PARTISAN REV I EW
these two million new voters, who had previously been politically indif–
ferent, round half a million voted for Labour, and round a million and
a half voted for the Conservatives or for Independents supported by
the Conservatives. In other words, one quarter for the Government,
three quarters against it. The petrol issue, kill-joy austerity, bureaucratic
chicane, exasperation at the nagging schoolmastery of ministerial exhorta–
tions, has achieved the miracle of waking up the lethargic, a-political
little man and shaking him into action-against the Government.
To all this the staunch Labour supporter will answer that the Gov–
ernment has no choice, that all its actions are rigidly determined by Tory
mismanagement in the past, by the dollar shortage, and the export gap.
It would be foolish to deny the extremely heavy economic odds against
which the Government is battling; it is equally foolish and irresponsible
to use facts, which were just as well-known in 1945 when Labour fought
its electoral campaign, as an over-all alibi for the subjective ineptitude
of, say, Shinwell's fuel policy last winter, or the symbolic lunacy of the
abolition of motoring, or Bevin's amok-run on Palestine. In my first
letter to you (March-April, 1946, issue) I tried to show that this Gov–
ernment, like any other, had a wide elbow-room of subjective freedom
for maneuvering within the hard limits set by objective conditions; and
that goes for all fields of activity, from economics to public relations.
It is characteristic of the mediocre person, that in a crisis he will carry
on doggedly along one fixed line-because he lacks imaginative resources,
and has to make a show of strength to hide his weakness. The dragging
of the Exodus refugees from Haifa to Marseilles, and then on to Ham–
burg, in the teeth of the protests and laughter of the world, was a
typical example of the spend-a-pound-to-save-a-penny policy. The same
obstinacy characterizes the regime's economic policy. We could get food
from soft-currency countries in Europe in exchange for industrial pro–
ducts, if the Government were willing or able to guarantee quantities
and dates of delivery. But this they wouldn't do, for it would mean
going just one step farther in the direction and control of export indus–
tries than the rigidly fixed line of democratic planning permits. Ergo :
one potato per man a day, and death to his motor bike; and if snooty
critics think they know better-let's silence them with another reference
to the Tory mismanagement of coal mines in the thirties, the cold spell
of last winter, and statistics about the export gap.
In that first letter I wrote to you that after eighteen months of
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