A Spectator ' s Notebook WHY SHOULD IT HAPPEN, I wonder, that
when the Labour movement was at its most decrepit in the Thirties, its propagandists were at their most persuasive; so that a generation of students were Left Book Clubbed into near-insensibility by the masters of self-confident pink prose, Laski and Cole, Strachey and Martin? And now that it is the Conservatives' turn to be in the political doldrums, their pamphleteering has never been more vigorous. Last week it was the Bow Group, with proposals for taxation reform : this week it is the Conservative Political Centre, with Dare Democracy Disengage? by Peregrine Worsthorne (CPC, ls. 6d.). Mr. Worsthorne's thesis is that dis- engagement, with Russia and the West agreeing to withdraw their forces from Germany, would be disastrous for the West; because `the essence of a revolutionary Power is that it does not accept,the existing international system; indeed, by definition it is dedicated to the destruction of that system.' This, Mr. Worsthorne argues, makes normal dip- lomacy impossible: `a revolutionary Power is a-Diplomatic, because it has by definition re- nounced diplomacy and embraced the antithesis of diplomacy : subversion and violence.' * * *
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