LONDON LETTER
127
went to bed. The next morning came the news that our candidate
had, of course, lost. Despite the heavy poll and the new crop of
voters, both he and the Conservative had polled almost exactly the
same number of votes as in 1955. The extra five thousand had
gone Liberal. All the candidate's spirit and intelligence had got
him
precisely nowhere; he might just as well have recited advertising
slogans to his audiences. It made one want to wash one's hands of
the whole wretched business.
That was two months ago. Since then, what happened to
Labour has been the theme of endless articles, conferences and
bickering. Obviously the defeat depends on much more than the
Conservatives' long and extremely efficient advertising campaign
before the election, or the long and, for the Tories, equally effi–
cient, hot summer which gave everyone a quite unprecedented
feeling of well-being and prosperity-after all, the English usually
have to spend good money abroad to get that sense of cloudless–
ness and ease that prevailed this year unbroken from May to Octo–
ber. The real cause of the defeat seems to be that, in a way, the
Tories were right: there is an enormous prosperity in England
now. And it has brought about a kind of Americanization of so–
ciety. Only superficially does this have to do with the obvious signs:
more cars and T.V. sets than ever before. It is, instead, a matter
of the disappearance of the working class. The old division of so–
ciety into aristocracy, upper-middle, lower-middle and working
classes has gone. The aristocracy, as an effective social power, did
not survive the First World War. Between the wars when, as Gait–
skell recently said, the level of unemployment was never less than
ten percent, the working class made its great bid for some kind of
equality. But now when-again to quote Gaitskell-"we talk of un–
employment as being serious if it rises above two percent," the
working class has largely been assimilated into the lower-middle,
the
petite bourgeoisie;
"the nation of shopkeepers" is no longer an
insult, but a truth. Hence the Labour Party found the old Socialist
principles, particularly nationalization, something of an embar–
rassment. "Leave well alone," said the electorate; and it made not
a jot of difference that the "well" was based squarely on social
