London Letter
I
SUPPOSE
by the time this is printed the Second Front will have
opened. It is generally assumed that this will happen within the next
few months, that the German part of the war will end this year; and
that there will be a general election turning on domestic issues soon
afterward. Meanwhile not much is happening politically. It has occurred
to me that it might be useful if I gave you some background stuff about
two contestants in the British political scene, Parliament and the Mon–
archy, which I have rather taken for granted in previous letters. But
first of allrsomething about current developments, in so far as there are
any. ,
The Government's whole policy, internal and external, continues to
move more and more openly to the right, while public feeling continues
to swing leftward as strongly, I should say, in a more disillusioned way,
as it did in 1940. Fed-upness and disbelief in sunshine promises are
general, and show themselves in sudden outbursts of indignation like the
row that occurred over Mosley's release from internment. On the face
of it this was a bad symptom amounting as it did to a popular protest
against habeas corpus (incidentally there was far more clamor against
Mosley's release than there had been in favor of locking him up in the
beginning), and it is also true that most of the public demonstrations
were stage-managed by Communists anxious to live down their own anti–
war activities. But there was a great deal of genuine feeling, especially
among working people, always on the ground that "they've only let
him
out because he's a rich man." Since 1940 we have suffered a long series
of Thermidors, and people grasp the general drift, but only through
events that influence their own lives. There is no authoritative voice on
the left to tell them that things like the AMG policy in Italy, or the
jailing of the Indian Congress leaders, also matter. By-elections show a
big turnover of votes against the Government, and in some cases a big
rise in the percentage of the electorate voting. Since I wrote to you last,
the Government has only lost one election (out of about half a dozen).,
but might have lost others if the opposition vote had not been split.
There is a new crop of "independent" candidates, whose policy is usually
of a kind to split the opposition rather than the Government vote. Some
people think that these "independents" are financed by the Conservative
Party.
My own fear is that the moment the war is over the Conservatives
will conduct a whirlwind campaign, present themselves as "the party that
