The campaign
Clearly this election campaign cannot survive for three weeks on answers and counteranswers to questions about the miners' dispute. We are, as a country, far more deeply engaged in problems about the nature of our future. It is essential that newspapers and magazines and the electors themselves demand again and again of politicians of all parties that they lift up their eyes and look to the future, telling us not merely what they would do to tackle the immediate dilemmas of the national situation, but where they think they can guide the country over the next five years. The fashionable idea that campaigns scarcely ever influence results is dead: in this campaign, to a degree never known before, the events of the next two weeks will determine what choice the voters make. It is right that this should be so. And politicians of all parties should be aware that it is so, and that the mind of the country is not yet made up. What they do, and what they say, in the two weeks to the end of this month, will determine what the country will allow them to do, and what they will be given a mandate to do. The least we can demand of our political leaders is that they will speak, over those weeks, to the people rather than to each other.
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