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already an appreciable amount of unemployment. On the other hand
there is resentment against long hours and bad working conditions, which ·
has shown itself in a series of "unofficial" strikes. When you listen to the
conversations in the fish queue you can hardly doubt that the average
working-class person is discontented, feels that the ending of the war
ought to have brought him more comfort and amusement, and does not
see why our loaves should be made smaller or our beer reduced in order
to
prevent Europe from starving.
And yet there seems to be extraordinarily little hostile criticism on
strictly political grounds. One cannot get a true idea of the general re–
action from the British press, because the big newspapers are mostly
owned by Tories while part of the minority press is under Communist
influence. I have heard almost endless grumbling because "they" are
not providing new houses quickly enough, or because "they" won't let
you have enough coal to last through the winter, or because of bad
travelling conditions, income tax, slowness of demobilisation, the ex–
pensiveness of vegetables, the smallness of the milk ration, and I -do not
know what else: but what I have not heard any ordinary person say is
that the government has not made any perceptible step towards the
introduction of Socialism. Even allowing for the fact that everything
takes time, it is astonishing how little change seems to have happened
as yet in the structure of society. In a purely economic sense, I suppose,
the drift is towards Socialism, or at least towards state ownership. Trans–
port, for exa111jple, is being nationalised. The railway shareholders are
being bought out at prices they would hardly get in the open market:
still, the control of the· railways is being taken out of private hands. But
in the social set-up there is no symptom by which one could infer that
we are not living under a Conservative government. No move has been
made against the House of Lords, for example, there has been no talk of
disestablishing the Church, there has been very little replacement of Tory
ambassadors, service chiefs or other high officials, and if any effort is
really being made to democratise education, it has borne no fruit as yet.
Allowing for the general improverishment, the upper classes are still
living their accustomed life, and though they certainly dislike the Labour
government, they don't appear to be frightened of it. All this fits in with
the British preference for doing things slowly and not stirring up class
hatred-still, I think almost any observer would have expected a greater
change in the social atmosphere when a Labour government with a
crushing majority had been in power for eight months.
But it
is
not on these grounds that the average person exprf'Sses dis–
content. In so far as they bother
with
politics, people still feel that they
won a great victory last summer-as indeed they did-and though the
deeds of the new government are perhaps somewhat uninspiring, there is
no competing ideology in sight. The Conservative Party
is
bankrupt of
