Politically, Britain is deeply and justly concerned with the liberties of the subject. Consequently, any discrimination by the government against Communists evokes the wrath of politicians and public bodies unconnected with Communism. This is true even when the government seeks to eliminate a known Communist from a "sensitive" department. The question is not whether Communism threatens Britain. The British know that it does, and they are prepared to fight it. But Britain's place in world society, it is reasoned, would be threatened even more if the liberties of the subject were endangered. The view that only a truly free society is capable of defeating Communism transcends party lines in Britain.
It is important to remember that the powerful influence of Communism on this heterogeneous group has affected it in two ways. Such people as Malcolm Muggeridge, the editor of Punch, were once sympathetic to Communism and are now among its best-informed and sharpest critics. In Britain, as in the United States, there are apostates who have turned from Communism and who now attack it. But their attacks, though often brilliant, command less attention in Britain than in the United States. This may be because the British never were so excited about the cold war as we were in the United States (after all, they were grappling with pressing economic problems). It may be because the British have scant respect for those who betray causes and then make money out of it.
On the whole, however, the group influenced by the Soviet Union exerts its influence to create friendlier relations between Britain and the Soviet Union. In its attitude toward the United States this group is sensitive, critical, and quite often abysmally ignorant.
The virtues and defects of the Soviet Union and the United States thus are weighed in public by an influential group that has already been tremendously impressed either by communism as a political creed or by the industrial, military, or diplomatic achievements of the Soviet state. They are receptive to news of Russia and, in many cases, remarkably uncritical. Indeed, they are generally less skeptical and critical in their approach to the Soviet Union than they are to the problems of Germany or the United States. One of their favorite sayings is "Let's try and keep an open mind about Russia."
In the battle for men's minds, this is a serious situation. It means that a considerable proportion of what Britons read, of what young Britons learn, of what the whole nation sees or hears through mass communication media is prepared by people whose attitude toward Russian claims and policies is less skeptical than it should be. On the other hand, the danger has been exaggerated by anxious Americans.
Since 1950 these fields of endeavor have been invaded by a group of young men and women much more favorably inclined to conservatism and modern capitalism than the group influenced by Russia. Some of them have been to the United States and are able to refute the anti-American charges of the other group with first-hand knowledge. Most of them developed intellectually in the period when the Russian danger overshadowed Europe, and they are not prone to make excuses for the Soviets.
Moreover, they are strongly influenced by the marked recrudescence of national feeling in Britain. Perhaps this is a revulsion from the internationalism of the group influenced by Russia. Perhaps it reflects a desire to do something about Britain's waning prestige in the world. Sometimes it indicates a new and welcome preoccupation with the political possibilities of an enlarged Commonwealth. Whatever the cause, it adds to the vitality of British thought. And it is healthy for the country that its young people should be interested in British development of nuclear energy rather than in Magnetogorsk or TVA.
The British attitude toward Communist China is unaffected by emotional memories of a war alliance, as in the case of the Soviet Union, or the sense of guilt regarding the conquest of China by the Communists which affects some Americans. Chiang Kai-shek was never a public hero during the war, as Tito and Stalin were. The London representatives of the great Anglo-Chinese trading firms might portray Chiang as the hope of the West in China, but the British people were not convinced.
Although the British military effort in the Korean war was considerably larger than Anglophobes would have Americans believe, the war's effect on the British was a good deal less. There has never been any sustained public outcry against Britain's recognition of the Chinese government. The danger of a Communist invasion of Formosa did not stir the British. When such an invasion seemed likely, the Conservative government faced a difficult situation: would the British people, in the event of war between China and the United States, have followed the Americans into the conflict?
The present British interest in Communist China is largely commercial. No one entertains the happy belief that the Communist regime can be overthrown—certainly not by Chiang and his aging forces. What the British want from Comrade Mao is more trade. If they get it and trade expands, the process will reflect not a national attraction to Communism but a restatement of the familiar British position that theirs is a trading nation which, in its present circumstances, must find commerce where it can.