These are the British

by Drew Middleton

Much is made in public speeches of the educational side of trade-union work. It would seem that the great opportunity for the unions now is in this field. Someone or some organization that enjoys the respect of the workers must educate them out of their lethargy and out of their memories of the past. The popular newspapers will not or cannot do it—and, naturally, as largely capitalist, they would be suspected by many of those most in need of such education. But the job must be done if Britain is to benefit fully from the enterprise and ingenuity of her designers and engineers.

Certainly the educational process would work both ways. A traveler in Britain in the period 1953-6 would notice that in many cases there was a difference between the TUC leaders' views about what the workers thought and what the workers themselves thought. Many of the unions have become too big. Contact between the leaders and the rank and file is lost. The Communists take advantage of this.

Can the working class awaken to the necessities of Britain's position and sublimate its agonizing memories and fierce hatreds in a national economic effort? This is the big "if" in Britain's ability to meet the economic challenge of today. I do not doubt that the working class will respond again, as it has in the past, to a national emergency that is as real, if less spectacular, than the one which faced the nation in 1940. This response, I believe, will develop as firmly, albeit more slowly, under a Conservative government as under a Labor government because it will be a development of the trend, already clearly evident, in the new middle class to take a national rather than a class outlook on Britain's problems. But the response must come soon.

We have seen how the present political alignment in Britain has developed out of the political and economic circumstances of the years since 1939. What of the future?

The Conservative government since the end of 1955 has been engaged in a gigantic political gamble. It has instituted a series of economic measures to restrict home spending. These measures are highly unpopular with the new working class from whom the party has obtained surprising support in recent elections. At the same time the Tory cabinet has not provided as much relief from taxation as the old middle class, its strongest supporters, demanded and expected after the electoral triumph of May 1955. These are calculated political risks. The calculation is that by the next general election, in 1959 or even 1960, the drive to expand British exports will have succeeded in establishing a new prosperity more firmly based than that of the boom years 1954 and 1955.

To attain this objective the Conservative government will have to perform a feat of political tightrope-walking beyond the aspirations of ordinary politics. The new prosperity can be achieved successfully, from the political point of view, only if the measures taken to attain it please the old middle class without offending Conservative voters in the new middle class and the new industrial working class. This will mean budgets in 1957 and 1958 that will relieve financial pressure upon the first of these groups without alienating the other two, whose interests are mutually antagonistic. It will mean that Britain's defense commitments must be reduced and adjusted to the extent that the savings will cut taxation of the old middle class but not to the extent that the reduction of defense construction will affect the employment of either the new middle class or the industrial working class.

This book was completed before the government's course was run. If its policy succeeds, then Harold Macmillan must be accorded a place in history not far below that of the greatest workers of political miracles.

Had there been a general election in the winter of 1956-7, the Labor Party would have won, although its majority would probably not have been so large as its enthusiastic tacticians predicted. The party should be able to appeal to the electorate at the next general election with greater success than in 1955, providing certain conditions are met.

The big "if" facing the Labor Party concerns not abstruse questions of socialist dogma but the oldest question in politics: the conflict between two men. The men are Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party, and Aneurin Bevan.