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involved supporting Churchill, and hope that in some way it would all
come right on the night-i,e., that the mere necessities of war, the inevitable
drift towards a centralised economy and a more equal standard of living,
would force the regime gradually to the left and allow the worst reac·
tionaries 'to be levered out. No one in his senses supposed that the British
ruling classes would legislate themselves out of existence, but they might
be manreuvred into a position where their continuance in power was quite
obviously in the Nazi interest. In that case the mass of the nation would
swing against them and it would
be
possible to get rid of them with little
or no violence. Before writing this off as a hopelessly "reformist" strat·
egy it is worth remembering that England is literally within gunshot of
the continent. Revolutionary defeatism, or anything approaching it,
is
nonsense in our· geographical situation.
If
there were even a week's serious
disorganisation in the armed forces the Nazis would be here, after which
one might as well stop talking about revolution.
To some small extent things have happened as I foresaw. One can
after all discern the outlines of a revolutionary world war. Britain has
been forced into alliance with Russia and China and into restoring Abys–
sinia and making fairly generous treaties with the Middle Eastern coun·
tries, and because of, among other things, the need to raise a huge air force
a serious breach has been made in the class system. The defeats in the
Far East have gone a long way towards killing the old conception of
imperialism. But there was a sort of gap in the ladder which we never got
over and which it was perhaps impossible to get over while no revolution·
ary party and no able leftwing leadership existed. This may or may not
have been altered by the emergence of Cripps. I think it is certain that a
new political party will have to arise
if
anything is to be changed, and the
obvious bankruptcy of the old parties may hasten this. Maybe Cripps will
lose his lustre quite quickly if he does not get out of the government. But
at present, in his peculiar isolated position, he is the likeliest man for any
new movement to crystallise round.
If
he fails, God save us from the
other probable alternatives to Churchill.
I suppose as usual I have written too much. There is not much change
in our everyday lives here. The nation went onto brown bread a few weeks
back. The basic petrol ration stops next month, which in theory means
the end of private motoring. The new luxury taxes are terrific. Cigarettes
now cost a shilling for ten and the cheapest beer tenpence a pint (four·
pence in 1936 ) . Everyone seems to be working longer and longer hours.
Now and again at intervals of weeks one gets one's head above water for
a moment and notices with surprise that the earth is still going round the
sun. One day I noticed crocuses in the parks, another day pear blossom,
another day hawthorn. One seems to catch vague glimpses of these thing
through a mist of war news.
·
Yours ever,
GEORGE ORWELL.
London ,
May
8, 1942.
