Dogmas for Demagogues ,
The Socialist professors are profoundly mistaken, I suggest, if they suppose that egalitarianism, with its concomitant of classless austerity. is likely to stir the Welfare State voter. A world without conspicuous expenditure, from which luxury and display are banished, without Lady Docker or Miss Dors or £75,000 cheques from the football pools, is one that holds little attraction.
There is no evidence, past or present, to justify the conclu- sion that the British mass electorate can be swayed by doctrin- aire appeals. Not theoretical inequities, but practical hardships —the shortage of food, or homes, or work—are the issues on which crusades are launched. It was on such issues that the Socialist Party moved forward like an avalanche from 1900 to 1945. To suppose that the avalanche can be set in motion again by a doctrinaire dogma is a delusion of the study.
What the mass electorate wants—what it is determined to preserve, literally at all costs—is economic security. Today this is endangered both by inflation and also by the need for indus- trial mobility brought about by changes in the economic climate in which Britain must sell her export goods. Inflation and redeployment—those are the two living issues in the domestic scene. The new nostrums of the Socialist professionals have no more relevance to either than the old nostrums had.
Now it begins to look—the signs have been accumulating ever since the Butler Budget of last autumn—as if organised labour is turning away from the political to the industrial hori- zon. It is shifting its spotlight from Westminster to the factory. This has happened before. During the period that lasted from 1910 to the failure of the General Strike in 1926 it was the trade unions, far more than the Socialist politicians, that voiced the aspirations of the working class. It may happen again.
Alone among the Socialist leaders, Mr. Bevan seems to be aware of this possibility. He is the only man among them now whose roots remain in the working class, and who is fitted both by experience and by instinct to comprehend the movement of events there. He is certainly the only one who—if the possibility becomes a reality—has the qualities that will enable him to move with it, and to play an important part in it. He is the last athlete of the platform in the Socialist movement, the last survivor of the 1910-26 era who is still a public figure.
Suppose that the swing does take place; what then? 1 will hazard two brief conjectures in reply to that very large question.
If it does, then the professors and their acolytes in the gold- fish bowl will be swept to one side. They will be thrust from the centre of the stage into the wings—as their predecessors were a generation ago.
Secondly, it is improbable that the organised worker will display any more interest in doctrinaire goals on the industrial field than he has ever done on the political field. He is far more likely to press for something like the British equivalent of American guaranteed employment, for the job with the yearly contract, and to demand that the pangs of redeployment shall be eased at the expense not of the taxpayer but of the indus- trialist. Nor is there anything in this that need perturb the Tory: on the contrary. A demand, if it comes, that capitalist industry shall bear the cost of a guaranteed labour contract and of labour mobility is completely compatible with the free enter- prise structure—as General Motors and Mr. Walter Reuther have proved to demonstration in the United States. More than that : such a demand might well anchor trade unionism still more firmly to the free enterprise structure. Instead of over- turning it, a formidable new buttress would be added to it.
Ultimately, both inflation and redeployment are industrial issues much more than political issues. The politician cannot do much more than plead; the trade union and the employer together can decide—and can enforce their decision.
It is over industrial reality, not over professorial dreams of doctrinaire nostrums, that the crunch is likely to come in ' Britain during the next few years. And if this does happen, then it will leave Mr. Gaitskell, like Walter Mitty, firing over open sights.
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