Liberty, Equality, and Mr. Gaitskell
BY CHARLES CURRAN FOR the past six years the Parliamentary leaders of British Socialism have been living in a goldfish bowl. They have run out of ideas, lost contact with the mass electorate. Now they revolve endlessly in a tiny circle whose centre is the House of Commons and whose periphery consists of Fleet Street, the Gilbert and Sullivan rooms at the Savoy Hotel, the broadcasting and television studios, the flats and restaurants of Mayfair, Knightsbridge, Hampstead and Fitzrovia. Inside this goldfish bowl victories are won, defeats suffered, reputations rise and sink, plots, intrigues, rumours and gossip go on and on. The professional politicians of Socialism pass their days and nights in a whirl of busy idleness.
It is the mark o,f the professional politician—and all the Socialist leaders are in that category, living on (and off) politics, writing and talking politics, for ever preoccupied with politics —to suppose that his activities are matters of public impor- tance. In fact, outside the goldfish bowl area of London they signify no more than the award of hockey colours at a girls' school.
Serious politics, said Lenin, begin where the masses are. In the significant period of the British Socialist movement, which began in the 1890s and which ended abruptly in 1950, it drew both its inspiration and its dynamism from the masses. Now it has lost both. In five years of power it exhausted all the intel- lectual capital on which it had traded for half a century. Now it is in a state of clamorous mental mendicancy.
Every by-election shows the party's plight. So does the slump in the sales of the party's newspapers. It makes no headway on its own steam—in spite of the demagogic possibilities presented by the tightening Tory grip on the throttle of inflation. The splendours and miseries of the goldfish bowl fill the common man with an angry boredom. They are merely noises off. They are not even intelligible in Bristol or Birmingham or Barrow- in-Furness; to the people around the slot-machines at the windy end of Wigan Pier; or to the men and women homeward- bound across the trackless wastes of Becontree and Wythen- shawe and Peterlee and the other planners' nightmares that disturb. it is to be hoped, the angelic dreams of the late Mr. Sidney Webb.
Substantially, the domestic politics of Great Britain are now reduced to the single question : `Can we have full employment without inflation; and, if we can, how?' To that question Socialism is. literally and totally, irrelevant. In front of it the manoeuvrings of Hugh and Harold and Alf and Dick and Douglas and Jim are as meaningless as a minuet. They are like men talking into a disconnected telephone. The Socialist Party cones more and more to resemble the Irish Nationalist Party during its sunset years—fighting sham battles with dead slogans, archers in an age of gunpowder.
Clearly it is idle to talk in 1956—and it will be still more futile at the General Election of 1960—as though this were still 1945, with nationalisation beckoning like Juliet from her bal- cony. Since then the electorate has endured six years' posses- sion of the lady. and her charms have disappeared in the dark. Therefore, in their search for a new siren, Mr. Gaitskell and his acolytes are studying the attractions of egalitarianism.
I want to look at this in narrowly electoral terms. Is egali- tarianism really the vote-winning nostrum that some of its advocates suppose? Is it a sure-fire corpse-reviver for the Socialist Party?
I put aside the question whether it would be economically practicable; for this is politically irrelevant. You would not necessarily diminish its electoral chances merely by showing that any attempt to create a classless, egalitarian Britain would neutralise all the forces of saving, striving and emulation that make for economic welfare; or by showing that the only effec- tive way to stop enterprising people from making fortunes is to put a stop to enterprise.
Skilfully coated, a bolus of self-contradictory absurdities can be fed with ease to a large part of the mass electorate. The entire history of British Socialism, front the 1890s to 1945, demonstrates this truth. Egalitarianism is no more discredit- able, in propaganda terms, than was 'Stand up to Hitler and abolish the Army' or its post-war equivalents 'Cut the taxes and restore the subsidies.'
But how many votes are there likely to be in egalitarianism? To answer that question, let us look first at the people who are playing with it.
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