The Professors Take Over
To become a successful political leader in Great Britain you must be either a bishop or a bookmaker. The bishops are a distinguished lot—from Gladstone, the greatest of them all, to Balfour, Asquith, Cripps, Attlee, Eden, Butler. So are book- makers—Disraeli, Lloyd George, Churchill, Mr. Bevan.
The tragedy of British Socialism is that its leadership has now fallen into the hands of men who are neither bishops nor bookmakers but professors; men with neither fervour nor gusto, who shrink both from the cakes and from the ale.
The professors are a well-defined type. They have always taken an important part in the Socialist movement, in Britain as elsewhere; but throughout its heroic age the movement has always kept them firmly in their places, as subordinates, not leaders. Mr. Attlee's political instinct never served him better than when he administered his brutal. brush-off to Professor Laski; for Mr. Attlee, whose judgement was as good as it was underrated, understood very clearly that if Socialism surrenders to professors it does so at its peril.
Today, for the first time, the professors are in charge of British Socialism—in Parliament and outside it. Gaitskell, Harold Wilson, Douglas Jay. Roy Jenkins. Crossman. Mar- cluand, Arthur Lewis, Anthony Crosland; all of them are the industrious little boys who won scholarships and fellowships, bookworms who always did their homework. They sit in the Socialist leadership, experimenting with proletarian prose as cautiously as a maiden lady in the forecastle of a pirate ship.
When Mr. Bevan called Mr. Gaitskell a dessicated calculat- ing machine he was not being in the least abusive. He was expressing—with the instinctive perception that still makes him by far the most considerable politician in the Socialist party— the amused revulsion that the common man feels in the presence of a professor.
To the common man 'Professor' is what the comedian calls the leader of the band; it is the honorific of the swimming instructor and the seaside astrologer. It brings to mind at once (I speak for myself) the man with the bald head, in evening dress as faultless as Liberace's, conducting the Holborn Empire orchestra in 'She's never been there before, but now, She's going there every night.' It suggests someone being told by Max Miller what it is like to fall in love with Mary from the dairy.
The professors have not lost the common touch in taking over the Socialist leadership; for they never had it. There never was a time when Mr. Roy Jenkins, for example. talked about wages—to him they must always have been personal incomes. (Mr. Jenkins, I suspect, would dismiss 'The wages of sin is death' as a Tory soapbox vulgarism for 'The personal income of moral delinquency is the termination of physical existence.') To judge from his new book, The Economics of Indus/I.:al Growth, Professor Arthur Lewis knows no more about the common man than he does about the canal bargees on the planet Mars. (It should be added, in fairness, that Mr. Lewis's prose entitles him to be described as his party's Amanda Ros.) But the rot of the professors does not stop at the Socialist leadership; it is spreading far and fast throughout the rest of the party. The post-war trade union and Co-op MPs now strive to mould themselves in the professorial image, as though in protective mimicry. This can be studied in the speeches of Mr. Alfred Robens, of the shopworkers' union; and of Mr. Joe Sparks, the railwaymen's MP; and the Co-op Mr. Beswick from Uxbridge; and many others. They are all pseudo- professors, beating their .shovels into agricultural implements, advancing along the semantic road from Wapping to South Kensington.
It is noticeable that Mr. Gaitskell, ever since Mr. Bevan's attack on him, has been striving to mask his professorial persona. So far he has not been very successful. His Budget onslaught on Mr. Butler had the authentic ring of the bogus: it sounded as though Mr. Gaitskell, like a more eminent man. was painfully painting his face with rage.
Egalitarianism is essentially a professor's policy. To date, the most significant fact about it is that Mr. Bevan has ostenta- tiously refused to pay it even lip-service. I think that this implied verdict on its electoral possibilities is of importance. It is true—as Mr. Bevan knows—that the manual workers from whom Socialism must always draw its strength take a certain pride in the party's professors. it pleases the manual worker to find that his side have got spokesmen who are at ease with polysyllables. But it is an error—and Mr. Bevan knows this too —to suppose that such flattery goes more than skin-deep.
For when you examine the mass-electorate—and Mr. Bevan knows far more about it than all the professors put together— it is hard to discern many recruits for an egalitarian crusade.
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