Alleged Nation

By STRIX SPEAKING for the trades union movement the other day, Mr. Frank Cousins observed : 'It might be said, "Why do we not co-operate with the Government?" There are two simple reasons. One, they have never asked us; and, secondly, they would never have us if we offered because they do not want to develop productivity.'

These are the saddest words I ever heard.

This may seem a large claim to make; and it is quite true that, like everyone else of my years, I have at one time or another listened to more poignant utterances. But they were wrung from individuals, speaking for themselves under stress or in anguish; and what these people said, though it may have been heart-rending or at least pathetic, was not what I mean here by sad. In me Mr. Cousins's words induced a sort of vast, flat, grey, November-Sunday-afternoon-in-Man- chester sorrow.

To prove his second reason valid would .require casuistry of a high order; but any lawyer of moderate skill could readily show that his first complaint was well founded.

'And have you, Mr. Cousins, ever received— personally, I mean—a written or oral cornmuni- -cation from any one of Her Majesty's Ministers inviting you to co-operate in any form of effort or enterprise ostensibly designed for the national benefit?' • 'No.'

'It has been suggested, with what may fairly.

be called tedious iteration, that you, as an alert and responsible trades union leader, might have interpreted as applying in some sense to yourself and to your members the frequent appeals made by representatives of all three parties, and by every organ of the press except the Daily Worker, to the population as a whole. The burden of these 'exhortations was, if I may lapse into nautical idiom, "All hands to the pumps!" Am I right in saying that, in so far as you were aware of these expressions of opinion, you felt fully justified in disregarding them?'

'Yes.' • 'My client, in'lud, is a busy man. The court has heard that no direct approach was made to him from any authoritative quarter in regard to the alleged economic crisis from which our alleged nation is, according to hearsay, suffering.

Is it reasonable that a man so unsparing of his energies, a man so closely involved in the direc- tion of important affairs, a man with (to use a colloquialism) so much on his plate—is it reason- able that such a man should be expected to assimilate, let alone to act upon, a succession of trite and arbitrary appeals made to his fello41- citizens—latterly for the most part by individuals of whom he does not approve—to put national before sectional interests man emergency?'

Perhaps I am being unfair to Mr. Cousins, of whom I know nothing but who appears (to those who do not know him) to share the resolution, the testiness and the congenital myopia of the other larger pachyderms. He ig clearly no fool and he must have integrity, otherwise—pace Horatio Bottomley and Hitler—he would not be where he is. All I do know is that, when he spoke the words quoted at the beginning of this article, he set a bad example and helped to per- petuate a bad state of affairs in this country.

Our current dilemma stems from this : that the British have somehow got themselves into the position of supplying both the actors and the audience for an endless season of old-fashioned, artificial and intrinsically almost worthless plays, Suez momentarily brought the whole theatre to life; it was as though Shakespeare had suddenly written a scene into some stilted, stumbling tragi-comedy by Dekker. The actors whipped out their convictions and had at each other like mad, before the bright dew could rust their blades; the empurpled audience cheered or booed with frenzy. It was not a savoury interlude; it was far from being a desirable norm; and it did not have a happy ending. But at least, for once, the actors spoke direct to the audience; and the audience, briefly paroled from the dull, unreal, imperfectly understood conventions of contemporary political drama, 'could feel some- thing, could participate, could choose for them- selves their own her6es and their own villains.

Now we are back in the rut, lounging and yawning in our Welfare State stalls. On the stage the actors grimace and rant and attitudinise. Flimsy, elaborate pretences are maintained. When the Socialists call the Tories blackguards whose sole aim in life is to harry the old-age pensioners and enrich the landlords, or when the Tories denigrate the Socialists in terms almost equally extravagant, the audience is expected to take this fustian seriously.

But we don't. The suspension of disbelief is not achieved. In a real theatre we are well pre- pared to accept the convention that a Shake- spearian heroine, perfunctorily disguised in doublet and hose, is totally unrecognisable to her nearest and dearest. But on the political stage these shallow and obsolete impostures no longer earn indulgence on our side of the footlights. The insistence of each faction that its opponents' motives are invariably base and their policies inevitably misguided, though apparently indis- pensable to the conduct of the drama, strikes most sensible people as plain silly.

This quality of silliness is not the prerogative of any party, but it has seldom been better illustrated than by those words of Mr. Cousins which I have quoted. It is not so much their childish content that saddens as the fact that up there, on the stage, they are accepted as a ' legitimate and telling piece of dialogue. We no longer go to the real theatre to hear the players bellow, 'Dead ! And never called me mother!' or try to curdle our blood with references to a fate worse than death. In that other, larger, theatre, where we are a captive audience and cannot ask for our money back, we can scarcely be blamed if we watch the performances of the repertory company with a growing listlessness.

In some quarters, I suspect, apathy is sharpen- ing into impatience, if not into disgust. The poli- tical actors now come, thanks to television, closer to the audience than of yore, yet they seem more remote than ever. The Government and the Opposition, the besieged and the besiegers, are straitly confined within their party lines. Since the central defences, rigid yet infinitely elaborate, will one day change hands, long sectors of the battlements and earthworks are virtually immune from attack. The opportunist saps and counter- scarps of the assailants are themselves inhibited in design by the need to conform, or to seem to conform, to the pattc.n of a threadbare and half- baked ideology to which its warmest adherents pay, at best, only a frothy lip-service. And from the ever-smouldering camp fires and the Small' booming guns of both sides rises -a gritty Pall of unnecessary animosities and provocations; through it, emblazoned on the rival banners, can scarcely be descried slogans which, when theY have any meaning at all, appear to be almost identical.

On many of its spectators this scene produces a depressing effect. The British are, by and large, a united, resourceful and fair-minded nation. The main reason why in the past they survived so many perils and overcame so many difficulties, is that they did not in a crisis wait to be 'asked to do something about it; and as they watch this protracted, profitless, unreal siege of one party by another, they cannot help wondering for how much longer the niceties and the nonsense of a Kriegspiel are going to sour the air, distort the nation's image and keep us, firmly, in the red.