A year of prophesying

by H. G. Wells

But even to entertain schemes of that sort requires imagination, and the new Labour Government has shown itself the least imaginative of Governments. It has excreted or suppressed all its creative elements. It is a class-Government, and it embodies the subdued mind of the common wages-earner. Whatever is, it accepts, from Court costume to slums. Its idea of life is the life of the back street in which it has always lived, and it wants more back streets and cheaper back streets to live in, with an occasional treat in the garden of Buckingham Palace. In dealing with housing, just as in dealing with mines or with transport, it shows itself incapable of any breadth or power of initiative.

One of the most remarkable aspects of this housing legislation is the ineffectiveness of the women. When women were struggling for the vote the world was given to understand that their success would be an end to “man-made laws” and “man-made” ways of living. There was to be an astonishing release of the sensible, practical feminine mind. Well, here is a question that concerns women primarily. A very large proportion of the girls and women of to-day, before their lives are out, will have to live either in the slums that the Labour Government is failing to reorganise, or in the rows and clumps of boxes of brick or timber that are to be spread out over the outskirts of every centre of population. There was nothing to prevent the distinguished women of the Labour Party from giving these men who are framing-up these schemes to build pauper houses and endow the building trade at the public expense a lead towards better things. These houses of the Wheatley project mean an effectual subjugation of great multitudes of women to dingy drudgery for scores of years to come; they mean the growth of a new generation of children with miserable standards of comfort and freedom. But so far we have had no guidance from intelligent women at all, but only speeches from such mere party supporters as Dr. Marion Phillips sustaining the preposterous pretensions of Mr. Wheatley. The Women’s Housing Councils’ National Federation, with its resolutions for the glorification of Mr. Wheatley’s building ramp, does no more than emphasise the general feminine apathy. Generally, the women of the country seem not to be awake to the manner in which this business concerns them.

Only one exception occurs to me at the present moment in the widespread indifference of intelligent and influential women to the comfort and outlook of the mass of their sex, and that is Mrs. Leonora Eyles, the novelist. Her book, The Woman in the Little House, is a most intelligent, sympathetic, and illuminating account of what it means to live in just such little houses as Mr. Wheatley and his friends, the employers and employed of the building trade, are conspiring to stereotype. She describes not slum life but the life of an ordinary working man’s wife in London, without exaggeration and without extenuation. It is a picture of extreme dinginess and meanness, relieved only by the pluck and devotion and hopefulness and cheerful humour that enable these people to hang on and hope for better things. It is this sort of life the Wheatley legislation proposes to extend and perpetuate, because in Britain, as everywhere in the world, political life is divorced from the creative imagination, and because the mass of common men and women in the world do not know how much they may reasonably ask for from those who have access to the science and control of the resources of the world.

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THE TRIVIALITY OF DEMOCRACY AND THE FEMININE INFLUENCE IN POLITICS

23.8.24

The other day I was discussing the political outlook in Great Britain with a very close and shrewd observer of political motives. I live very much in a dream of a saner world and he lives in active reaction to the passing hour, but we both knew most of the leading figures in public affairs and we were surveying the present extraordinary fragmentation of parties in Parliament—for even the Labour Party now is hardly on speaking terms with itself and has nothing but office to hold it together. His thoughts ran much more on personalities than mine did. Was Mr. Asquith played out? Would Lloyd George “come back”? What was the future of Lord Birkenhead? Would Mr. Baldwin ever be brighter and better? Was Mr. Masterman the resuscitated hope of the Liberal Party? Was there anyone of any promise at all in the Labour Party? And so on.

Unlike my friend, I do not go about culling incompatible posies of politicians. I have no interest in gathering together a marketable bunch. The failure of party government, the dissolution of all British parties, cheers and pleases me. Great Britain, I said, would have to lead the way to a new stage of democratic government and get itself a Legislature of a more manageable size, elected by Proportional Representation.

“They won’t,” said my friend, meaning by “they” our bright-eyed millions of voters. “They can’t grasp ideas like that—new, difficult ideas. It takes ten minutes’ attention to understand Proportional Representation. You can’t go to the country with a thing like that.”

“But unless we get a more efficient Legislature, how can we tackle our difficulties with money, with Europe, with India?”

“We don’t tackle difficulties,” said my friend; “Parliaments can’t.”