Historical Hangovers
By ANGUS MAUDE, MP
THE Party Conferences are over and things are much as they were. Apart from the pas de trois danced by Mr. Bevan, Mr. Cousins and the Bomb, whose choreography earnest political balletomanes are still trying to disentangle, the memories are fading. It all seems curiously un- real. But what can you expect, as a shrewd politi- cal commentator asked me after Brighton, when You have a Labour Party that doesn't believe in Socialism, a Conservative Party that doesn't be- lieve in Toryism and a few Liberals who will believe anything? It does not, in fact, look as if there is a great deal of future for parliamentary democracy. However, this has been so before, and in the event new lights have dawned. This is not the first time in history that British politicians have appeared miraculously to combine a lack of realism with a lack of idealism; yet after these troughs are past, valuable things have been done and an occasional spark has even started a blaze.
It was said of Rousseau that he gave the wrong answers to the right questions; he did much harm, but the questions were worth asking. Nowadays It is refreshing even to hear the right questions asked, and particularly refreshing to find them being asked by a not too Angry Young Man amid the arid wastes of Declaration. I cannot imagine why no one has Commented seriously on Mr. Lindsay Anderson's essay 'Get Out and Push!' for it is to my mind the best in the book. It even answers Mr. Christopher Hollis's inquiry as to "at angry young men are angry about. Mr. Anderson has 'accepted the universe' and much that is in it as well. He sets out to attack the Cult of cosiness, the refusal to admit the existence
unpleasantness, the avoidance of genuine political controversy about fundamentals. He
finds the intellectuals, particularly those of the
"eft, increasingly sterile and insulated.
There is a general unwillingness to get to grips with the realities of life. 'Fundamentally, our Problems today are all problems of adjustment; We have somehow to evolve new social relation- ships within the nation, and a new relationship altogether with the world outside. Britain—an tndustrial, imperialist country that has lost its economic superiority and its empire—has yet to ,ind, or to accept, its new identity. The irreso- tUtin expresses itself widely, and in many different ways; in discontent or opportunism a ill°11g young people, in nostalgic complaints and futile bombast from the established Right, and in a Weary shrugging of the shoulders from those who were Pink, or even Red, twenty years ago. But the real question remains unanswered. . . . What kind of Britain do we want? What ideal are
we going to set ourselves in our re-ordering of society? What truths do we hold to be self- evident?'
Now it is hard to discuss Mr. Anderson's views without sounding patronising, which I am very anxious to avoid, since the same things make me angry that exacerbate him, and the root of the matter is clearly in him. But it is necessary to start by pointing out two things. First, that, there is nothing new in all this : there very seldom is anything quite new in politics, though that does not diminish the value of penetrating questions and energetic restatements of problems. Second, our social and economic problems are always, and always have been, problems of adjustment.
We had a terrific problem of adjustment after the First World War, having been jerked violently out of the age of coal and steam into that of petrol and electricity, in a world of new nations, of shifting power and political instability. Although the twenty years between the wars are rightly remembered as a period of shameful un- zmployment over large areas and pigheaded re- strictionism in many industries, there was also a vast shift of labour from contracting to ex- panding industries, a net rise in the average stan- dard Of living and a great deal of painstaking, patchwork social reform.
The industrial revolution was one long prob- lem of adjustment. When I read a leading article in the local paper of my constituency, attributing the prevailing Weitschmerz to a new 'awareness of the apparent inability of the human race to show in its approach to social questions.anything like the skill it is exhibiting in the solution of technical problems,' I wonder whether the writer has ever read any history at all, let alone visited the slums of Leeds. Social reform has always— at least until 1944—lagged behind economic ad- vance. It has come in cycles, in bursts of legisla- tion designed to staunch the wounds of progress. From 1944 to 1948 it sought to reach out ahead, which was an admirable and sensible intention but contains dangers of its own. Not only does it require that technical advance should now keep up with the cost of social services, but it tends to establish permanent palliatives for evils that should be tackled at their roots.
We need always to be on our guard against historical hangovers of attitude. They are the great barriers to communication and to action, and they are equally prevalent wherever you look, Right, Left or Centre. They permeate economics, social reform, industrial relations and foreign policy. They do more than dig last ditches and inhibit fresh thinking; they provoke overstate- ment among those who react against them, thus widening the ditches.
Mr. Anderson, exasperated equally by the horrors of Taller society and by the middle-class smugness that managed cosily to co-exist with three million unemployed, takes a flying kick at the Prime Minister for talking about 'dreary equality,' and describes the concept of society that this suggests to him. 'We are back with the hierarchy, the self-idealised elite of class and wealth, the docile middle classes, and the in- dustrious, devoted army of workers.' But equality is dreary, and a mortal danger too, if it settles round the lower-middle-class subtopian norm. Mr. Anderson has a deep faith in the vitality and individuality of ordinary working men; and in him this is something more, I think, than the proletarian urge through which inter-war Left- wing intellectuals sublimated their middle-class guilt feelings. The danger is that the working class he knows and loves may simply die under him. It is perhaps significant that when he wanted to make a film about them he went to Covent Garden Market, which is a grossly inefficient and ruinously expensive survival of a bygone age.
For Mr. Anderson is a maker of films, and the quietist, middle-class escapism of the British cinema distresses him horribly, as well it might. But the system which produces this leads him to a violent attack on laisser-faire, which is one thing the British film industry has not got. If it had, it would be dead in a week. It exists on a highly complicated tangle of subsidies and other economic artificialities. It is a bad system and ought to be changed, because it does not produce many good films. Mr. Anderson admits that good work comes from Hollywood as well as from Russia, which seems to show that there is more to it than a nostalgic yearning for the Crown Film Unit would put right. To swing full circle might make it worse. As Stravinsky said in a recent interview, 'Patronage has not changed in 150 years except that today there seems to be less of it.'
I don't much like Capitalism, either. I do not see how anyone could like it, let alone try to make a political faith out of it. But it is one way of trying to get certain essential economic tasks performed, and a way which has on the whole worked rather better than all but the most ruthlessly totalitarian forms of Socialism. There, ought to be a third way, certainly, and I am all for trying to find it. For my part, I recognise the Right-wing danger of talking nonsense about foreign policy' : But because I do not care to entrust the safety' of my country solely to a United Nations system which does not yet work, I am not therefore `living in the nineteenth century'; I am only trying to survive to the twenty-first. Because 1 some. times find the Americans almost as alarming the Russians, and believe that the one deadly failure of our Middle Eastern policy is that it has brought these two Powers dangerously le; gether in a place where we could have medial"; I am not therefore dreaming of a British `third force' to equal them in power. Both Mr. Anderson and I, without doubt, Nye much to learn. But we might learn quicker—and thousands of others like us—if we learned 1° communicate better and to argue in the same categories. It is true that we need more 01- troversy, not less. Santayana rightly insisted that compromise is only reasonable when it involves a .change in the methods or instruments of action and that compromise that surrenders the ultimate object you pursued 'indicates mere weakness or vagueness in your moral nature.' Is not Mr' Anderson right in deploring our current vague- ness about the ends themselves? And are our ends, I wonder, really so different?
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