting, because it has ceased to have any central effect on the life or thought of the country. But it is not too fanciful to read lessons for Mr. Gaitskell And the Labour Party into its collapse. The Labour Party today is in much graver danger than many of the faithful realise of sliding farther and faster into decline and impotence; if Dr. Wood's son is not to write a book called Socialism and British Intellectuals, with an equally melancholy story to tell, the re- thinking had better go a lot farther than it has gone so far. Mr. Harold Wilson, for instance, has been telling the Cambridge University Labour Club that

Everyone knows that if the election had taken place at any time between 1955 and, at any rate, mid-1958, Labour would have won—and prob- ably won easily. It was only the windfall gain in import prices—worth 000 million in 1958— which enabled the Tories to claim stability of prices, to drop the credit squeeze, lo embark on the election-winning hire-purchase boom, to make big Budget hand-outs, and to reverse the policies which were leading to unemployment. Without this reversal of Tory politicies, the result would never have been in doubt.

And Mr. Wilson must be listened to. Not because it is necessary to have a high regard for his intelli- gence and judgment, but because he must by definition be one of those whose opinions will carry weight in the Labour Party; the man who would have been Chancellor if the election had gone the other way must automatically be one of the party's leaders, and despite the grumbles about the failure of the Wilson Machine, nobody seri- ously suggests that the election would have been won by better organisation. And it does not much matter that the nonsense I have quoted is untrue; nor does it matter whether Mr. Wilson believes it or not. What must chill any observer —of whatever political persuasion—who thinks the extinction of the Labour Party undesirable in the wider interests of British parliamentary demo- cracy is that it is clear that if that nonsense were true, Mr. Wilson would be quite satisfied.

Not only does Mr. Wilson appear to be gaily conceding that the Labour Party cannot win an election in the absence of widespread economic hardship (which may well be true; if it is true it is one of the most depressing truths about British political life to emerge for decades), but he is also saying that the only reasons that anybody had for turning to the Labour Party before mid-1958 were purely negative ones. He should consider whether the odds are all that high against a 'windfall gain in import prices' just before every election for the next thousand years, in which case he and his successors are surely going to be compelled to think up some new excuses, if they do nothing else. But how many other influential members of the Labour Party, I wonder, are willing to sit back and wait for a slump to roll them into power? Mr. George Lindgren, who was defeated at Wellingborough After fourteen years (the House will miss his absurdly bell-bottomed trousers), when asked if he would seek to get back to Parlia- ment (i.e., at a by-election), handsomely replied, 'That would depend on someone else's misfortune, and I cannot wish for that.' But is not the Labour Party in collective danger of depending on the entire country's misfortune, if Mr. Wilson's atti- tude is anything to go by?

There are other signs of the times, though. which are a little more encouraging. I have been struck by the number of people who have joined the Labour Party since October 8; and I hear of recruits—mainly younger ones, and these mainly 'intellectuals' (are you there, Dr. Wood?) —on all hands. Of course, there is always a tendency for a flush of sympathy to break out for the losers of any battle (Tees help them on their feet again, and build their bloody fleet again), but I think, despite the vagueness of some of these new adherents about their reasons for adhering (Rhett Butler was equally vague about his reasons for joining the Army of the Confederacy when it had become clear beyond all doubt that the South had lost the war), the Labour Party can take some kind of permanent comfort from it.

Of course, there is for many a deep satis- faction lurking far below the dark surface of defeat, and a comradeship on the sinking ship that the torpedo can never know. And no doubt the appearance of Lord Woolton's autobiography, a portrait of a man who snatched power and prestige from the jaws of defeat, must have tickled one or two subconsciousnesses into dreams of glory. But there is more to it than that. The Tory victory has jolted into political action some who were previously quiescent; they have woken up to the possibility of permanent Tory government in Britain, confirmed at successive elections; an idea which alarms them so much (and well it might) that not even the distasteful business of active political involvement seems too high a price to pay for a chance to deter them. Of course, the slow reality may blunt their enthusiasm quickly; but if not I hope the new voices will not allow themselves to be drowned by cries of 'Johnny- come-lately.'

BERNARD LEVIN