The Radical Debate

...Impatient Americans, appalled by their nonlegislating Congress and their prudent President, are inclined to think that of all the advanced countries of the Western world the United States is surely the most conservative...

...If British voters were unwilling to share this vision now, Labor should be willing, true to its allegiances, to await the disasters and depressions which would sooner or later sweep the party once more into office...

...But aside from politics the British are content with an increasingly ramshackle set of public services, a grossly inequitable system of education, inefficient industrial management, archaic union structure, philistine attitudes toward the arts, and a depressing, nay-saying, snobbish attitude toward each other...

...This is a civilized, a persuasive, an ingenious book...

...Is redistribution of income, wealth and influence all that simple...

...And here an even more nagging question obtrudes itself...

...Crossman is wholly dissatisfied with the existing nationalized industries...

...It is the great strength of Crosland and the managerial wing of the British Labor party that they do know in some technical detail what they would do in office...

...Radicals do not win in a climate of political tedium...

...If doubt lingers, it feeds on two considerations...

...One does not begrudge Crosland his next remark: "no wonder he expects us to be in opposition for a decade...

...Crosland is even more optimistic than the later Strachey about the efficacy of political processes...

...A History of Economic Ideas" Appearances deceive...

...As he shrewdly observes, "Mr...

...For Labor party intellectuals and MP's like Crosland and his major ideological opponent, Richard Crossman, painful reassessment of the party's failures and prospects could scarcely be avoided...

...Nor has the New Left offered very persuasive evidence that its members would know what to do with their opportunity if history called them to power...

...The Labor party under Gaitskell and Wilson has been modernized in part, and in ways which accord with Crosland's recommendations...

...In short, the Crosland side of the argument will appear less attractive two years from now if Labor wins and nobody notices...

...These essays, many of them Encounter articles, were composed in the wake of the disastrous (for Labor) general election of 1959...

...As Crosland characterizes his compatriots' mood, it is one of "conservatism, antipathy to innovation, an absence of audacity, and an unwarranted complacency with things as they are...

...Suppose that Crosland is conceded his sharp, polemical point: that as between him and Crossman he is the radical and Crossman, the nostalgic admirer of outmoded theories of class conflict and obsolete techniques of nationalization, is the conservative...

...so he concludes that we want to nationalize a lot more industries...

...Yet, as a summer visitor to Britain and a year-round sympathizer with British Labor, I was disconcerted to hear how little change Labor party intellectuals anticipated from a Labor government...

...A proficient economist and an industrious researcher, Crosland wins all the technical arguments with Crossman and his allies of the New Left...

...This was the first time in British electoral history that a major political party lost House of Commons seats in four consecutive elections...

...If the drama departs from politics and wrangles over techniques alone divide the parties, politics will become a bore...

...Crosland, on the opposite tack, thinks poorly of a democratic party which patronizes the electorate, resigns itself to protracted opposition, and morbidly enjoys the prospect of inevitable catastrophe...

...Labor is now the overwhelming favorite to win the next general election...

...As Barbara Castle, a Crossman ally, put it in the wake of the election, "Our ethical reach was beyond the mental grasp of the average person...

...Let these disheartened Americans read Anthony Crosland's collection of articles and essays in order to find out what a totally conservative country is like...

...he has no precise ideas as to how to improve them...

...No doubt British Chancellors of the Exchequer can play games with taxes and public expenditures which our fundamentalist Congress would never, never permit...

...The Crossman wing proclaimed the faith of the true believer in the depravity of capitalism, the inadequacy of "tinkering" with the system, and the consequent necessity of sweeping nationalization...

...Who was to blame...

...The Crossmanites may have nightmares over capitalist conspiracies, but there is a sober enough question whether the propertied portions of the community will not at some point dig in their heels and refuse to cooperate with a government which curtails their privileges too sharply...

...In this, the 27th year since the publication of Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, it is hard to believe that comparatively intelligent, expensively educated men and women still shudder at unbalanced budgets, flee from medicare, and run for their lives from the menace of Big Government...

...Which is to say that Crosland, himself a frequent contributor to Encounter, agrees in general with that periodical's famous issue of last summer, "England, Suicide of a Nation?," a compendium of the sensitive Englishman's displeasure with practically all aspects of British life...

...Hence, he openly accepts "the end of ideology" and disaggregates the grand abstractions of old-style Socialist rhetoric into a series of technical problems connected with more equitable taxation, broader access to the public schools and the universities, social control over commercial construction, improvement of the mass media, supervision of industrial location, and rationalization of the welfare services...

...For the fact is, the British New Left has produced quantities of rhetoric and oceans of radical aspiration, but amazingly little solid evidence that the class enemy, the British version of the power elite, really is engaged in conscious conspiracy against the community...

...Still, is socialism as easy to achieve as Crosland makes it seem...

...Crosland conducts his own assault within a different context...

...He prefers Weber's ethic of responsibility to contemporary citizens to Crossman's flirtation with the ethic of ultimate ends...