The Road from Billericay

By BERNARD L.EVIN MR. MORGAN PHILLIPS has been a long time up Mount Sinai, and some of the Israelites (if Mr.

Michael Foot is not a Lost Tribe, I should dearly like to know what he is) have been getting out of hand. You could hardly describe the Nationalisation of the means of Ambition, Distraction, Ugli- fication and Derision as a Golden Calf, but they have been worshipping something pretty odd these last few months, and Joshua Gaitskell must have been the most relieved man on the plain when he saw Mr. Phillips emerge from the cloud carrying a couple of large stone tablets which he has now dumped on the table, with a perceptible 'ouf.' And if its one bad blunder can be dispensed with, Labour in the Sixties (price sixpence, and at last a rest from the stridently South Bank layout and typography that Transport House recently caught up with a couple of years after everybody else had aban- doned it) might well turn out to be the way to the Promised Land.

It begins, it is true, ominously. 'Since last October,' Mr. Phillips writes, 'the Labour Party has been immersed in an internal controversy about the causes of its defeat, which has sapped its energies and damaged its morale. It is essen- tial that we should end this sterile inquest.'

Well, yes. But what Mr. Phillips does not men- tion---'I suppose he could hardly be expected to— is that the sterile inquest has now turned into a struggle for power, and that he really cannot expect those who think they see their goal—the destruction of Mr. Gaitskell—in sight to call off the hunt at Mr. Phillips's bidding. When he says, almost immediately, 'We must decide to end forthwith the fruitless reappraisal of the past and instead to face the challenge of the future' his advice is, strictly speaking, redundant. The Labour Party debate has long since turned away from the reappraisal of the past and ,faced the challenge of the future with an all too literal grimness, the challenge of the future being the challenge to Mr. Gaitskell of those who want to remove him from the leadership of the Labour Party and his ideas and policies from its pro- gramme, and then sink comfortably back into the delicious warmth of permanent minority status, going to the country every few years with a foreign policy based on Mr. Zilliacus's articles about the peace-loving Soviet Union, and a domestic policy based on the nationalisa- tion of you know what.

But, as I say, these are truths Mr. Phillips, though he knows them perfectly well, can hardly he expected to acknowledge in public. And hav- ing hurried over this awkward first yard of the ground, he makes some remarkable progress over the rest of it. His analysis of what drives the Conservative Party and its supporters is, to put it mildly, biased. but when he leaves polemic and looks at the state of the nation a little more dispassionately, he has some pertinent things to say, in particular a reminder of the extent to which the social services have been eroded over the past few years C. . we treat our old people worse than any European nation except Spain. Our family allowances, measured against their original purpose, are a farce ') When he gets on to foreign policy, he is equally one-two-three.

Having set the scene, Mr. Phillips moves his actors on to it. And there are some surprises in the cast. The decline of manual labour and the rapid increase of administrative and technical labour is something that has been going on for a long time and has been a secret to very few people. Its effect on the Labour Party itself, and the party's electoral chances, has also been widely recognised. But Mr. Phillips is very crisp indeed about this phenomenon.

Clearly the danger exists that membership of the Labour Party is gradually ceasing to be what in the past we have claimed as its greatest strength—a mirror of the nation at work. The problems and viewpoints of those engaged in ' new industries and new occupations are through lack of representation only faintly heard in the councils of the Party.

This is already a serious difficulty and it may well get worse as the new pattern of industry and employment emerges. . . .

It is not often that you hear a General Secretary of the Labour Party saying this sort• of thing, either: . . . the average age of the Labour MPs has gone up at every election since 1945, and today the average Labour MP is, at 55, seven years older than his opponent. More striking still is the fact that in the present Parliament we have only 18 MPs under 40 compared with 72 Tories, while on the other hand we have 80 MPs over 60—including 21 over 70—as com- pared with only 37 Tories.

As for . . . to large numbers of sympathetic but uncommitted people, to the youth of the '60s, to the men and women in white-collar and pro- fessional employment whom we shall wish to draw in, we must frankly recognise that the appearance of the Party is often unattractive and even repellent.

I could hardly have put it more forcibly myself, except possibly by changing 'often' to 'invari- ably' in the last line.

But then Mr. Phillips slips. 'The Parliamentary Party,' he says, discussing party unity, 'is one centre of decision-making, the National Execu- tive Committee another and the Annual Con- ference a third. Policy therefore cannot be laid down: it must be agreed.' These sentiments no doubt reflect the present state of affairs in the Labour Party—the Conference does indeed make decisions. But what counts is not who takes deci- sions—the Daily Worker is always full of pathetic little announcements saying that No. 3144 branch of the National Union of Vehicle Builders has passed a resolution saying that all American troops in Britain should be sent home immediately—but who takes the effective deci- sions. And Mr. Phillips's whole argument on this subject leaves wide open the one question that should be firmly closed: the absolute con- trol that must be finally vested, however many discussions may be had with other bodies, and however much notice may be taken of those other bodies' decisions, in the one group chosen by House of Commons. I expect more trouble in October over this paragraph of Mr. Phillips's than over the whole of the rest of his pamphlet, not excluding his admirable criticisms of the picecanthropoid attitude of too many Labour- controlled Councils. ('a morbid dislike of pub- licity,' a much wider tolerance is desirable') and his blunt insistence that Labour Party members must pay more if they wish to compete on any- thing like equal terms with the Tory Party, and his plain hint that it is high time the Party stopped regarding advertising as an invention of the Devil himself, and started to use it.

Will it work? It ought to; simultaneously with Mr. Phillips's pamphlet comes the final instal- ment of Dr. Mark Abrams's 'Why Labour has lost Elections,' in the August Socialist Commen- tary. One section of this last instalment deals with 'Prosperity and Politics,' and anyone in the Labour Party who thinks the two are un- connected ought to be a member of Victory for Socialism, and in most cases actually is. Trog's famous Spectator cartoon (already reproduced twice elsewhere without Acknowledgement. I might say) of Mr. Macmillan sitting at the Cabinet table with his colleagues—a television set, refrigerator, motor-car, washing machine— and saying 'Well, gentlemen, I think we all fought a good fight,' summed up what had come to be widely regarded, on both sides, as the 'I'm all right, Jack' election. Like all summaries. it slightly distorts the picture. Dr. Abrams's find- ings indicate that what distinguishes the working- class Conservative voter from the working-class Labour voter is not the possession of those adjuncts of the good life that Trog drew, for these are owned in almost exactly the same propor- tions by working-class voters whether they vote Conservative or Labour, or neithei. The one distinguishing element is the ownership of a house. The more likely a working-class voter is to own his own house, the more likely he is to vote Conservative.

There is nothing particularly surprising in this, except no doubt to most of the members of the Labour Party. The ownership of your own house, sneered at by the faithful in their collec- tive sneer at selfishness and greed, represents in its most tangible form the natural human desire for an immovable base, an anchor, a physical position in the community. What more natural than that people who have got that position should be increasingly reluctant to support a party that gives every sign of wanting to take it away again? The first result announced on election night was that of Billericay. Now this was properly regarded by both sides as a barometer- constituency : as goes Billericay, so goes the nation. The reason for its representative nature was the vast new housing estates in the constitu- ency: if the Labour Party could hold or capture these newly rooted, it would win. If the over- spilled settled down among the green fields and new brick and voted. Tory, the Labour Party would lose. It seemed as simple as that. and it was.

2:23:: E. L. Gardner, Con. ..

24,402 Mrs. R. A. Smythe, Lab. .. 4,822

P. M. T. Sheldon-Williams. L'ib..

Con. majority .. .. . (Con. majority 1955. 4.2061