The White Settlers of Britain - By CHARLES CURRAN* D ISCONTENT in

Britain has moved to a new address. It used to reside among the manual workers. There it thrived on slumdom, insecurity, mass unemployment; and it found its voice in the Labour movement. But now that voice is muted. For our post-war revolution has removed the old grievances of the manual worker. Today the State accepts a semi-feudal responsibility for him, supplying him with full employment, a subsidised house, lifelong welfare services, and a pension when he is too old to work. To a great extent, he has gone back from contract to status. Consequently, his political outlook has changed. He has come to resemble the tradi- tional Frenchman; his heart may be on the Left, but his pockets are on the Right. At each general election for a decade it has become harder to get him to vote Labour. He sees the Tories as the guardians of his security. He prefers to do his gambling with bingo and the football pools rather than at the polling station.

But this is an imperfect world. The amount of discontent in any human society seems--like its stocks of matter and or evil—to be irreducible. You can change its shape, its location, its out- ward manifestations. You cannot get rid of it. The revolution that has swept away the old problems has merely replaced them by others. Now that the ghost of mass unemployment has gone, a substitute spectre is haunting our poli- tics. Its name is inflation. It strikes fear, not into the manual worker so much as into the hearts of the new men—the 'products of the revolution.

In the process of draining off discontent from the masses, the Tories have called this new class into existence. Now, it seems, it is turning against its creators. Its opening roar was heard at Orpington. There are more roars to come.

Who are the members of this new class? They are the white settlers of post-war Britain.

They have been chosen by examination. At the age of eleven-plus they are plucked from working-class homes and placed on the educa- tional escalator built by the Butler Act. The escalator carries them up from Coronation Street to the grammar schools, Redbrick, Ox- bridge. Then they step off in order to become the commissioned officers of our society. They are the managers, the executives, the admini- strators, the accountants, the salesmen, the aco- lytes of Admass. It is a process of emigration, both geographical and psychological. They move up from one class to another. They move away, also, from their original surroundings, Their greatest concentration is in south-east England –although there are electorally significant clusters of settlers around all our industrial areas, notably in Greater Birmingham. But the zone that they have made their own is the region that lies just beyond the London green belt. Here, in the counties of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hert- fordshire and Bucks, the settlers have their maxi- mum density. They have colonised. extensively in what was once—and, to a diminishing extent, * Member of Parliament for Uxbridge. But we're supposed to be asexual.' still is—the land of the upper middle class. It is traditionally Tory territory.

Emigration from one class to another is a process that necessarily produces psychological changes. You get a clinical picture of them in the recently published Education and the Work- ing Class (Routledge, 28s.). The authors of this book, Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden, turn a microscope on a group of boys and girls who have travelled up the escalator from working- class Huddersfield. Their findings are note- worthy; they can be supplemented and corrobo- rated by any politician who has had experience of the settler vote.

Basically, the settler seeks to detach himself from his past. He has put his class origins behind him. He is no egalitarian. He feels that his success in getting on to the escalator marks him off from those who failed to do so. He tends to regard them as the victims, not of a defective social order, but of their own lack of ability. The political implications are obvious.

As an emigrant, he sets out to create his own style of living. The key step here is the decision to buy a house and to equip it with a telephone. By making this decision he crosses a psycho- logical Rubicon. It separates him from the mass, the dwellers in council houses supplied with cut-price shelter by their feudal overlord. (The importance of the telephone as a status symbol for the process is something that is familiar to advertisers and market research agencies— though not, as a rule to politicians. The tele- phone now is what the grand piano was to the pre-1914 artisan; a badge of achievement.) Inside his house the settler seeks to make a way of life that will differentiate him from the class that he has left. There is significance in furni- ture—as Mr. Dennis Chapman showed in a recent study that came out of Liverpool Univer- sity called The Home and Social Status. It threw a floodlight on the domestic Briton.

Introversion is the mark of the settler's way of life. But this is not peculiar to him. For if one generalisation can be made with safety about post-war Britain, it is that most of her inhabitants now prefer to look inwards, not outwards. This tendency exhibits itself in all sorts of ways; the absorption in TV, the popularity of do-it-your- self, the boom in home decoration, the family unit that seeks non-gregarious pleasure in the family car. Consequently, politics come more and more to be seen simply as an extension of the citizen's personal circumstances. Political issues are assessed by the yardstick of 'But how does all this affect me?'

Now the settler has suddenly started to wave this yardstick. He is brandishing it at Tories and Socialists alike. For his personal circumstances, so far as politics are concerned, give him an in- terest in one matter only. That is inflation. The Socialists raised the spectre, and the Tories have failed to exorcise it. When you look at it through the settler's eyes, you have no difficulty in seeing the reasons for his anger.

He is angry with the Left. Full employment gives the organised worker a sellers' market for labour. This enables the unions, year by year, to extract wage increases that outstrip any rise in production. Consequently, the value of money drops. But the organised worker can, to a great extent, contract out of this process by renewing the squeeze. The settler, however, cannot.

Consequently, he is bitterly hostile to the unions, and to Labour as the party of the unions. Does this make him a True Tory? If by True Toryism is meant the castration of the unions, the settler would respond enthusiastically to any cry of all hands to the knife.

But the Tory Party, of course, cannot raise any such cry. For one thing it cannot forget the millions of workers who now vote for it to de- fend their security. For another, it can hope to cope with inflation only by getting the unions to co-operate; and it will not do that by declaring war on them.

The settler's disgust with Toryism, however, does not stem solely from what he regards as Tory timidity, or its vote-catching readiness to pander to the unions. There is another reason for it. Living as he does on an income from which tax is deducted at source, the settler looks up in anger. Above him he sees the Wicked Rich. Their misdeeds are charted in every gossip column.

Just as the organised workers arc able to con- tract out of inflation by means of trade union pressure, so are the Wicked Rich able to con- tract out—by means of expense accounts, and capital gains, and speculations in land, and all the other ways of making money without benefit to the Inland Revenue. How numerous the Wicked Rich really are; how far it would be worth while, in measurable cash terms, to grapple with them; whether penal taxes on them would justify the powder and shot necessary for the job--all this, to the settler, is totally irrele- vant.

To him, the Wicked Rich are dodging in- flation, and the Tories are letting them do it— just as they are letting the unions do the same thing. This is a bi-focal blow that rouses his rage against Right as well as Left. He has suffered more or less patiently throughout the 1950s, hoping that presently the Tories would master inflation. Now his patience has run out.

For inflation, so far as he is concerned, is all that matters. It rouses him now as intensely as the fear of mass unemployment used to rouse the class that he has left. If the Tories are to regain his confidence, they will have to make war on the Wicked Rich--not as a matter of economics, but as a matter of psychology. Unless they do, Orpington will be duplicated throughout the white settlements of Britain.