LONDON LETTER
143
Britain produce films on the lives of Marx or Robert Owen or Keir Hardy
or the Tolpuddle Martyrs-which would be just as exciting as films on
Henry VIII or Lady Hamilton? Why has the British working-class
family to spend its holidays at home or on a miserable excursion which
consists mainly of queueing-for the train, for a room, for tea, lunch,
cigarettes, cinemas-while Butlin's private holiday-camps for the lower
middle classes are a roaring success, with sport, dances, entertainments
and no end of fun for very little money? Why can't the Government
hire Mr. Butlin-or study the Nazis' "Strength through Joy" organiza–
tion, which was in many respects a truly admirable thing? Why is the
only place in any English village or town where a soldier can play bil–
liards, read magazines, hear lectures and get cheap meals, the YMCA–
and why are Labor clubs the most cheerless places anywhere? Why is
no serious attempt being made to show the people in this country what
socialism is really about? We hear the news at nine o'clock; but where,
to quote Eliot, where are the eagles and the trumpets?
The answer to these questions is, firstly, that each national branch
of the Working-Class Movement is bound to adapt itself to certain
national characteristics. The ruthlessness of the Bolsheviks reflected the
mentality of a semi-Asiatic country; the arduous theorists of the SPD
were steeped in German pedantry; the great tribunes of French socialism
drew on the sources of latin eloquence; and the Labor Movement has
inherited the Briton's proverbial main virtue and vice, his Lack of
Imagination. (More or less consciously, lack of imagination has always
been associated in this country with straightness, honesty, and tradition;
its opposites, "smartness" and "cleverness," with dubious and mainly
foreign practices.)
And secondly, each political organism develops, as it advances in
age, a kind of automatic filter system through the meshes of which
only those are able to ascend to leadership who, in mentality and tem–
perament, conform more or less to the required standard type; it is the
equivalent of Natural Selection in the political field. Hence the preva–
lence in the British Labor Movement of the Transport House bureau–
crat, and its contempt for "intellectuals" like Laski and Strachey, for
brilliant
enfants terribles
like Nye Bevan, for people who are considered
too clever by half like Crossman or too passionately sincere like Michael
Foot. I could continue the list; if the outsiders were insiders, Britain
could have the most dynamic government in its history. As things are,
Bevan and Strachey were given the most thankless and unpopular min–
istries (housing and food) ; while, according to the law of natural selec–
tion, the most colorless leader in socialist history became the first Prime
Minister of the new era.
Another paradoxical aspect of the situation is, that the forerunners
