Quest for Crossman
BY HENRY FAIRLIE This ability of Mr. Crossman to find a satisfactory intellectual basis for his opinions, attitudes and actions of the moment is, of course, his most obvious characteristic as a politician. When he returned from Germany after the failure of the Berlin Conference in 1954, another Left-wing MP suggested to him that the 'Attlee conditions' had been fulfilled and that the Labour Party was left with no alternative but to support German rearmament. Mr. Crossman replied that his attitude to the issue of German rearmament was 'ambivalent.' He was prepared to agree that, in fact, the `Attlee conditions' had been fulfilled, but he was sure that, if the Labour Party were to continue to have an independent foreign policy, it must pretend that they had not been. 'Ambiva- lence'? Well, it is a longer word than some others. But the interesting point is that Mr. Crossman's position was, intel- lectually, wholly valid. The 'Attlee conditions' had never been anything more than a political delaying tactic, and Mr. Cross- man was merely suggesting that they should continue to be used as such for a little longer. Machiavellian it might be, but his position was intellectually wholly supportable. The only doubt which remains about his reactions is the fundamental one : whether his intellectual agility is compatible with moral principles or with principles of any category.
The answer to this question is favourable to Mr. Crossman. If it were not, he would have no other interest than as a As a political thinker Mr. Crossman is not just undoctrinaire, he is extremely English. His two serious works on poli- tics, both written before the war, are profoundly liberal, not so much in their conclusions as in their scepticism and in their distrust of enthusiasm. A harmless parlour game which politicians tend to play in the early hours of the morning is to make fun of Mr. Crossman's Winchester background. (Mr. Betjeman's poem 'The Wykehamist' is about Mr. Crossman; and it is often said that the explanation of Mr. Gaitskell and Mr. Crossman is to be found in the fact that the former was a prefect at Winchester while the latter was not.) Personally I believe that New College exercised a much deeper influence on Mr. Cross- man's intellectual make-up than Winchester. It was H. A. L. Fisher's New College; and I do not see how anyone can read ,either that odd, out-of-date but still interesting collection of essays Plato Today, or the more conventional treatise Govern- ment and the Governed, without feeling that during his crucial years at Oxford, of which they were the product, Mr. Crossman was subjected to a liberal and humane influence which pro- vided the mould for his otherwise wayward opinions. The greatest college heads are not necessarily either brilliant scholars or brilliant administrators, though there have been both, but men of broad sympathies who succeed in instilling into both tutors and undergraduates a concern for the world as well as for learning, for people as well as for books, for the present as well as the past, which they will never lose. Jowett, Fisher and, more recently, Sir Richard Livingstone are among the names which stand out, and the influence of Fisher's New College on Mr. Crossman was probably more important than even he might recognise or acknowledge.
When Mr. Crossman, while still a don at New College, broke into local Oxford politics, not just as a city councillor but as leader of the Labour group on the Oxford City Council, and when he then threw up what would certainly have been a brilliant academic career in order to plunge into politics and political journalism, he caused a minor sensation. I have listened at length to the tedious explanations which his con- temporaries give of this decision to leave Oxford and tread the path to Westminster by way of Great Turnstile. But, apart from the influence which determined the precise occasion of his breach with Oxford, there seems to me to be nothing abnor- mal in his decision which requires explanation. The influence was that of Dr. Hugh Dalton, who urged Mr. Crossman to become an active advocate of rearmament at a time when the Labour Party was still clinging to its old pacifist illusions. This is a point to be underlined. Mr. Crossman's highly individual deviations from the Bevanite or normal Left-wing line during the past four years have this revealing parallel in the first notable stand which he took in politics. Mr. Crossman may wear blinkers—which of us does not?—but they are not the normal, orthodox party blinkers. His attitude to Germany has been a complicated one throughout his life, but on the straight- forward issue which faced the Labour Party during the years of appeasement—whether it was prepared to provide the arms which were needed to support an anti-Fascist foreign policy— he (with very few other Labour Ieade;s) was right, and, for a young intellectual Socialist, courageously fight.
In the quest for Mr. Crossman, therefore, two points have so far emerged. One is that his mind is cast in a Liberal mould. The observation which most of us make from time to time, that he is the last nineteenth-century Liberal left in the House of Commons, is not very far from wrong; and, in spite of his specific criticisms of John Stuart Mill in Government and the Governed, his admiration for Mill's contribution to English political thought is one of the most revealing points in the book. The second fact which has emerged is that within this Liberal mould, and within the context of day-to-day political pressures, Mr. Crossman often reacts unpredictably. Apart from his attitude to rearmament during the period of appease- ment, he has since 1951 deviated from the normal Left-wing attitude on three basic issues. In the first place, his attitude to capitalism (or, at any rate, to mid-twentieth-century capi- talism) has been astonishingly undoctrinaire. In the second place, and this in part explains his attitude to rearmament before the war, he has a far more sophisticated attitude to power politics than most people on the Left. In the third place, he has retained an extremely critical attitude towards the Soviet Union. These are the three important deviations which have persisted during the past four years in spite of Mr. Cross- man's habitual changes of front. Indeed, those Who have always retained an affectionate respect for the New Statesman and Nation will feel rather anxious that it has now been de- prived of one considerable figure on its staff who could be relied on to oppose the fellow-travelling influence to which a weekly organ of the Left is naturally subjected.
Mr. Crossman's departure from the New Statesman in order to write a regular political column for the Daily Mirror pro- vides, of course, a clue to the third aspect of Mr. Crossman which is politically important. He is a born teacher, by which I mean that he stimulates interest in ideas as no one else that I know does. It does not matter whether it is a group of politicians as sophisticated as himself, or a group of under- graduates, or a bunch of pupils at a Fabian summer school, he is gifted with the ability to make them react positively to old ideas put in a new form or to new ideas. His decision to go to the Daily Mirror—not, as he says in a letter to the Editor of the Spectator, as a member of the staff—is due to several reasons. But the most important is that Mr. Crossman has been, in effect, a WEA lecturer all his life, and he regards the mass circulation of the Daily Mirror as a mass WEA audience. In this, of course, he is mistaken. Probably only a very small proportion of the Daily Mirror readership ever reads his column, and of that small number only a fraction understand what he is getting at. But to Mr. Crossman the opportunity was—given a good contract—irresistible. I hap- pen to know a working journalist who really believes in the Daily Mirror slogan, 'Forward with the People.' He will argue convincingly that to address 5,000,000 Daily Mirror readers is far more important than to address 250,000 Times readers. Mr. Crossman—at least for as long as his contract lasts—be- lieves this also. Of course, if, as he no doubt wishes, he were ever to be offered the editorship of the New Statesman, he would rediscover again the virtues of weekly journalism.
The good teacher—the stimulator—is always a good learner. Part of the reason why he is a good teacher is that he himself is always subjecting his own ideas and prepossessions to the test of other people's—including his pupils'—inquiries. This is what makes Mr. Crossman both a more important and a more likeable person than many people suggest. It is also, of course, his weakness as a politician. Mr. Crossman not only sees both sides of a question; he sees about a score of facets of it which no one else would have seen. As soon as a new facet is revealed to him, as soon as a new intellectual concept enters his mind, not necessarily for the first time but at least anew, he is temporarily fascinated by it. I observed this happening a few weeks ago when he was the chairman while Mr. Maurice Cranston addressed the Fabian Summer School at Oxford. Mr. Cranston, with a delicious and naughty irony, sprung on the innocent Fabians the idea that 'moderate poverty' was a state more blessed than the vulgarian riches of America. In doing so, he caught the Fabians in a cleft stick. They inwardly applauded his denunciation of the American Way of life; they openly resented his advocacy of 'moderate poverty' But Mr. Crossman was seized by the idea of `moderate poverty.' One could see that in a flash it linked up with so much of the rest of his political thinking, From the recesses of his mind and his learning came answering echoes. `Moderate poverty'? Now, is that not a persistent strand in Christian and even Greek thought?
It seems to me, therefore, that one has to be very careful before joining in the easy gibes at Mr. Crossman's inconsis- tencies. I know only one other politician who can, like him, keep seven balls in the air at the same time. That is Mr. Denis Healey, who, like Mr. Crossman, lacks certain basic political qualities and instincts. But Mr. Healey is unlikely to acquire the influence which Mr. Crossman has, whether one likes it or not, exercised over the past ten years. Mr. Healey is an ex-Communist. But it is not that which primarily matters. What matters is that he is still dominated by his early Marxism. He is a Marxist turned upside down. Mr. Crossman has been influenced by Marx but he has never been either a Marxist or a Communist, and I think that this is the most important fact in trying to understand the nature of his political career. Mr. Crossman is acting within the English political tradition, and his persistent attempts during the past four or five years to attract the attention of the Labour Party to problems which it has traditionally ignored seem to me to be worthy of more praise than they normally get. Almost all people of any size or character have their faults exaggerated, and Mr. Crossman is no exception. His ambition, his pleasure in both fame and notoriety, his demoniacal skill in excusing himself from an untenable position : all of these are faults which most of us have, but which in Mr. Crossman are magnified to the power of n. The pity is that these faults prevent Mr. Crossman from being taken as seriously as he should be by those in power.
He is also taken far too seriously by those who do not hold power at all, and Mr. Crossman is as ready as most to fall for the flattery of attention, however unconvincing the quarter from which the attention comes. But he remains the one Labour intellectual who has started to question the nature of the society which Labour created between 1945 and 1949. Mr. Crossman would, on the platform, be able to say—and to say quite sincerely—that a, b and c of what the Labour Govern- ment did were things "which needed to be done. But if he ever analysed his serious opinions with more than a momentary steadiness, if he was prepared to follow even one of his argu- ments to its logical conclusion instead of deviating into a promising siding. he would, I suspect, be surprised at what he found he believed. In the eyes of his fevered disciples, at home as well as abroad, he stands out as the spokesman of some vague kind of Leftism. For all I know, he may be. I still do not know what Left and Right, as philosophical terms, mean. But what I am certain is that Mr. Crossman's importance, if only he were prepared to cease to be the journalist for a moment and to recall his academic past, is that he has it in him to write the most important work of political theory since T. H. Green's Principles of Political Obligation. He says that he will do it. But I think he should be warned that it will provide the con- clusive evidence that he is not a Socialist.
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