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PARTISAN REVIEW
Churchill should go, Cripps and Bevin are tipped as the likeliest men for
the premiership, with Bevin evidently favourite.
7.
How do you explain what, over here, seems to be the remarkable
amount of democracy
and
civil liberties preserved during the war? Labor
pressure? British tradition? Weakness of the upper classes?
"British tradition" is a vague phrase, but I think it is the nearest
answer. I suppose I shall seem to be giving myself a free advert., but
may I draw attention to a recent book of mine,
The Lion and the Unicorn
(I believe copies have reached the U.S.A.)? In it I pointed out
t~at
there
is in England a certain feeling of family loyalty which cuts across the
class system (also makes it easier for the class system to survive, I am
afraid) and checks the growth of political hatred. There
could,
I suppose,
be a civil war in England, but I have never met any English person able
to imagine one. At the same time one ought not to overrate the amount
of freedom of the intellect existing here. The position is that in England
there is a great respect for freedom of speech but very little for freedom
of the press. During the past twenty years there has been much tampering,
direct and indirect, with the freedom of the press, and this has never
raised a flicker of popular protest. This is a lowbrow country and it is
felt that the printed word doesn't matter greatly and that writers and such
people don't deserve much sympathy. On the other hand the sort of
atmosphere in which you daren't talk politics for fear that the Gestapo
may be listening isn't thinkable in England. Any attempt to produce it
would be broken not so much by conscious resistance as by the inability
of ordinary people to grasp what was wanted of them. With the working
classes, in particular, grumbling is so habitual that they don't know when
they are grumbling. Where unemployment can be used as a screw, men are
often afraid of expressing "red'' opinions which might get round to the
overseer or the boss, but hardly anyone would bother, for instance, about
being overheard by a policeman. I believe that an organisation now exists
for political espionage in factories, pubs, etc., and of course in the army,
but I doubt whether it can do more than report on the state of public
opinion and occasionally victimise some individual held to be dangerous.
A foolish law was passed some time back making it a punishable offence
to say anything "likely to cause alarm and despondency" (or words to
that effect). There have been prosecutions under it, a few score I should
say, but it is practically a dead letter and probably the majority of people
don't know of its existence. you can hardly go into a pub or railway
carriage without hearing it technically infringed, for obviously one can't
discuss the war seriously without making statements which
might
cause
alarm. Possibly at some time a law will be passed forbidding people to
listen-in to foreign radio stations, but it will never be enforcible.
The British ruling class believe in democracy and civil liberty in a
narrow and partly hypocritical way. At any rate they believe in the
letter
Df
the law and will sometimes keep to it when
it
is not to their advantage.
They show no sign of developing a genuinely Fascist mentality. Liberty
