A phoney war

AFTERTHOUGHT STRIX

If a war cannot be prevented from breaking out, it is normally the aim of men of goodwill to stop it spreading and to bring it to an end as quickly as possible. This truism (for it is surely that) is particularly applicable if the war is a civil war and if the men of goodwill are not only natives of the country in which it is being fought but are also in a position to influence the opinions of their compatriots.

Why is it that this code of conduct does not apply to the class war which—if it is a war at all—is certainly a civil war? The question is prompted by an article in last week's New Statesman by its editor, Mr Paul Johnson.

Mr Johnson is distressed by the low standing of the Government and the growing demoralisa- tion of its supporters. Of this unsatisfactory state of affairs he offers an interesting diagnosis. He makes no reference to errors of judgment, ad- ministrative failures, broken pledges, extrava- gance or any of the other causes to which less esoteric commentators attribute the decline in Labour's fortunes; indeed, there is nothing in his long article to suggest that the Government's deeds over the past three years have been less than admirable. Mr Wilson, in his view, has made only one mistake—he has been too decent to non-socialists; 'even now that things have gone hopelessly wrong,' writes Mr Johnson, 'he is still pursuing the mirage of the consensus, pretending that Labour is not a class party, that it can be all things to all men and can operate without antagonising powerful sec- tions of the community.'

But all is not, in Mr Johnson's view, irre- trievably lost. 'Mr Wilson and his colleagues will find no refuge in further retreat . . . Their only course now is to stand and fight, to devote the rest of this Parliament to a prolonged offen- sive against the forces of money and privilege . . . The object of the Government during the next few weeks should be to wipe the contempt off the Tories' faces and replace it with genuine fear.'

This last sentence, echoing as it so vividly does the accents of Dr Goebbels during the forma- tive years of the National Socialist party, moved me to re-read Mr Johnson's article which, taking it for ordinary tosh, I had perused with only half an eye. Against whom had the Government got to fight? What novel contingency required Parliament to abandon its normal legislative functions and concentrate its energies on perse- cuting a minority of the electors? To these ques- tions the writer, I discovered, provides clear though at times rather confusing answers.

There are two main sets of Baddies—the Tories and the rich. Of the two, internal evi- dence suggests that the rich are the more das- tardly; to Tories, 'Labour in office is constitu- tionalised crime, theft by statute,' whereas to the rich 'Labour in office is an abortion and a * It would hare been courteous, and in keeping with practice in the more advanced socialist countries such as the USSR, if Mr Johnson had here inserted a footnote pointing out that, for reasons which it would take too long to go into, these strictures do not apply to men like Lord Campbell of Eskan, Lord Walston, Mr S. Bern- stein and Mr R. Maxwell MP. blasphemy,' which sounds much more deroga- tory. Moreover, in order to prevent Labour from carrying through meaningful reforms, 'the rich will fight like animals, break the rules, lie and slander and betray their country to preserve their money and privileges—after all, that is usually how they got them in the first place';* by comparison, the gravest charge levelled against the Tories is that 'their strategy allows Labour an occasional episode in office: just enough time to entangle itself in the complexi- ties of government, not enough to resolve them.' Devilish clever and damned unfair, but hardly satanic.

Apart from the vile, traitorous rich and the sly, unscrupulous Tories there are a number of lesser villains who are 'doing all in their con- siderable power to break Labour's self-confi- dence and thus its capacity to survive.' I doubt whether 'TV interviewers, who'd been snubbed by ministers' constitute, either quantitatively or qualitatively, a serious threat to even the most topple-ripe government, and the same goes for the rather loosely defined category of 'Top Per- sons whose wives like to see them on the telly.' Surely Top Persons whose wives don't like see- ing them on the telly, or even Top Bachelors, are just as pernicious, just as capable of sabo- taging the socialist cause? But the newspapers are a more serious matter, and if Mr Johnson, who reads many more of them than I do, is right in saying that 'The vast majority of the press, national and provincial, is openly hostile, running slanted news-stories alongside veno- mous editorials,' he clearly has grounds for concern.

But what grounds has he for claiming, as he does, that virtually all the editors in the land are parties to a disreputable conspiracy? He ad- mits himself that in 1966 the Government 'ran into real trouble' and that now 'things have gone hopelessly wrong'; these quaint euphemisms cannot conceal the fact that it is the main duty of a government not to run into real trouble or to allow 'things' to go hopelessly wrong. When a government consistently fails to discharge this duty, the press would be failing in theirs if they abstained from criticism, or even watered it down. I have not myself come across any veno- mous editorials, but then I lead a sheltered life and was unaware that 'personal smear-cam- paigns against ministers are carefully orches- trated'; it would be interesting to know how this is done.

Much of Mr Johnson's article is devoted to the endemic nature of the loathing with which not only their political opponents but 'a great many people on or near the fringes of public life— some inspired by mixed motives, some by pure greed, bitterness and hatred' regard a socialist administration; and in a characteristic passage he writes 'No bibulous baronet reads his well- thumbed copy of Debrett with the same satis- faction when a Labour Prime Minister draws up the Honours List.'

In Victorian melodrama the baronetage pro- vided a high proportion of the villains, and for sentimental reasons I was glad to see one of its members, however imaginary, exposed to the hisses of the audience. But the sentence rein- forced suspicions, engendered by other passages in his article, that Mr Johnson's grasp on reali- ties is infirm. I saw that the baronet had to be bibulous; class warfare would languish if its exponents slackened in their use of opprobrium and, despicable though a baronet is per se, a stroke of the pen can make him more so by endowing him with a weakness from which, I

understand, the upper reaches of the socialist hierarchy are happily immune.

But this titled sot corresponds to the little wax image into which a witch sticks pins; the image must bear a reasonable resemblance to the original for pain to be inflicted, and I do not think that Mr Johnson's baronet fulfils this requirement. Unless Mr Johnson was employed at an early and impressionable stage of his career as a gossip-writer on a glossy magazine, I do not know where he got the idea that any- body's copy of Debrett can plausibly be de- scribed as 'well-thumbed'; nor, though all works of reference offer agreeable browsing, do I understand bow reading—and frequently re- reading—Debrett can be said to bring 'satisfac- tion,' even to a bibulous baronet. The poor oaf might, I suppose, tot up the number of entries referring to individuals whom he knew by their Christian names, or with whom he had been at school; but the glow of pleasure afforded by this exercise would surely prove transient, could not be recaptured every time he returned, decanter at elbow, to the well-thumbed pages. I do not entirely believe in Mr Johnson's baronet.

Nor, as a matter of fact, do I believe in Mr Johnson's Britain, a land in which a Labour sup- porter cannot watch Sir Alec Douglas-Home arriving at No. 10 in a ministerial car without feeling anger: a land in which men like Lord Longford and Mr Crossman are regarded by 'the people who own this country' as 'intellect- crazed public schoolmen who have betrayed their class': a land in which all the Tories are rich and all the socialists poor: a land whose rulers, with a parliamentary majority of eighty seats, have a plain duty to instil 'genuine fear' into their political opponents: a land in which, as far as I can make out, practically everyone is foaming at the mouth.

It may well be that I am wrong, and Mr Johnson right; he is in much closer touch with affairs than I am. Perhaps the class war really is being waged ferociously (but thus far, it would seem, unilaterally) throughout British society, perhaps rancour, envy, misrepresenta- tion and all the other unbecoming, debilitating features of this alleged struggle really do domin- ate our public life.

If this is so, all I can do is to refer the editor of the New Statesman back to the first two sen- tences of this article.