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A. ALVAREZ
amenities, such as Nationalized Medicine, that would still be pipe
dreams if Labour had not been elected in 1945. It was John Wain
who remarked that one of the more eerie features of the campaign
was that Macmillan's slogan, "You've never had it so good," was
an Americanism. Eerie but significant; for the old class structure
based on instinctual and inherited differences, so much beloved by
American critics of the European novel, has given way to an
American class system based on money.
All this would
be
very much to the good if money were not
quite as effective a snob-agent as class. For example, on Election
Day I was ferrying voters to the polls from the trailer park outside
the town. The place could hardly have been grimmer: gloomy,
rutted fields with the trailers ranged round their edges, mud paths,
no amenities, and, as I said earlier, grotesquely high rents. Yet
wherever the trailers were lusher than average or had been
re–
placed by miserable, but permanent little bungalows, there were
Conservative posters stuck in the windows. Apparently the tiniest
step up the financial ladder made the voters want to range them–
selves alongside Money, Big Business, Class and the mysteries of
High Finance-no matter whether or not they were cutting their
own political throats by doing so.
In the face of all this, Labour's strongest appeal was, I
think,
moral. For there, despite the prosperity, the Tories had left them–
selves painfully open. They had resisted the most passionately felt
popular cause: the banning of nuclear weapons and tests. The Rent
Act had caused a considerable amount of suffering for people
forced out of their homes by doubled or even trebled rents. The
building of schools, hospitals and roads was hopelessly inadequate.
Their refusal to levy a capital gains tax-which the States, I be–
lieve, has had since the 'twenties-opened the way for some extra–
ordinarily questionable take-over bids. The largely Conservative
Devlin Commission had
flailed
their policy in Central Africa (per–
haps it was another token of Americanization that the minister
responsible did not resign when the Commission's report was made
public). They had mismanaged Cyprus and given the language
two new four-letter words: Suez and Hola. And so on.
