HERE AND THERE
61
doing well enough to win support, or badly enough to lose it. The reason
was some faint stirring of a sense of social justice.
Americans may find it hard to care; from a distance our parties
are Tweedledurn and Tweedledee. Yet they do matter to us. The issue
of deterrence may
be
to a considerable extent a bogus one; the electorate
didn't pay much attention to it anyway. But the questions of steel and
land speculation are very important indeed, and the country is deeply
divided on them. And yet the strong feeling on the Left that this was
the 'one we had to win had profounder causes than these. At the mo–
ment of choice, there dawns an understanding that the Tory party
epitomizes most of what one knows to be wrong with England.
Bad weather on polling day
is
traditionally hard on Labour. In
Stockport, our nearest big town, there was morning fog, and workers
could not vote .on the way to the factories. This was bad, but continuing
rain was worse; the bulk of the socialist vote comes in the evening
be–
tween about 7: 00 and 8: 30, and in the afternoon one saw the candidates'
wives at headquarters looking anxiously out of the windows. At lunch–
time my wife was heaven knows where, driving voters, so I had a pub
lunch with Bill Webb, Literary Editor of
The Guardian,
another Stock–
port resident. With us was a young party worker with a C.N.D. back–
ground. He had heckled Home at his Stockport meeting, and been
ejected with what he considered unnecessary violence; so he asked the
official responsible for a chance to continue the argument. The man
agreed, he said, and in accordance with their arrangement our com–
panion went to Conservative headquarters for the second meeting; but
all that happened was that his opponents called the police. They–
so the allegation runs-removed him with equal briskness, as a photo–
graph in the local press is held to demonstrate. A little later,
post
or
propter hoc
one cannot speculate, the police booked all the cars stand–
ing outside Labour headquarters, and an official enquiry is now in
progress.
By seven we were ready for the final operation of flushing the
Labour vote. No rain, but a damp industrial murk, enough to make
driving a strain. My wife and I were sent to remote housing estates full
of lurking, perhaps lazy, supporters. Every door has to be knocked at,
every excuse overridden. A small fleet of cars was in action. Conversa–
tions on the way to the polling booth often suggested only a rudimentary
degree of political information, but that was less important than the
sense that there was only one way to vote. One woman said that earlier
in the day she had been struggling uphill in the rain with a load of
shopping and two kids, when a car stopped, and a lady Tory rolled
