LONDON LETTER
109
ter-attacking. Margesson's entry into the Cabinet-the nearest equivalent
possible to bringing Chamberlain out of his grave-was a swift cash-in on
Wavell's victory in Egypt. The campaign in the Mediterranean is not
finished, but events there have justified the Conservatives as against the
Left and they can he expected to take advantage of it. It is not impossible
that one or two leftish newspapers will he suppressed before long. Sup–
pression of the
Daily
Worker
is said to have been mooted already in the
Cabinet. But this swing of the pendulum is not vitally important unless
one believes, as I do not-and I doubt whether many people under fifty
believe it either-that England can win the war without passing through
revolution and go straight hack to pre-1939 "normality," with 3 million
unemployed, etc., etc.
But at present there does not effectively exist any policy between
being patriotic in the "King and Country'' style and being pro-Hitler.
If
another wave of anti-capitalist feeling arrived it could at the moment only
be canalised into defeatism. At the same time there is little sign of this in
England, though the morale is probably worse in the industrial towns than
elsewhere. In ·London, after four months of almost ceaseless bombing,
morale is far better than a year ago when the war was stagnant. The only
people who are overtly defeatist are Mosley's followers, the Communists
and the pacifists. The Communists still possess a footing in the factories
and may some time stage a come-hack by fomenting grievances about
working-hours, etc. But they have difficulty in getting their working-class
followers to accept a definitely pro-Hitler policy, and they had to pipe
down during the desperate days in the summer. With the general public
their influence is nil, as one can see by the votes in the by-elections, and the
powerful hold they had on the press· in the years 1935-9 has been com·
pletely broken. Mosley's Blackshirts have ceased to exist as a legal organ–
isation, but they probably deserve to he taken more seriously than the
Communists, if only because the tone of their propaganda is more accept·
able to soldiers, sailors and airmen. No leftwing organisation in England
has ever been able to gain a footing in the armed forces. The Fascists have,
of course, tried to put the blame for both the war and the discomfort
caused by the air-raids onto the Jews, and during the worst of the East
End bombings they did succeed in raising a mutter of anti-Semitism.
though only a faint one. The most interesting development on the anti-war
front has been the interpenetration of the pacifist movement by Fascist
ideas, especially anti-Semitism. After Dick Sheppard's death British paci·
fism seems to have suffered a moral collapse; it has not produced any
significant gesture nor even many martyrs, and only about 15 per cent of
the membership of the Peace Pledge Union now appear to he active. But
many of the surviving pacifists now spin a line of talk indistinguishable
from that of the Blackshirts ("Stop this Jewish war" etc.), and the actual
membership of the P.P.U. and the British Union overlap to some extent.
Put all together, the various pro-Hitler organisations can hardly number
150,000 members, and they are not likely to achieve much by their own
