THE BRITISH CRISIS
275
nothing happens because the will to crack down on it is not there while
money and political power more or less coincide. To give just one exam·
ple. At long last, and against much opposition in high places, the Minis·
try of Food is about to cut down "luxury feeding" by limiting the sum of
money that can be spent on a meal in a hotel or restaurant. Already,
before the law is even passed, ways of evading it have been thought out,
and these are discussed almost undisguisedly in the newspapers.
There are other tensions which the war has brought out but which
are somewhat less obvious than the jealousy caused by the Black Market
or the discontent of soldiers blancoing their gasmask.s under the orders of
twerps of officers. One
is
the growing resentment felt by the underpaid
armed forces (at any rate the Army) against the high wages of the muni·
tion workers.
If
this were dealt with by .raising the soldier's pay to the
munition-worker's level the result would be either inflation or the diver·
sion of labour from war-production to consumption goods. The only real
remedy is to cut down the civilian worker's wages as well, which could
only be made acceptable by the most drastic income cuts all round–
briefly, "war communism." And apart ·from the class struggle in its ordi·
nary sense there are deeper jealousies within the bourgeoisie than for·
eigners sometimes realise.
If
you talk with a BBC accent you can get jobs
that a proletarian couldn't get, but it is almost impossible to get beyond
a certain point unless you belong socially to the Upper Crust. Every·
where able men feel themselves bottled down by incompetent idiots from
the county families. Bound up with this is the crushing feeling we have
all had in England these last twenty years that if you have brains "they"
(the Upper Crust) will see to it that you are kept out of any really impor·
tant job. During the years of investment capital we produced like a belt
of fat the huge blimpocracy which monopolises official and military power
and has an instinctive hatred of intelligence. This is probably a more
important factor in England than in a "new" country like the USA. It
means that our military weakness goes beyond the inherent weakness of a
capitalist state. When in England you find a gifted man in a really com·
manding position it is usually because he happens to have been born into
an
aristocratic family (examples are Churchill, Cripps, Mountbatten),
and even so he only gets there in. moments of disaster when others don't
want to take responsibility. Aristocrats apart, those who are branded as
"clever" can't get their hands on the real levers of power, and they know
it.
Of course "clever" individuals do occur in the upper strata, but basically
it
is a class issue, middle class against upper class.
THE POLITICAL LEADERSHIP
The statement in the March-April PR that "the reins of power are
still
firmly in the hands of Churchill" is an error. Churchill's position is
ftr}'
shaky. Up to the fall of Singapore it would have been true to say
tbat
the mass of the people liked Churchill while disliking the rest of his
pvernment, but in recent months his popularity has slumped heavily. In
addition he has the rightwing Tories against him (the Tories on the whole
have always hated Churchill, though they had to pipe down for a long
period), and Beaverbrook is up to some game which I do not fully under·
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