To the Editor:

Robert Moss [“Anglocommunism?,” February] is an effective polemicist, but after admiring the vigor with which he chews the scenery, I’m not sure I detect much substance in his art. Regarding his conclusion that Britain is teetering toward totalitarianism, it is necessary to respond with a verdict of not proved.

Mr. Moss’s analogy between Britain and the Third World is amusing if ultimately not very satisfying. His strenuous effort to demonstrate that Britain is already six-tenths of the way toward realizing the aims of the Communist Manifesto is followed by a leap in logic: “Once that is achieved, you can forget about democracy.” Perhaps Mr. Moss intends this comment to apply only to the views of Hugh Jenkins and his left-wing colleagues in the Tribune Group, but I take him, rather, to be arguing that it is impossible in the long run to be both democratic and socialistic. In other words, he accepts as a given a central tenet of economic determinism—namely, that the political system exists only as a reflection of underlying economic realities. This is certainly a debatable proposition (though a curious basis for an attack on Marxism). However, Mr. Moss does not bother to debate it; he treats it as if it were self-evident, which it is not.

Mr. Moss is on firmer ground when he discusses the penetration of anti-democratic elements into the Trades Union Congress. Indeed, he makes much less of this point than it deserves. On the other hand, he makes altogether too much of the fact that a Trotskyite, Andy Bevan, has recently been appointed as the Labor party’s national youth organizer. While Sid Bidwell may not have said it elegantly, he is, of course, correct that “there have always been Reds in the Labor party.” Certainly the example of Andy Bevan is not enough “to demonstrate the extent to which British socialism has succumbed to . . . the ‘totalitarian temptation.’ ”

Before assenting to them, one must request some evidence for Mr. Moss’s assertions that parliamentary institutions are decaying, that the rule of law is under serious attack, that dissent is in danger of being squelched—evidence, in short, that the vision of the apocalypse which the article presents is more than a fevered expression of distaste for policies that Mr. Moss regards as ruinous and for people whom he manifestly dislikes.

No one doubts that Britain is in trouble both economically and politically. The Economist (for which Mr. Moss labors) offers weekly proof of that. But as a faithful reader of that publication and an occasional visitor to Britain, I see no reason to believe that Britain’s unwritten constitution is so fragile that it will blow away in a heavy gale or that the British people are so little attached to their parliamentary traditions that they will fling them away or allow them to be desecrated without a struggle.

Norman I. Gelman
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

Robert Moss is far too pessimistic about Britain’s future. Obviously he has access to more detailed information than most of us, but even the pages of the Economist give a solid basis for a far more optimistic view. From this source one learns that the rate of inflation has been cut drastically during the past two years, and that during this same period the trade unions have accepted a severe limitation on wage increases that leaves the average worker with less purchasing power than he had before. Also, the oil now flowing from the North Sea is substantially easing Britain’s balance-of-payments problem. And this present heavy flow is rapidly increasing as new wells and pipelines are completed. Of course, there are serious problems for the country that was bled white in the two world wars—unemployment above a million, inflation still high, an industrial establishment partly obsolete, a labor force frustrated, and a middle class that has watched its standard of living decline and is looking for a way out. But the spirit that led the people of these islands after the fall of France in 1940 to stand alone against the brutal might of Hitler . . . is still very much in evidence. . . .

According to Mr. Moss, “Britain has traveled more than two-thirds of the way to becoming a fully communist society. . . .” Perhaps so, but to me the evidence he presents is entirely unconvincing. I have long placed the British Labor party in the same group with the social democrats of other European countries such as Norway and Sweden. And even after reading Mr. Moss’s article, I am still inclined to do so. . . .

Hugh Carter
Washington, D.C.

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Robert Moss writes:

I am delighted that Britain’s friends across the waters put up such a spirited defense of this down-at-heel country. There are those of us on this side, too, who believe that not all is lost. But it is still true that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Anyone who wants to help Britain today should remember that the kind of national will that enabled the country to stand alone against Hitler is more difficult to develop when the challenges are internal (and very complex) and that Britain’s past success in “muddling through” is no guide to what is to come.

I am accused of apocalyptic fevers (I see that the Nation has coined the term “Mossianic”) and both Norman I. Gelman and Hugh Carter challenge me to produce more evidence about the totalitarian trends in the British Labor movement. Let me offer a few more examples of why it is no longer accurate to describe the Labor party as a social-democratic party in the sense that Mr. Carter wields the term (although I would readily accept that it includes many social democrats, and that the Prime Minister is one of them):

  1. The General Secretary of Britain’s Labor party, Ron Hayward, pays frequent visits (on a party-to-party basis) to the Communist party chiefs in Eastern Europe. This is an ominous departure from the practice of his predecessors. On a visit to East Berlin in 1975, he remarked that “I see Mr. Honecker as a man of wisdom and experience, very proud of the GDR and with every right to be proud.” Is that the way a social democrat should describe one of the most rigidly Stalinist of Europe’s Communist dictators? Mr. Hayward has also written for the British Communist organ, the Morning Star.
  2. Many Labor MP’s associate with Communist-front organizations like the World Peace Council, write for Communist publications like the Morning Star and the Labor Monthly, speak at Communist rallies, and dabble in import-export business with the Soviet bloc. A recent document issued by the Social Democratic Alliance—which stands in the Gaiteskellite tradition of social democracy and is therefore assailed by the Left as “hysterically right-wing”—listed 33 Labor MP’s, including the Minister for Overseas Development, as members of “Labor’s Fifth Column.” The list could easily be trebled if one based the criterion for membership on whether the MP has ever voted in a way that is contrary to the Soviet interest.
  3. As I observed in my article, the Labor party is dominated by the trade-union leadership which is dominated in turn by the Marxist or fellow-traveling Left. Hugh Scanlon, leader of the powerful engineers’ union (the AUEW), is a nominal Labor supporter but was a Communist for twenty years and still backs Communist candidates against Labor candidates in union elections. He has said that in his ideal society labor would be “directed” by the state, which would make his role the exact equivalent of that of his East European counterparts—i.e., state labor manager and factory policeman. Clive Jenkins, the voluble Welsh secretary of the white-collar-workers’ union (ATSMS), has called on the British people to “nourish” the Soviet state.

Do these things matter? Is Britain’s unwritten constitution being undermined? Part of the trouble is that Britain is insufficiently defended—in the absence of a supreme court or a codified constitution—against new legislation, promoted by a minority government (often at the behest of left-wing union leaders), that strikes at the heart of the tradition of English common law and the original Bill of Rights. There is no definition of basic liberties that should lie beyond the scope of government interference, and so the way is clear—when the votes in Parliament can be scraped together—for legislation that imperils press freedom or seeks to confer exceptional powers on unrepresentative union officials.

Mr. Gelman raises an intriguing question: can you have both democracy and socialism? But this puts us back in the semantic jungle. If he means (as he appears to mean) the kind of socialism defined in the Communist Manifesto, then I am convinced the answer is no. Trotsky gave the reason. When the state is the sole employer, he observed, “opposition becomes a slow form of starvation.” I am not saying, with Marx, that the political system is merely the reflection of underlying economic realities. For example, economic pluralism does not lead, through some inexorable process, to political pluralism and democratic institutions. But I have yet to see any evidence that political pluralism is possible in the absence of economic pluralism.

I, too, hope that Britain’s constitutional tradition will not be “desecrated without a struggle.” As one of the strugglers, I can assure COMMENTARY readers that not everyone over here is reconciled to Anglocommunism.

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[Additional correspondence on Robert Moss’s article will appear next month.—Ed.]

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