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PARTISAN REVIEW
build millions of houses and to keep up armed forces larger than we
can afford in order to hold on to our precarious supplies of oil. No one,
I think, expects the next few years to be easy ones, but on the whole
people did vote Labor because of the belief that a Left government means
family allowances, higher old age pensions, houses with bathrooms, etc.,
rather than from any internationalist consideration. They look to a Labor
government to make them more secure and, after a few years, more
confortable, and the chief danger of the situation lies in the fact that
English people have never been made to grasp that the sources of their
prosperity lie outside England. The parochial outlook of the Labor
Party itself is largely responsible for this.
I have already written on the election and I do not want to repeat
what I said. · But I must re-emphasise two points. One-not everyone
agrees with me about this, but it is the impression I gathered in the
London constituencies-is that the election was fought on domestic
issues. Even Russophile feeling was a secondary factor. The other is that
the turnover of votes was not enormous. Looking back at the last letter
I sent you, I find that I was wrong on several points, and above all in
predicting that the Conservatives would win. But everybody else, so far
as I know, was also wrong, and even when the Gallup polls indicated
that about 46 percent would vote Labor, the newspapers of the Left
would go only so far as predicting a stalemate. The anomalies of the
English electoral system usually work in favor of the Conservatives, and
everyone assumed that they would do so again. Actually they worked the
other way, for once, and everyone was stunned with surprise when the
results were announced. But I was also wrong in suggesting that the
Labor leaders might flinch from power and hence fight the election half–
heartedly. It was a genuine enough fight, and it turned on issues that
were serious so far as they went. Everyone who took an interest saw that
the only chance of getting the Tories out was to vote Labof, and the
minor parties were ignored. The twenty candidates put up by the Com–
munists only won about 100,000 votes between them, and the Common
Wealth did equally badly. I think that the democratic tradition came
out of the election fairly well. Tory efforts to turn the whole thing into
a sort of plebiscite only excited disgust, and though the big masses ap–
peared uninterested, they did go into the polling booths and vote at the
last minute-against Churchill, as it turned out. But one cannot take
this slide to the Left as meaning that Britain is on the verge of revolu–
tion. In spite of the discontent smouldering in the armed forces, the
mood of the country seems to me less revolutionary, less Utopian, even
less hopeful, than it was in 1940 or 1942. Of the votes cast in the elec–
tion, at most 50 percent could be considered as outright votes for So–
cialism, and about another 10 percent as votes for nationalisation of
certain key industries.
A Labor government may be said to mean business if it (a) na-
