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PARTISAN REVIEW
job, involving rationing and "direction" of labor over a long period, but
are less well aware that the devastation of Europe must react badly on
our own economy.
It
is extraordinary how little protest there has been
against the proposal to turn Germany into a sort of overcrowded rural
slum. In looking to the future, people think in terms of re-distributing
the national income, and don't pause to reflect that that income is itself
dependent on world conditions. They have had the Beveridge Scheme,
raising of the school-leaving age, and so forth, whisked in front of their
noses, and no one has told them that for a long time to come we may be
unable to afford any improvement in our way of life. Sometimes at Labor
meetings during the election I tried the experiment of asking at question
time: ·"What is the Labor Party's policy towards India?" I always got
some such perfunctory answer as "Of course the Labor Party is in the
completest sympathy with the Indian people's aspiration towards in–
dependence," and there the subject dropped, neither speakers nor audi–
ences having the faintest interest in it. I don't think throughout the
election I heard a Labor speaker spontaneously mention India, and they
rarely mentioned Europe except to make the demagogic and misleading
claim that a government of the Left would be able to "come to an
understanding with Soviet Russia." It is easy to see what dangers are
contained in this optimism about home affairs and disregard of
con~
ditions abroad. The trouble could come to a head in dozens of ways–
over India or the colonies, over the need to cut our rations further in
order to prevent occupied Germany from starving, over mobility of labor,
over the inevitable muddles and failures in re-housing, and so on and so
forth. The great need of the moment is to make people aware of what
is happening and why, and to persuade them that Socialism is a
better
way of life but not necessarily, in its first stages, a more comfortable one.
I have no doubt they would accept this
if
it were put to them in the
right way: but at present nothing of the kind is being attempted.
Up to date there has been no definite sign of a re-orientation in
foreign policy. A Labor government has fewer reasons than a Conser–
vative one for propping up unpopular monarchs and dictators, but it
cannot disregard British strategic interests. I think it is an error to sup–
pose, as the public was allowed to suppose during the election, that the
Labor leaders will be more subservient to the USSR than the Tories
were. After the first few months it will probably be the other way about.
Most of them-Laski, for instance, is an exception-have no illusions
about the Soviet system, they are involved, as the Tories are not, in the
ideological struggle between the eastern and western conceptions of So–
cialism, and if they choose to stand up to Russia public opinion will sup–
port them, whereas Tory motives for opposing Russia were always justly
suspect. One probable source of trouble in the near future is Palestine.
The Labor Party, and the Left generally, is very strongly committed to
