Britain After Churchill

...Alas, the welfare state has come just when all national energies have to be bent to the task of providing it with an economic foundation...

...These are popular slogans, and an election could conceivably be won on them, but they do not really touch the main point...

...It generates a stodgy traditionalism when what is called for is radical innovation...

...This disastrous mental climate hangs like a pall of smoke over the movement...

...Just now, the party is resting on its laurels, and they are fading fast...

...It is the antithesis of genuine socialism...

...Nye Bevan has a unique talent for raising people's blood pressure, but there is nothing mean or dishonorable about him...

...German rearmament in some form is inevitable, and the defense budget cannot be significantly scaled down...

...The professionals are determined to win ??if necessary, by making use of Aneurin Bevan...

...Americans who bracket him with their own fashionable demagogue are not merely doing him an injustice, but blinding themselves to his growing importance...

...Is it the fault of the economists that Labor's leaders proved unequal to their unique opportunity...

...Mining remains what farming is in France: a millstone round the community's neck...

...but that is another story...

...Perhaps the only thing that could really defeat the Conservatives would be the adoption of a genuine Conservative program, and they have too much political sense to do anything so foolish...

...Bad luck??and yet, but for the shock of war and the impoverishment of the middle class, Labor might not have gotten the chance it did in 1945...

...This does not quite run parallel to the right-left cleavages...

...Here is the knot??and no Bevanite or Gaitskellian sword will cut it...

...If he does, there may be trouble on an international scale...

...There are people on both wings of the movement who are clear about the need for ruthless realism in economics, and each camp, too, has its ballast, stodgy trade-unionists and romantic egalitarians...

...But the real break with the economic past was not made, though the psychological moment was ripe...

...It is a hard thing to say, but the trouble is that Labor is too old-fashioned...

...Working habits have not changed, aging structures have not been dismantled, and Cripps destroyed his health in a superhuman and (unfortunately) largely successful effort to revive Lancashire's textile industry, which had mercifully contracted during the war and should have been closed down altogether in 1945...

...Yet, every proposal, however modest, for raising its income evokes passionate resistance from the sentimentalists and the egalitarians who together set the tone of the Labor movement...

...Labor at the moment has a distinctly elderly look...

...Such a situation, of course, cannot last...

...Why is Labor in the doldrums...

...A really severe American recession, with disagreeable consequences for British trade and employment, could reverse this trend, but at the moment this seems unlikely...

...Nor is East-West trade an issue between the factions, or even between the parties: Everyone, including Churchill, is in favor of it...

...And it is just this that no one wants to talk about...

...More important, perhaps, is the rift between economic realists and the rest...

...Yet, Labor's only real chance of recapturing public confidence is to come forward with a program for economic expansion...

...For the moment, nothing is less likely than that Labor will win the next election, so perhaps this particular menace may simply fade out...

...If and when Churchill does step down, it is taken for granted that Anthony Eden will become Prime Minister, with Richard Austen Butler as Deputy Premier and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and with most other major posts likewise occupied by representatives of the Eden-Butler generation...

...Just now, the date most favored is early June, though some prophets hold out for November, to coincide with his eightieth birthday...

...He is only the symptom of an inner inability to get out of a certain mental and moral tradition, and into the twentieth century...

...If everyone's wages cannot be raised, then no one is to have another penny...

...The evidence of by-elections and public-opinion polls is unmistakable: Labor is losing ground among the voters, just as for years it has been losing ground among intellectuals and students...

...without its full cooperation, Labor cannot advance and neither can the British economy...

...There is, in fact, very little enthusiasm for anything just now, and it is precisely this mood which helps the Tories, the party of the status quo, low expectations, and "muddling through...

...Partly for personal reasons, bound up with the age, temperament and political record of various well-known leading figures, from the tired Old Guard to the efficient, colorless technicians on the party's right wing and the less reliable but more dramatic characters who inhabit that Cave of the Winds, the Bevanite opposition...

...If it did, it would be the end of the Labor party, and political machines rarely commit suicide...

...All the signs point to a Conservative triumph at the polls, with or without Churchill...

...BRITAIN AFTER CHURCHILL Conservatives under Eden will keep gaining until Labor discards outdated appeals By G. L. Arnold London The political weathermen are now agreed that Sir Winston Churchill will probably retire from the political scene this year...

...Better let the Tories ride it out, think some of the tacticians...

...Until it is untied, Labor must continue to wander in the wilderness, disliking its diet of manna, hoping for quails, muttering against Aaron (there is no Moses), and clamoring at intervals to be led back to the fleshpots of the pre-1939 world, when imported food was cheap, sterling was a hard currency, and distribution seemed a bigger problem than production...

...For there can be no doubt now that the great opportunity was largely wasted...

...Failing some such calamity, the country's mood seems to favor moderate Conservatism, though without much enthusiasm...

...Labor is the prisoner of its past...

...True, important gains were made, not only socially but structurally as well: To the extent that the basic industries have been brought under public control, it has become possible to channel investments into areas where they are needed...

...but it is popular and democratic, and in tune with fifty years of egalitarian propaganda...

...He has not yet come within measurable distance of his aim—the leadership of Labor and, thereafter, the Premiership??but, for the first time in years, it is not utterly absurd to suppose that he may reach it...

...It still puts equality first, not realizing that the drive to equalize incomes has already reached a point where the managerial and professional class is barely able to do its work (farmers and businessmen, by contrast, are well off), and where, in consequence, a dangerous rift has appeared between the skilled workers and the technical-managerial stratum on whose efficiency the whole economy depends...

...But this is the key element in modern society...

...What is really wrong with the Labor party...

...The public is fascinated by the controversy over German rearmament, and by the Bevanite argument that the present massive defense budget leaves no margin for capital investment or expansion of the social services...

...For a "Swedish" program of expansion must be dramatized in terms of better living standards, for which there is no money (the money being needed to pay for arms and the existing social services), while failure to modernize the economy means that there will eventually be another economic crisis due to falling income from exports...

...The real issue, as the protagonists know perfectly well, is Britain's lagging industrial progress...

...It discourages initiative, bores the young, drives the more ambitious technicians abroad, and threatens to create an unbridgeable gulf between the workers and the middle class...

...Taxation and inflation combined have halved the real income of the salaried classes??from civil servants and university professors to scientists and technicians...

...Whenever it comes, Clement Attlee (70 last year) and Herbert Morrison (66 this year) will be confronted with a streamlined, up-to-date Tory party, led by men in the prime of life and supported by a very large section of the younger voters...

...Before someone starts drawing disagreeable comparisons with Senator You-know-who, let it be firmly stated that such a parallel would be resented by most people on this side of the Atlantic, including many staunch Tories...

...And now the party, with no Cripps to stiffen its backbone, and with only the able but pallid Gaitskell to balance the egalitarians of the Left, looks dubiously into the future...

...Not Nye Bevan...

...For practical purposes, this means that the key posts will be held by men aged between 50 and 60, and that the Tory party will display more marked enthusiasm for the welfare state...

...But a movement which still believes that it has the answer to the social riddle cannot for long take such an attitude without losing heart...

...The shift is not large, but it is enough to satisfy the Tories that they can risk an election this year or next...

...There is to be an election this year, next year or, at the latest, in 1956...

...The accent is on youth and modernity...