LONDON LETTER
409
Liberal Party. Otherwise there are no political developments, i. e., in
the narrower sense, that I can discern.
Domestic issues continue to occupy most people's attention. India,
for instance, has almost dropped out of the news. The chief subjects of
discussion are demobilization, re-housing and, for those who are a little
longer-sighted, the birth-rate. The housing shortage, already serious, is
going to be appalling as soon as the troops come home, and the Govern–
ment proposes to cope with it by means of prefabricated steel houses
which are reasonably convenient but so small as only to have room for
one-child families. In theory these temporary shacks are to be scrapped
after three years, but everyone assumes that in practice the new houses
will
not
be forthcoming. It is widely recognized that our birth-rate can–
not be expected tq rise significantly unless people have houses to live in
and that re-housing on a big scale is impossible while private property
rights are respected. It would be impossible to rebuild London, for
instance, without buying out tens of thousands of ground-landlords at
fantastic prices. The Conservatives, who are on the whole more con–
cerned about the birth-rate situation than the Left, are at the same time
fighting the landlord's battles for him, and try to solve the problem by
preaching to the working class the duty of self-sacrifice and the wicked–
ness of birth-control. The Left tends to evade this problem, partly be–
cause small families are still vaguely associated with enlightenment, part–
ly because of a certain unwillingness to recognize, or at any rate to say
publicly, that a sudden rise in the birth-rate (it has got to rise drastically
within ten or twenty years if our population is to be kept up) would
mean a drop in the standard of living. There is a vague belief that
"Socialism" would ·somehow make people philoprogenitive again, and
much praise of the high Russian birth-rate, without, however, any seri–
ous examination of the Russian vital statistics. This is only one of the
basic questions that the Left habitually ignores, others being the rela–
tion between ourselves and the coloured peoples of the Empire, and the
dependence of British prosperity on trade and foreign investments. The
Tories are far more willing to admit that these problems exist, though
unable to produce any real solution. Very nearly all English leftwingers,
from Labourites to Anarchists, have the outlook of people who neither
want nor expect power. The Tories are not only more courageous, but
they don't make extravagant promises and have no scruples about break–
ing the promises they do make.
Other highly unpopular subjects are postwar mobility of labour,
postwar continuation of food rationing, etc., and the war against Japan.
People will, I have no doubt, be ready to go on fighting until Japan is
beaten, but their capacity for simply
forgetting
these years of warfare
that lie ahead is surprising. In conversation, "When the war stops" in–
variably means when Germany packs up. The last Mass Observation
