SIR.—Your claim that I misunderstood your point about Labour's need
to anticipate trends in public opinion is a little disingenuous. You 'specifically con- demned' Mr. Anthony Crosland's proposal to poll the voters on the purely technical ground that the information so culled would be out of date.
The way to power, you declared, was through the predictive hunch—I called it 'inidave market re• search'—about the voters' feelings the day after tomorrow. The only inference to be drawn from the leader was that Labour should adjust its policies to what you would call the 'realities' by forecasting the trends (a nice vague word, this). In other words: political pools, with power as the big prize.
My point, simply, was this: Socialism's aim is to lead people towards a better society, not follow them
into the I'm-all-right-Jack jungle. •
Your muddle-headed comparison of what you call Tribune Socialists with 'some religious sects more anxious to satisfy the enlightened and faithful than to proselytise the masses' merely underlines your inability to grasp the difference between Socialism and opportunist organisations like the Tory Party. To proselytise the masses is precisely what Socialists of the Left want the Labour Party to do—but not by junking the rubric, as the Spectator so insistently advocates.
With the imaginative use of modern media and the introduction of some conviction, guts and fire at Westminster, the conversion of the masses might not be such a tremendous task at that. After all, at the very moment that Mr. Gaitskell is fussing about Clause Four like a medieval theologian, that super-empiricist Mr.'Macmillan has urbanely switched to industrial controls, planning and subsidies—with- out, so far as 1 can ascertain, a Tory voters' protest march to No. 10.
I suggest that by the time—perhaps uncomfortably nearer than we think—that Russia is a serious com- petitor in vital export markets the current bickering about public ownership will seem as quaint as •..he chimney-boy controversy. Or doesn't the Spectator's trendometer pierce the five-year barrier?—Yours faithfully,
25 The Chenies, Petts Wood, Kent
TOM BAIS'TOW
[This correspondence is referred to in a leading article on p. 308.—Editor, Spectator.]
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