These are the British

by Drew Middleton

This influence is exerted principally upon an important group of intellectual orphans—the young men and women whose education surpassed their capacities and who now find themselves in dull, poorly paid jobs, living on a scale of comfort much lower than that of the more prosperous members of the urban working class. They are dissatisfied with the system and the government that has condemned them to dreary days of teaching runny-nosed little boys or to routine civil-service jobs. Not unnaturally, they welcome political plans and projects which promise to install them in posts worthy of their abilities as they see them.

Politically they are on the extreme left. The New Statesman encourages their political beliefs and assures them that their present lowly estate is due to the system and not to their own failings. The members of this group are poor. They are occasionally futile and often ridiculous. But they are not negligible.

That wise man Sir Oliver Franks said once that the political outlook of this group would have an important effect on Britain's political situation ten or twenty years hence. My own conclusion is that this group, like the Bevanites in the constituency labor parties, and the dissidents in the unions, wants to remake the Labor Party in its own image and then, when the party has come to power, remake Britain.

The left-wing radicalism of Britain—what we call Bevanism—is thus a good deal more important than the occasional rebellions of a few MP's on the Labor side of the House of Commons. It represents in an acute form the evangelism that is so strong a part of the nonconformist tradition in Britain. It rebels against the present direction of the Labor movement and the Parliamentary Labor Party. It wants, not a Britain governed by the Labor Party, but a socialist Britain.

Can it come to power? Movements of this kind usually win power during or after some great national convulsion. A war or an economic depression comparable to that of 1929-36 would give left-wing radicalism its chance. But either might give right-wing radicalism and nationalism a chance, too. To win, the Bevanites would have to defeat the mature power of the great unions and the undoubted abilities of the present leaders of the party.

The great unions are the result of one hundred and fifty years of crusading agitation. The labor movement began with them. They have money and they have power. The "branch" or "lodge" is the basic unit of organization within the union. Every union member must belong to it. In an individual plant or factory, the workers of the various unions are represented by a shop steward, who recruits new members, handles grievances, and, as the intelligence officer for the workers, keeps in touch with the management and its plans.

There are regional, district, or area organizations on a higher level for the larger unions. Finally, there is a national executive council of elected officials which deals with the national needs of the unions. At the top is the Trades Union Congress, a confederation of nearly all the great unions.

The unions have grown so large—the Amalgamated Engineering Union, for instance, includes thirty-nine separate unions in its organization—that it is sometimes difficult for the TUC or the national executive of an individual union to control its members. But the moderate political outlook—moderate, that is, by Bevanite standards—still prevails at the top, and the system of card voting, under which all the votes of a union are cast at the annual conference according to the decision of its national executive, insures that the moderate policies of the union leaders will be approved at the conference.

The imposing voting strength of the unions has been employed at successive conferences to maintain the policies and leadership of men like Attlee, Morrison, and Gaitskell. The steamroller in action is an impressive and, to the Bevanites, an undemocratic sight. But it does represent millions who advocate a conservative policy for the labor movement and who, at the moment, are satisfied with evolutionary rather than revolutionary progress.

The left-wing constituency labor parties create a great deal of noise. Those which support the moderate leadership are less enterprising in their propaganda, and, because criticism is often more interesting than support, they make fewer headlines. But, despite the agonized pleas of the left wing, hundreds of CLP's are satisfied with the general ideological policy of the movement and its leaders. This is a manifestation of the innate conservatism of the British worker. Just as the Conservatives of twenty years ago distrusted the brilliant Churchill largely because he was brilliant, so thousands of Labor voters today distrust the brilliant Bevan.