130
PARTISAN REVIEW
rise of a white-collar class: by 1976, the turning point, less than half
the adult population were manual workers. The theme of
ouevrisme
as
a strategy for a political party aiming at commanding a majority was
in doubt. And, it became increasingly apparent, the new working
class was not like its fathers. Increasingly, its members owned their
own homes (home ownership in the U.K. is at U.S. levels) and their
own cars; they had a stake in prosperity. The appeal of a fundamen–
talist party was thereby much weakened.
These factors ought to have been obvious to everyone; they
were pointed out repeatedly by American intellectuals such as
Daniel Bell, as well as by British intellectuals like the economist and
future foreign secretary Anthony Crosland. What is extraordinary is
how long they were evaded among most Left thinkers. In 1978, Eric
Hobsbaum, the
doyen
of British Marxists, published in
Marxism Today
an essay ("The Forward March of Labour Halted") that recited
these familiar facts. He seemed to convince no one on the Left; to a
man, the Marxist intellectuals ducked his challenge and carried on
for all the world as if nothing had happened .
In consequence, more and more of the debate within the Labor
Party seemed deeply puzzling to the British electorate. For example,
Labor's support for nationalization : as late as 1964, fifty-seven per–
cent of the Labor electorate supported further measures of national–
ization; in 1979, that proportion had fallen to thirty-two percent.
Not surprisingly, this shift in belief was accompanied by a decline in
Labor's proportion of the vote in the general elections. In 1951, its
peak, it won the support of forty-nine percent of electors. In 1979, it
managed just thirty-seven percent.
*
Britain 's leading psephologist,
Ivor Crewe of Essex University, said,
"If
everything went well for us
and the Tories make an unholy mess of it, I can just about see
Labour winning one more General Election ."
Given these incompatibilities, and given Labor's lack of politi–
cal success, perhaps the most pertinent question is not
why
Labor
split; it is why Labor did not split
earlier,
and why, when the split did
come, it was not deeper.
There are, I think, two main reasons for this. One is that the
•Admittedly, this decline in part reflected a fall in the share of the vote collected by
both main parties. But Paul Whitely has shown (in
The Politics of the Labour Party,
1982) that the fall was far faster for Labor than for the Conservatives.
