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PARTISAN REVIEW
ideas, as even its own publicists admit. All it can do is to yap against
"state interference" and "bureaucracy," which the ordinary person may
slightly dislike but far prefers to economic insecurity. A good many Tories
how believe that their best hope lies in the Communists, who might
succeed in splitting the Labour Party and forcing the right-wing Labour
leaders to form another coalition. I don't myself believe that this will
happen, but it is a fact that the Communists are at present the main
danger to the government, and might become a real political force if
some calamity abroad-for instance, large-scale fighting in India-made
the government's foreign policy acutely unpopular.
The actual number of Communists and "fellow travellers" is still
only a few score thousands, and has no doubt dwindled over the past
year. But while they have somewhat lost ground with the general public,
they have now succeeded in capturing the leadership of several important
:unions, and in addition there is the group of "underground" Communist
M.Ps-that is, M.Ps elected as Labour men but secretly members of the
C. P. or reliably sympathetic to it. The number of these is uncertain,
but I should say there are twenty or thirty of them, out of a total of
something over 300 Labour M.Ps. Their tactic, needless to say, is to
clamour inside and outside Parliament for a policy of appeasement to–
wards the USSR, and at the same time to try to group the Left elements
in the country round them by playing on domestic discontent. At present
they have rather isolated themselves by making their aims too obvious,
and expressions like "infiltration" and "crypto-Communist" are now
being bandied about by people who had hardly heard of such things a
year ago. When Bevin had a show-down with the Parliamentary Labour
Party on the question of his foreign policy, only six M.Ps would actually
vote against him, though others abstained. Considering that the USSR
is and must be implacably hostile to a social-democratic government of
the British type, it is clear that a combination of open Communists like
Arthur Horner at the head of big trade unions, "underground" Com–
munists like Zilliacus in Parliament, and "sympathisers" like Priestley in
the popular press, could be very dangerous. But the difficulty for these
people is that they cannot lay their main emphasis on domestic grievances.
They are tied to the defence of Russian foreign policy, which the ordinary
person feels to be simply indefensible. From reading the minority left–
wing press you might get the idea that the Labour Party is seething
with revolt and that the rank-and-file Labour supporter is full of en–
thusiam for the Russian actions in Iran, Rumania etc., and is also
pining to hand over the secrets of the atomic bomb without getting any
military information in return. It is certain however, that this is not so.
The public opinion polls taken by the
News-Chronicle
showed that
Bevin's popularity went sensationally
up
after his battle with Vishinsky,
and went up most of all among Labour Party supporters. I doubt even
