Half a Cheer (No More) for British Labour
Rosenberg, Bernard
Half a Cheer (No More) for British Labour HOW CAN ANYBODY raise more than about one-half of a cheer for the tattered British Labour party? Few Britons would go that far. Seeing themselves...
...This difference cannot be drowned out by the jingle of half crowns in working-class pockets...
...Mixed with another variety of bacilli emanating from the New Left and raised to epidemic proportions, the virus would destroy more than socialists...
...At any rate, they stay away in droves (Joan Lestor reports that 41,000 left the party in 1967), and no very vigorous attempt is made to recruit them...
...A little, a very little that justifies our fraction of a cheer...
...For those deflated coins are invidiously compared with the pounds "they" carry...
...But Enoch Powell, professor of Greek, turned populist politician...
...Who was there but: Dennis Healy, the Hawk...
...Labour is divided even now on entering the Common Market...
...But socialists are expected to do more and do it faster than champions of the status quo...
...They diddled and waffled and muddled—but not through to anything...
...Remaining aloof can be considered correct, provided far more energetic efforts are made to alleviate very real regional hardships...
...Few Britons would go that far...
...Large disparities remain and grow, producing that `relative deprivation" which generates ressentiment and transforms xenophobia into something uglier as it crunches and maddens "the little man...
...This experience has been traumatic...
...Presumably to capture the middle-class vote...
...Twist those left hands this way and that, and cross them with many an extended right hand: strangulation is bound to ensue...
...Let us act on our principles, not theirs...
...But why should a bloody rupture occur at just this moment, if not on account of economic conditions...
...More of us should have remembered Aneuran Bevan's anguished cry: "We are socialists out of power and tories in power...
...A new pension system, widely touted as the greatest breakthrough since Beveridge, will be fully operative by —this is no typo-1999...
...Labour is less responsive to the nationalist clamor than either the Conservative or the Liberal parties...
...Why chip away at the welfare state...
...Ah, but now behold The Conservative Worker, a mighty, abstract object of sociological inquiry...
...Approximately three and a half million women and half a million men would come out ahead if the minimum wage were set at 12 pounds a week...
...and yet, in some ways, stereotyping starts earlier and goes deeper than with us...
...A A LL THAT GRAY MATTER and so much incompetence, so many unfathomable reversals...
...Moreover, various kinds of humane and liberal legislation, unthinkable without a Labour majority, are on the books...
...Hopes ran high in 1964 when, after 13 year of Opposition, Labour returned to power...
...It is a virus that kills socialists...
...And Labour is committed to wholesale betterment of working-class conditions exactly as the restorative Britain needs...
...Her innumerable childrens' books still outsell all others...
...On this score, for complex technological and financial reasons, a postimperial mini-country can have maxi-problems...
...Nor that all this should fuel revolutionary black na tionalism...
...The more bizarre sort (they're called Situationists— somewhat like our Crazies) have BERNARD ROSENBERG found refuge in the Liberal party...
...Quite a few in office became recalcitrant backbenchers...
...At present, nationalized industries are run by business directors and professors...
...If not, a new charge for spectacles and dentures should fill the bill: all this pettiness Secretary Crossman just could not explain...
...If so, this is the moment to try dispersing discipline and broadening authority...
...One blunder after another on top of one defeat after another, a shameful and possibly fatal ra BERNARD ROSENBERG cialist lapse, real retrenchment and apparent betrayal, the freeze and squeeze, devaluation, Keynesian and pre-Keynesian economic policy—with "planned unemployment" for God's sake—and a foreign policy tied sycophantically to that of the U.S., except in Nigeria where Britain actively helps to starve and bomb Biafra out of existence: all this from the party that until recently seemed a beacon...
...The fact that they have made it relatively worse is only because BERNARD ROSENBERG between the idea and the action lies a great gulf of ignorance and muddle, similar to that which lay between MacDonald and action to cure unemployment...
...The Joan Lestors, Ian Mikardos, Michael Footes, unstained in this decade by old Tribune fellow-traveling, all of them notwithstanding, no such happy outcome seems likely...
...If so, the worst kind of academic upheaval, like the worst kind of racial tension, could still be avoided...
...Labour will no doubt go down to defeat in the next election...
...A critic like John Vaizey does not doubt that his party wishes to reduce inequalities, but, mainly through inadvertence and mindlessness, it has only managed to increase them...
...The kind of devolution that Welsh and Scottish nationalists demand, Ulstermen attained 50 years ago...
...It's a rare bird who can work up much enthusiasm for any of the parties...
...Richard Crossman, the Fumbler...
...If Labour leaders, who still look better than their opponents on this issue, lack that courage, a deadly chain of events can follow...
...That they would this time undo so much until they themselves were undone, one could not have known until, say, last year...
...Early on, the Wilson administration restored partial prescription payments—a pittance to all except the poor who even now must watch their ha' pennies...
...Workers might be more interested in increasing output if they had some say in decision-making...
...That it has been Americanized...
...Powell misappropriated the poet's line, but Britain still remains "a green and pleasant land," more civilized than any in the Western world, where decency, respect for privacy, a sense of fair play, tolerance, and good humor persist...
...What to say about the race question...
...Again, it is not cricket to fault Wilson or his pedantic minister of Education for failing to solve a problem that appears to be practically insoluble everywhere...
...Renee Short, made her own racist noises, all of a sudden there was Powell's reverse image: "the left-wing Guru from Wolverhampton...
...Grimond's abberation supplied a home for one small segment of the young anarcho-fascist Left...
...L L ABOUR CANNOT BE CENSURED for all the troubles that bedevil a people among whom such a salutation as, "The best of British luck to you," is a common curse...
...A marked growth in social services took place, so that, for example, a 50 percent increase in public housing and slum clearance since 1964 could be claimed...
...Today left-wingers urge adoption of a wealth tax...
...The notorious eleven-plus system for perpetuating caste is on its way out, and comprehensive schools, which appear to be more admirable than not, will continue to multiply under Labour...
...They cannot be set aside forever...
...Half a Cheer (No More) for British Labour HOW CAN ANYBODY raise more than about one-half of a cheer for the tattered British Labour party...
...The other actions, insofar as they had any ultimate purpose beyond action for the sake of action, were designed to improve the lot of the poor...
...Barbara Castle as Minister of Productivity and Employment has had to bear the brunt of responsibility for that strange document...
...And yet how poignantly right Roy Jenkins is when he says: "We are still one of the richer nations—able to pay our own way without being subsidized by others...
...George Brown, a charming and erratic apologist for the cabinet from which he has resigned, ruefully observed last year at a Labour gathering in Blackpool, "If the Tories had done half what we've done, you'd all go out and vote for them...
...Partly for a commonsense reason that many men endorse, namely that while Britain won the war in 1945, it subsequently lost the peace, and vice versa for Germany and Japan...
...I almost heard Michael X, modeled after our own Malcolm, propose total extermination of the white race...
...A people with such virtues may win out in the end...
...Seeing themselves as condemned to five years of Hard Labour, they are more likely to hiss or laugh derisively...
...Their sense is that they lag behind us in campus turmoil by a few years...
...During his worst week this year, Crossman on several successive days fought himself to a standstill in the House of Commons...
...It will take political courage of a high order for a British leader to fight race prejudice...
...Its incomes policy, which hits those at the bottom hardest, has not been accompanied by a system of redistributed budget allocations...
...If only Labour could go down to defeat or—mirabile dictu—forward to triumph, on principle...
...What Mr...
...Its larger cadres are naturally more at home in the university...
...It is one datum in a Niagara of statistics Labour publicists regularly release...
...I just missed him at the University of Essex where, I'm told, most of his audience cheered, while a few white students asked for and magnanimously received, personal exemption...
...Labor spokesmen continued to denounce "gnomes" in the City, in Zurich, and on Wall Street for their government's fiscal plight...
...One suspects that Britain will be saved, if saved at all, by its traditional values, among them that "political stupidity" which keeps its leaders from pursuing false logic to fanatical conclusions...
...It is widely assumed that through direct dictation, the International Monetary Fund runs Britain's economy...
...Labour is not just demoralized and discredited: it is barely breathing...
...About one-third of the working class votes Conservative...
...As a professional economist, Wilson might be expected to strive above all for that stream-lined technological society whose eventual wonders he constantly celebrates...
...Given a big mandate and further encouragement for social democratic change, the party went haywire...
...No one called the colorless but conscientious Attlee, Clem MacDonald...
...Public expenditure was protected throughout a severe and continuing monetary crisis—no small achievement...
...Well, yes, but it's a matter of degree...
...By 1966, Wilson had disgraced himself on the race question...
...Meanwhile gross exploitation of the unorganized continues, for instance in Britain's 400,000 small retail establishments...
...Powell replied, "of course...
...Now economic stagnation plainly has much to do with the machinations of bankers, but no serious move has been directed at them...
...Shrinking pains seem to hurt more than growing pains...
...Barbara Castle, later dubbed Barbarella the Union Buster, previously a darling of the Left...
...From R. H. Tawney to R. M. Titmuss, BLP thinkers have favored an assault on the class structure, greater equity for women, and a gradual but consistent redistribution of wealth...
...Shirley Sumerskill, Labour MP for Halifax, to exclaim, "Mr...
...However, an American Anglophile fresh from the bloody arena of American politics can find a little virtue in the lesser evil...
...Wilson's own irrational inclination in 1969 is to blame workmen who go out on wildcat strikes—even though he knows that industrial accidents cause a greater loss of man hours on the job than all official and unofficial strikes put together...
...And no one really knows how beneficial or harmful admission would be...
...It is he who has challenged the illusion that a first-power status can be maintained on the basis of a medium-power economy...
...Now Wilson's politics of opportunism has alienated just these swing voters who might have made a second consecutive victory possible...
...So is the electorate...
...Positively, with the withering away of Empire came a decline in defense spending which at last took second place to education...
...In pursuit of his obsession, he ignores a Royal Commission report, or at least its major recommendations, and produces instead the notorious White Paper ironically entitled In Place of Strife...
...On the other hand, success at the polls has lately depended in part on progressive middle-class civil service and related types...
...This procedure is no substitute for the democratization of management toward which Labour should want to move...
...But some months later, when a Labour MP, Mrs...
...In Place of Strife gave rise to more unnecessary fratricide than any witness can readily recall...
...Union muscle gets wage increases that could be resisted in the interests of a larger GNP only if others shared more equitably in a general austerity...
...Labour shone brightly when its Parliamentary power hung on a few votes...
...Ulster, like Wales and Scotland, suffers from a significantly higher rate of misery and unemployment (20 percent in Londonderry) than England...
...If only the party had not so hopelessly compromised itself...
...Next came the proposed Industrial Relations Act, replete with cool ing-off periods and penal sanctions, which amounts to an unprovoked declaration of war on the unions...
...Historically, Brown would seem to be right...
...Industrially, under the Tories, Britain fell farther and farther behind...
...Decades of the welfare state have brought benefits to everybody, but most of all to the prosperous who know best how to use them...
...And anyone with a historical sense must admit that a good part of what is good about England is due to the long and noble efforts of its labor movement...
...Centuries of turmoil, complicated by religious bigotry and continuing persecution, substantially account for "the Bitter Oranges" reaped in Northern Ireland...
...Crossman gives the impression of someone whose left hand does not know what his other left hand is doing...
...It would leave only those primitives who want to inherit the world...
...Before withdrawing from that position, and doubtless in despair of locating a genuine constituency, Liberal leader Jo Grimond began to express admiration for "extraparliamentary politics...
...Why should "academic de-authorization" be less pronounced in Britain than anwhere else...
...How is a so-called poor people to do that...
...This exhibition caused Dr...
...Whether we use rise in income or home ownership (which is to say, a hundredyear mortgage) as the criterion, embourgeoisement is plainly discernible...
...Total rejection of the system at art schools, rebellion against "proctorial power" at Oxford, demonstrations at Birmingham, "Revolutionary Festivals" at Essex, rumblings everywhere followed by clever and useless post hoc analyses, leave academic administrators and public officials virtually as jittery as Americans...
...Indeed the Wilson era is one of general disenchantment— with young people getting to be apolitical only a bit faster than their elders...
...Party conferences endorse it—and Labour's own research reveals no actual change in maldistribution since 1938...
...With consumer prices, profits, and managerial salaries soaring, organized labor will not stand for wage controls...
...Not only but not least by progressive instead of regressive taxation...
...In Blackpool Wilson referred to Powellism as a virus...
...So what else is new...
...Moral and esthetic insensitivity, as much as lackluster politics, probably repels youth from the BLP...
...But Wilson and his advisers have been less resourceful in coping with them than their opposite numbers on the Continent...
...So they have been increased another 25 percent, which will really enrich the Exchequer...
...If Labour had not proved that intellectuals should remain in their studies, Enoch Powell alone would be evidence enough...
...The remnants of Empire were to be liquidated, less skilfully than by de Gaulle but also with less damage to the democratic process...
...For despite economic fetishes and electoral expediencies, Wilson and his ministers were bent on achieving quite a bit...
...Since nearly 70 percent of the British population is composed of manual laborers, they would seem to be a sufficient electoral target...
...Not quite...
...Wilson got a laugh when he spoke of Powell as "the Conservative Guru from Wolverhamptom...
...Only some of this has been deliberate...
...Heath stands for does not excite this generation of British students...
...Instead, ENGLAND, OUR ENGLAND Wilson's government has overtaxed our credulity by futile action mobilized against the unauthorized, usually very brief, stoppages of the workers...
...ENGLAND, OUR ENGLAND To be sure, Labour inherited a mess...
...But his prescription, which is essentially workers' austerity, will not or does not do the trick...
...Realizable goals have been established...
...Then, with the unpardonable exclusion of Kenya Asians, he lost those of his dons who had not been elected to office...
...Bureaucratic processing did cost only a trifle less than the payments brought in...
...Those hopes have largely been dashed...
...Of the intellectuals who remained, practically every one turned sour...
...He writes: The Labour government, by inflating capital values, by encouraging mergers, by handing out lavish subsidies to private business, by legislation to keep down wages, by making the tax laws so complex that wellpaid private lawyers are bound to beat poorly paid civil servants, by eroding welfare benefits through price rises—by all these means (to mention only a few) it has made the rich more secure and the poor less secure...
...This Labour government has not put a levy on investments...
...Nor that poorly educated dock workers should demonstrate against their illusory enemies...
...Now and then, in pursuit of "joint consultation," workers' representatives chat with a few officials...
...I was unable to find one, and I looked at more than enough, without the ubiquitous Golliwog...
...The prevailing academic —and public—attitude can be heard in an old refrain: it doesn't matter who's in office because the Tories are always in power...
...Equal pay for women and for farm workers might help to stimulate a lagging economy...
...Even so, it would be nice to have a Prime Minister in the next Labor government who heeded Michael Foote's admonition: "Let us readopt the socialist platform on which we were elected...
...The most successful writer in England until her death some months ago was Miss Enid Blyton...
...Thus the comic-opera invasion of Anguilla, which prompted a Punch cartoonist to jeer, "Anguilla today, tomorrow the world...
...An unfavorable balance of trade is no new story...
...Given the heritage of colonial contempt for Asian and African peoples, it is hardly surprising that a trickle of dark-skinned immigrants should be mistaken for a flood...
...Why is he finding it impossible to overhaul and modernize a somewhat obsolescent system of production...
...Bereft of colonies, with the Commonwealth reduced to a skeleton, Britain itself begins to fly apart...
...Ramsay MacWilson is common currency...
...That's scarcely calculated to rekindle old fires...
...He haltingly advanced at least three implausible and contradictory explanations of the government's decision to water down its superb system of socialized medicine...
...So would a boost in morale...
...The litmus (or Titmuss) test of any Labour government has been equality...
...And so on through a list that begins with Bevan's old ally, Harold Wilson, who wept publicly over his country's "enslavement to international financiers" while capitulating to most of their nineteenthcentury demands...
...Anthony Crosland, the right-winger...
...Increased material well-being for all, far from softening class lines, has tended to heighten the visibility of an immemorial difference between "them" and "us...
...Most of the best came first...
...DEAs are not lacking: for workers' democ racy as more than a shibboleth, for women's rights in a country where women comprise a large part of the underprivileged working class, for a national minimum wage at a time when millions of laborers earn less than 15 pounds a week, for every species of social improvement from town planning to large-scale schooling...
...That black villain is part of every Englishmen's infantile imagery...
...The yield on this operation was almost exactly zero...
...As the economy is rationalized, merger follows merger, and a smaller oligarchy gets to be more concentrated than ever...
...Who knows...
...That war only common enemies of both the party and the unions could possibly win...
...The sun, which shines seldom enough on the British Isles, will never again rise on the British Empire...
...After a sit-in and a bad dose of violence at the London School of Economics, from which that institution may never recover, complacency disappeared...
...Vulnerability to student unrest is universal...
Vol. 16 • November 1969 • No. 6
