London
The Labor Party’s victory was overwhelming. It has a clear majority of more than 150 seats over all other parties combined, while the Conservatives and their satellites have lost nearly 200 seats and the minor parties have been simply obliterated. So far as I know, not a soul in England foresaw any such outcome. Before the election began, my own forecast had been a small Tory majority, and after polling day—this as a result of observing the strong leftward swing in the London area—a small Labor majority. Most of the people I know were of the same way of thinking, while the newspapers alternated between giving the Tories a majority of about 50, and predicting a stalemate. The Liberals, who put up 300 candidates, were expected to increase their representation considerably (actually it has dwindled from 18 seats to 10), and most of the discussion between polling day and the announcement of the results turned on what would happen if there were a minority government and the Liberals had the casting vote. The belief that the election would be a very near thing, and that we should be left with a weak government which would be forced to form some kind of coalition, was almost universal. Before giving any opinion as to what this landslide means, I should like to record the impressions I picked up while the election was on.
I saw the election only in London, but I followed its developments fairly closely, as I was “covering” the London constituencies for a Sunday paper. The thing that principally struck me, as it struck others who were watching events in the streets and not in the newspapers, was that the masses were not interested. It is true that a high percentage voted (actually higher than it seems, since hundreds of thousands of people were disenfranchised owing to defects in the electoral register), but people always do vote in a general election, as opposed to a by-election, because of the last-minute pressure put upon them by newspapers and radio.
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During a fortnight of electioneering, in which most of my waking hours were spent in the streets or in pubs, buses and teashops, with my ears pricked all the time, I only twice overheard a spontaneous comment on the election. Outdoor meetings, especially in the more crowded and noisy parts of London, were often a complete failure. Indoors, in church halls, schools and dance-palaces, you had lively and sometimes very turbulent meetings of five hundred or a thousand people, but in the streets the great crowds drifted to and fro as usual, seemingly indifferent to the whole thing and never, in my experience, stopping to look at the election posters which were pasted all over the walls. Nearly all the agents and organizers whom I interviewed remarked on the difficulty of canvassing and the impossibility of finding out what the masses were thinking. Canvassers reported that “I haven’t made up my mind yet” was a frequent answer. There was also a certain amount of feeling that there ought not to have been an election at this time, i.e., when the Japanese end of the war was uncompleted, and both Tory and Labor candidates did their best to transfer the odium of “forcing” the election on to the other party.
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On the other hand, among the minority who did take an interest, I was struck by the comparative seriousness and decency with which the whole thing was conducted. The behavior of candidates and audiences seemed to me a good deal better than the behavior of the press. It is so long since we have had a general election in England that people have forgotten the libels and buffooneries that used to be taken for granted, and there were angry protests from some quarters that Britain was presenting an undignified spectacle to Europe. Actually I believe that this election was an exceptionally quiet and an exceptionally clean one, and several party agents with long experience confirmed this. The only real attempt to drag the contest down to the level of 1931 or 1924 was the short-lived campaign of the Beaverbrook press against Professor Laski. This failed even to become an election issue, and was simply one more demonstration of the inability of the big press lords to influence public opinion by direct means. So far as my observation went, anti-Semitism was not a factor in the election, and certainly no overt attempt at stirring up anti-Semitism was made in the press, though the Laski affair could obviously have been given some such twist. (Anti-Semitism, although it is probably on the upgrade, isn’t really a political issue at all in England, and can’t be made to appear so when there is no Fascist party functioning. There are Jews in all political parties, though they are distributed a bit thicker in the parties of the left, and there were Jewish candidates on all the tickets. Incidentally, the one new Communist who got in—they now have two seats—was a Jew, but as he was elected in what is practically an all-Jewish quarter of London and his Labor opponent was also a Jew, it’s a bit difficult to see deep significance in this.)
At public meetings, the attempts to shout down the speakers were usually the work of small groups of Communists or near-Communists, who were countered with similar tactics by small groups of Conservatives. All the Labor Party meetings I went to were quiet and serious, and the level of the questions asked was fairly high. Much the worst feature of the election, if one regards it in broad terms, was the exploitation of Churchill’s record and personality by the Conservatives. But in the end this recoiled against themselves, and the leader-worship and ballyhoo were nothing to what goes on in Continental countries. Symptomatically, the photographs of Churchill which were plastered everywhere were only about a quarter the size of the photographs of Stalin, de Gaulle, etc., which are to be seen in the appropriate parts of Europe.
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The third thing that struck me was that this election was fought almost wholly on domestic issues. This ought to be emphasized, because such foreign press comments as I have seen hitherto point to serious misconception. Obviously, the Labor Party and the Conservative Party stand for quite different policies, and British policy all over the world will be affected by the change of government: but the mass of the electorate, during the actual struggle, showed no interest in anything outside the British isles. The war with Japan, foreign policy, relations with the U.S.A., the Dominions, Palestine and India were not election issues. Even relations with the USSR only had an indirect effect because of the widespread vague belief that a Labor government would “get on better with Russia.” The questions on which the election turned were nationalization of industry, social security, demobilization, housing, old age pensions, continuation of wartime controls and also of wartime facilities such as day nurseries, and the raising of the school-leaving age. The Conservatives, unable simply to keep silent about home affairs, were forced to come out openly as the champions of laissez-faire, and did their best to make this policy a little more acceptable by tying Churchill’s name to it. They would have liked to put more emphasis on the Pacific war and the need to recapture Britain’s foreign markets, but their audiences would not let them. Labor candidates sometimes talked as though Britain’s internal prosperity need be in no way affected by the outside world. Significantly, the handbook issued to Labor speakers gives, out of its 218 pages, only a single rather uninformative page to India.
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These were my main impressions, and I think many other observers would confirm them. But now one must ask, what did this nationwide swing to the Left actually mean?
The first thing to notice is that in terms of votes the swing was not nearly so big as it looks if one considers it in terms of seats. The English electoral system is capable of producing all kinds of anomalies, and would in theory be capable of giving every single seat in Parliament to a party which had won only 51 per cent of the votes. Over the past twenty-five years—largely because the rural areas, where people used to vote Conservative, were over-represented—the anomalies have worked in the Conservative interest, and it has needed many more votes to elect a Labor man than to elect a Conservative. In the present election the position has been reversed, and it has needed, on average, 46,000 votes to elect a Conservative and only 30,000 to elect a Labor man. The upshot is that though Labor has won 392 seats as against 195 won by the Conservatives, the number of votes won was roughly 12 million as against 9 million. If one takes into account the minor parties which can be lumped with one or other of the two main ones, then the figures are approximately twelve and a half millions and ten millions: which means that the preponderance of votes was in the ratio of six and a half to five, while the preponderance of seats was in the ratio of two to one.
There were various complicating factors which should be mentioned but are not worth discussing in detail, since they probably did not alter the over-all result. The most important were the large-scale intervention of the Liberals (who polled over 2 million votes though they only won 10 seats), and the very large number of “lost” votes, nearly all of them working-class votes, due to the bad state of the electoral register and the inadequate facilities for men and women serving overseas. (Men and women in the services could vote either by post or by proxy. Many who had applied to vote by post did not get their voting papers in time, while others had not been adequately informed by their unit commanders about the steps it would be necessary to take beforehand. This may not have been entirely due to carelessness. The non-commissioned ranks in all three services would mostly vote Labor if they voted at all.) According to the very rough calculations that I have been able to make, the wastage of votes on one side and on the other would either cancel out, or would slightly benefit the Conservatives.
Had Proportional Representation been in force in England, the division of votes would have given Labor about 300 seats, the Conservatives and their satellite parties about 250 seats, and the Liberals 55 seats. This is to say that the Labor Party would not have had a reliable working majority: and similarly, on a basis of Proportional Representation, the Conservatives would hardly have had a working majority after the election of 1935. In that election the Conservatives polled something over 10 million votes and the Labor Party something over 8 million. If one compares the figures for 1935 and 1945, it can be seen that a comparatively small turnover of votes may bring about a complete reversal of the political situation. This often means that the House of Commons is not genuinely representative of the electorate, but it does have the advantage of producing governments which are strong enough to act but which can be fairly easily got rid of when their five-years’ term is over.
In the present election, the defeat of the Conservatives is sufficiently accounted for by two things that were bound to happen sooner or later: the penetration of the Labor Party into the rural areas, and the defection of the middle class. Labor members have been returned by rustic constituencies and by prosperous “dormitory suburbs” where only ten years ago it would have been quite hopeless for any left-wing candidate to present himself. But though I have emphasized above that the turnover of votes is not enormous, the general drift in England is leftward, as innumerable observers have pointed out from 1940 onwards. In spite of the general apathy and ignorance, there is a gathering discontent which cannot be fitted into any “ism” but which springs from a desire for more dignity and decency in everyday life, more opportunities for the young, and, above all, more security.
It would be absurd to imagine that Britain is on the verge of violent revolution, or even that the masses have been definitely converted to Socialism. Most of them don’t know what Socialism means, though public opinion is quite ready for essentially socialistic measures such as nationalization of mines, railways, public utilities, and land. Again, it is doubtful whether there is any widespread desire for complete social equality. There is considerable class feeling, which is never quite dormant and sometimes sharpens to acute resentment, but if a plebiscite could be taken, the mass of the people would not vote for rigid equalization of incomes, nor for the abolition of the monarchy, nor even, possibly, for the abolition of hereditary titles. The Labor Party, in the average man’s mind, does not stand for republicanism, and still less does it stand for red flags, barricades and reigns of terror: it stands for full employment, free milk for school-children, old-age pensions of thirty shillings a week, and, in general, a fair deal for the working man.
The same drift towards the Left, not accompanied by any strong revolutionary yearnings or any sudden break-up of class system, can be observed in France. Recently, after the municipal elections in which half the electorate of Paris voted either Communist or Socialist, it appeared to me that Paris was in fact less revolutionary, more pre-1939 in outlook, even than London. People voted for the Left partly because the collaborators had belonged to the Right, but above all because the Left stood for social security. In England the mythos of the USSR and the victories of the Red Army have been helpful to the Labor Party, but there is little real interest in the Soviet system. Russia is dimly thought of as a country where “they” (the upper classes) do not usurp all the privileges and where there is no unemployment. After the experience of the between-wars years, mass unemployment—unemployment against a background of social competitiveness—is the worst horror the English people can imagine, and they have turned towards the Labor Party because, more convincingly than its opponents, it promised a way out.
Meanwhile, unless it suffers a major split, the Labor Party has a completely free hand for five years. Just like any other government at this time, it will have to do unpopular things: it will have to continue with military conscription, to “direct” labor into hated jobs such as coal-mining, to crush sabotage on both Right and Left, to soothe the inevitable disappointments over demobilization and rehousing, and, in general, to clean up the mess left over from the war. But it starts out with great advantages, especially in dealing with foreign affairs. It has no strong motive for backing up such indefensible figures as Franco or King George of Greece, and on the other hand it is not obliged to adopt an appeaser attitude towards the USSR. At some point or another a stand against Russian aggression will have to be made, and when the moment comes a Labor government will be able to unite the country behind it, which a Conservative government for obvious reasons could not. It is, I believe, a mistake to imagine that the new government’s foreign policy will be diametrically opposed to that of the old one.
A Labor government will approach such problems as the occupation of Germany with more common sense than has been shown hitherto, it will look with a friendlier eye on the Italian Socialists and the Spanish Republicans, and it will go somewhat further towards satisfying Jewish aspirations in Palestine: but Britain’s strategic interests, in a world of competing nationalists, remain the same, whether the government at home is called Socialist or capitalist.
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By Far the hardest problem for a Labor Government—and it is all the harder because the mass of the people never give the subject a thought—is India. The Labor Party will now have to decide, once and for all, whether the promises it has made to India are to be kept or broken. It cannot simply postpone the question as a Conservative government might succeed in doing, because with Labor in power the Indian Nationalists will expect a decision promptly.
Underneath this problem lies the fact I mentioned above—that the election was fought on domestic issues and that the bulk of the British people are almost completely uninterested in foreign or imperial affairs. Immersed in their struggle with the Tories, the Labor leaders have never made clear to their followers the extent to which British prosperity depends on the exploitation of the colored peoples. It has always been tacitly pretended that we could “set India free” and raise our own wages simultaneously. The first task of the Labor government is to make people realize that Britain is not self-contained, but is part of a world-wide network. Even the problem of introducing Socialism is secondary to that. For Britain cannot become a genuinely Socialist country while continuing to plunder Asia and Africa; while on the other hand no amount of nationalization, no cutting-out of profits and destruction of privilege, could keep up our standard of living if we lost all our markets and our sources of raw materials at one blow. It is not yet certain whether the Labor Party will make a genuine effort to introduce Socialism: but if it does, the period of reconstruction will probably be a very uncomfortable one for almost everyone. By its success or otherwise in educating people for that period, in making them see that it has to be faced, just as the war had to be faced, the Labor Party will stand or fall.
The most difficult moment will probably be about two years hence, when the war boom is over and demobilization is complete. But the Labor government has at least five years in hand, and the men at the top of it, as a body, are at least as able and determined as any government we have had for decades past. It is too early to cheer, but a hopeful attitude is justified. As a sign of the vitality of democracy, of the power of the English-speaking peoples to get along without fuehrers, the outcome of this election is a thing to be rejoiced at, even if the men it has brought to power should utterly fail.
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Right now Parliament is in recess, and though the ministerial appointments were made some time back, there has not as yet been any statement of policy. The government has addressed a not-too-friendly note to the Greek government, there have been shufflings in Spain which may be partly due to British pressure, and a Secretary of State for India has been appointed, which suggests that the India Office is not to be abolished. Otherwise there is nothing very revealing.
So far as foreign policy goes, no very violent or sudden change should be expected because of Labor’s accession to power. The Labor Party has to play out the hand left to it by its predecessor, and one must remember that the Labor leaders helped to frame, or at any rate concurred in, Churchill’s policy. In the matter of Greece, for instance, the people at the top of the Labor Party are very much less favorable to EAM than the rank and file. So also with Yugoslavia, Poland, the Baltic states, Finland and Turkey. With regard to all these countries there is a sort of left-wing orthodoxy which is accepted unreservedly by the big mass of Labor Party supporters, and which is perhaps best expressed by the Liberal News-Chronicle. One has only to look back two or three years at the earlier speeches and writings of the men who now form the government, to realize that their views on foreign policy are not always what their followers imagine. A Labor government has not the same motive as a Conservative one for automatically backing reaction everywhere, but its first consideration must be to guard British strategic interests, which are the same whatever government is in power. Ernest Bevin, the new Foreign Minister, is a very much tougher person than Anthony Eden.
The one part of the world, outside Britain, in which the Labor government’s policy may diverge sharply from that of its predecessor is Palestine. The Labor Party is firmly committed to the establishment of the Jewish National Home, and indeed almost all shades of radical opinion in England are “pro-Jewish” on the Palestine issue. I think it would be rash; however, to assume that the Labor government will live up to the promises it made when it was in opposition. Leftwing opinion in England is pro-Jewish partly because the Arab case gets no hearing, and it is not always realized that the colored peoples almost everywhere are pro-Arab. Unreserved support of the Jews might have repercussions in the other Arab countries, in Egypt and even in India, of a kind that a newly-elected government could hardly be expected to face.
