May 14th 1955
About Politics
The general election is close at hand and I think it important that I should say something about politics – or rather about what lies behind politics. As enthusiasm mounts there will be a strong tendency to treat the contest just as we treated the struggle between Newcastle United and Manchester City. But the election is a very different issue and the consequences of the decision going one way or the other will be felt for years to come and perhaps throughout the world.
In thinking what I should say I watned (sic) to give some sort of guidance, but I found it very difficult to be unbiased. Eventually I had to give up the attempt, and I decided to tell you just what I believe, how I have come to feel and vote as I do, leaving you free, I hope, to accept or rejrect (sic) my position. I think I can fairly safely say that in a school of this sort the pupils do not have the sort of reverence for the Headmaster that will make them accept without question what he says. Indeed I think it just as likely that you will take the opposite point of view just to make certain for yourselves that I am not “putting it across you”. So here goes.
I have grown up with the Labour Party. Roughly speaking it is about the same age as I am – that is, if we think of the period in which it has become a significant Parliamentary force. But my family were not at first Labour voters – we were Liberals. In the first election that I can remember we had a Liberal poster in our front window. It has to be remembered that what the Liberal speaker said the other night – in the middle of an otherwise unimpressive speech – about the Liberal party having been responsible for the initiation of most of our social services – is quite true. There are certain very old people who still speak of being on the unemployment benefit as being “on the Lloyd George”. But when the Liberal party began to wane in its power and it was clear to us that the Labour party was becoming the true representative of the poorer section of the community, then my father began to vote Labour.
I have just remembered another incident; I think it was in the middle twenties, when I was teaching at a country grammar school. I went to a Conservative meeting and after the speaker had finished I raised the question of the action of the government in replacing Labour Boards of Guardians who were considered to be overspending (it is difficult to remember exactly, but I think some special legislation was put through in Parliamnet to make this possible). The Guardians, who were responsible for the care of the impoverished and unemployed in their various districts had arranged for the issue of free milk to expectant mothers and babies. The Government committee which ousted the democratically appointed Guardians, had suspended (sic) this issue in Bethnal Green and I asked the speaker whether he was aware of the fact that the death rate among mothers and babies had gone up after this ( it was a statistical fact) and was not this a very serious matter. As it happened I was an expectant father at the time, so it was much on my mind! The speaker, a very smooth barrister with a pronounced Oxford accent, immediately charged me with accusing the Government nominees of being murderers. I was furious at this twist of what I had said and protested vehemently. Almost the whole of the audience turned round on Frances and myself with contemptuous dislike in their eyes.
Nearly all of the Governors of the grammar school were on the Conservative platform. Next day the angry frightened Headmaster told me I ought not to have gone to the meeting and that I certainly ought not to have voiced any criticism – for he would be hauled over the coals for having active Labour supporters on the staff. You can imagine that I did not take this lying down, but stood up for my rights as a citizen of a “free” country.
We must avoid getting caught in highly emotional situations, such as are created by electioneering tricks, and we must be careful not to let our discrimination and intelligence be undermined by the genial candidate who makes us feel that we are all good fellows standing up for the good old party, what! We must never forget, too, that ultimately politics must serve the ordinary man and woman, and we must therefore never let the discussion of policy get too far up in the air.
Thus where religion impinge on politics. How often one used to hear it said that you must keep your religion out of politics and politics out of religion. This was very freely said by those who held power and feared that to put the Sermon on the Mount into practice would cut at the very root of power and the profit motive. It has to be remembered that Socialism sprang from Christian convictions, that it had its roots, not in Russia, but in nineteenth century England, among generous and sensitive people who could not bear that the sufferings of the poorest in the community should continue. This is not a matter of opinion but of historical truth, though of course it is true also that power seekers, haters and bitter-minded people have so to speak “cashed in” on Socialism. But putting that aside, there surely can be no doubt that all our politics must be put to the test of religious feeling and principle. What is religion if it does not claim the whole of our life?
Love is the root-principle of Christianity, and people in their smallest groupings are held together by love – the family for instance. But there is another principle indissolubly bound up with it – the principle of justice. Jesus said “Love one another”, but he also said “do unto others as ye would they should do unto you”. You cannot obey the first command if you do not practice the second. A mother cannot make up If a mother persistently gives one child more jam than another, she cannot make up for it by giving the deprived child what appears to be love instead. The bigger a group becomes the less it is possible to express love and the more important it becomes to ensure justice. People cannot love one another in the mass, but they can, if they will, so arrange the life of the mass as to ensure the maximum of justice. During the last 150 years there has been a terrible battle for justice – justice for the underdog – and there is still in our social and industrial system a great deal of injustice; not injustice that is necessarily desired or imposed but is an ineviatable (sic) result of the system or of some demand that we cling to, such as “freedom of enterprise”, which may mean freedom for some and a sort of slavery for others. Admittedly many of those who hold industrial or financial power have made friendly overtures to their employees, arranged for all sorts of welfare work, in other words tried to make possible some sort of “love” between those who are usually regarded as inevitably enemies. But this “love” cannot be real unless in every possible way justice is done to those who have no privilege or power – and this must be done first before love can have any sincerity in it.
Now these considerations make me want, in political thinking, to examine every part of the structure of society to see whether there is still justice to be done, to see whether there is anything in the structure that inevitably prevents it.
To know whether a policy is just, you must think in terms of individuals, ask what they enjoy or suffer, in what sense they are free or un-free. If they suffer, you must trace the suffering to its origin. We had to do this in connection with the appalling unemployment of the ‘thirties, and many people then for the first time realised that capitalism and private enterprise could never again be left uncontrolled to go through the alternation of boom and slump with the consequent terrible degradation of masses of people.
Take a smaller example. How shall I decide whether to support nationalisation of road haulage? On economic grounds! No. I am concerned primarily with the man who drives the lorry and I must ask which is the better system for him. Under what system will the brakes be better kept in order, under what system will the accident rate be diminished, under what system will the regulations controlling hours of work (to prevent tiredness) be more observed? The answer was in the Manchester Guardian the other day. You should look for it.
Now for an example of nationalisation of a quite different sort. Ought all education to be nationalised – that is run entirely under the control of the state? Quite a number of Labour Party members think so. But are they thinking of the individual child as I was thinking of the lorry driver – or of the individual school? No – I think they are thinking far too much in terms of ideas and plans, and this thrusts me into a difficult position. The Labour Party would perhaps spend more on education than would the Conservatives, build schools faster; but they might by the crude application of a doubtful principle destroy something valuable in education, something that we are trying above all to preserve in this school. Incidentally it is something which if widespread in the community make a wholesome socialism possible, because it cuts at the root of class-distinctions and power-seeking.
Now for another very important point. The impulse to love and to give justice are generous impulses, the opposite of self-seeking. They involve the thinking of others before ourselves. Generosity, in public life as weel (sic) as in private, is an absolute necessity if that life is to be wholesome. But it is the most difficult thing to make sure of in mass-movements and in politics. The more people mass together the more likely it is that self-seeking will be what is expressed. I can’t go very deeply into this matter at present, but I can suggest that people should not be led astray at election times when parties appeal to motives that are essentially selfish. The offer of prosperity is one of the familiar baits. I find the suggestion that this country should try to double its standard of living in the next 25 years is quite shocking in view of the needs of the world as a whole. What right have we to set that as a target when hundreds of millions of the world’s people are miserably poor, undernourished and ill housed? It is an immoral intention and an immoral appeal. We should be thinking what we could do for other peoples than our own; but only Sir Richard Acland, now an Independent Labour candidate fighting a lone battle against the manufacture of the Hydrogen bomb, dares to say that we should devote any of our resources to backward countries. In the end the great nations of the world will pay a heavy price for their neglect of those who are in need. Already in a way they are paying for it – for the ill-fed and backward peoples are turning towards communism.
This reference to the appeal to self-interest leads me to another related point. It is never right to judge a political issue primarily on economic grounds; that is to say that we should not try to decide between the parties by considering which party will pursue the policy that is most likely to lead to prosperity. For one thing none of us knows enough about economics. Even the most expert, the most learned in the so-called science of economics cannot agree, so what hope have we amateurs of making a wise judgement? Theorists used to talk about “economic man” but they are less inclined to do so nowadays. On this theory of economic man, which supposed that man in the mass was necessarily entirely self-seeking and grasping, they based supposedly inexorable economic laws, and it was supposed that we could not fly in the face of such laws without meeting disaster. Economics was thus made to come before politics. But many of us who were forced to think furiously about such questions in the period between the world wars, when Communism and Fascism were rising in the world, came strongly to the conclusion that politics must come before economics – that is to say that we must decide what is to be the structure of our society, what are to be the motives and desires behind its organisation, and then, afterwards, fit our economics to the structure. If we think otherwise we shall be the powerless victims of mass-selfishness, but if we put our politics first we shall be forced to think what is right and good, instead of thinking what will pay. “You must serve God or money; you cannot serve both.” is just as true of the life of a nation as it is of the life of a single man.
So I say that in our political judgements at election we must look for the party that has the more constructive and generous attitude to world needs, the party that is more likely to put some new quality into international affairs that will rescue them from the mess of hostility, fear, distrust and deception that they have been in so long, and that will give the backward peoples of the earth a feeling that they are not forgotten by those who have cornered the world’s riches. Britain, which is not so deeply involved in the business of grab-what-you-can-and-devil-take-the-hindmost, as are certain other nations; might yet give a moral lead to the world.
I seen (sic) no sign of a move in this direction by the Conservative Party, and hardly any in the Labour Party – in the Labour Party as a whole. And over certain other international matters I see little difference, for instance, the matter of the manufacture of the Hydrogen Bomb and the re-armament of Germany. Both of these I find impossible to tolerate. But there is still a difference between the parties. Whereas the Conservative Party seems united about these and most other matters of foreign policy, the Labour Party is not united. The Labour party has a rebel group and is much more disunited than it allows the voters to think. I shall vote Labour precisely because it is disunited. Does that seem queer? You will be told that what we want is a strong united party in charge speaking with one voice. Not for me! I prefer a party that is disturbed in its conscience, that in fact recognises that there is a serious moral issue involved to one that does not recognise that there is an issue. Where there is a conscience – a still small voice, however small, - there is more prospect of moral health.
I’m not thinking of Mr Bevan, for whom, I’m afraid I have no great respect, but of the considerable group of sensitive and thoughtful people that has always existed in the L.P., a group that does its best to observe party discipline but is never quite silent and never lets the party get away with opportunism. I can’t help remebering (sic) that the Labour Party has always had to tolerate and respect the pacifist elements among its numbers, and has always been willing to have pacifists among its candidates – a thing the Conservatives could never face.
There are often quite deeply rooted reasons fo the choices that people make in politics – reasons that go much deeper than the political issues of the moment, reasons that go far back into the past. I think this was true in the case of my family. We had no ties with the middle or upper classes. On both sides of the family we came from the very poor: on one side from agricultural labourers in Wessex, kin to the Tolpuddle martyrs who were deported in the eighteen-thirties for asking for more wages, on the other side from Highland crofters who were driven out of their tiny crofts by aristocratic English landlords. We detested snobbery and were always on the side of the underdog. We hated the tendencies we saw – as soon as we moved out of a slummy area into a tolerably decent house – on the part of our neighbours to suck up to people who had some money or social position. I remember how, in one of the first elections after the first World War, the conservative candidate, a man whose only qualification for parliament was that he was a Lord and a racing motorist, used to come round the streets in a most magnificent Rolls Royce. This had a very powerful effect on snobbish neighbours, who seemed to imagine that a vote for such a man put them almost into the category of Rolls Royce owners.
We, on the other hand, found ourselves in a minority of people who were not quite respectable. In the Labour Party there were plenty of people with loud and rough voices, and isn’t easy to assume that people whose voices are loud and rough are somehow inferior? There were also people who were unusually thoughtful and sensitive, people who were deeply concerned about the ethical or Christian approach to politics. It was a curious mixture, but in this mixture I found a great deal of sincerity, and a passion for justice. All this contrasted very favourably – I must say this – with easy assumptions, the smooth polished manners of the Tories I met, manners that I found could break down behind the scenes into appalling unscrupulousness. Remember that I am speaking about the Tories as I knew them thirty years ago. There was one truly shocking bit of unscrupulousness in one of the elections that returned a Conservative majority under Stanley Baldwin. On the very last day before the poll the text was published of what was called the Zinovieff letter; I forget the detail of this letter but it indicated that the Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution were backing the Labour Party in this country. There was no time for the Labour Party to deny this before the poll and it swept a great many frightened people into the Tory camp. A few years later, after someone had done some detective work, Mr. Baldwin was forced to admit in Parliament that he got this letter from a business man in London called Mr. Im Thurn and he knew it was a forgery. This was the sort of thing that pushed me further and further to the left in politics.
In the early days the Labour Party had a large number of people in its ranks who were either pacifists or at least deeply concerned to get rid of the curse of war. At that time the Conservatives were still strongly imperialist and were quick to charge us with being “anti-British”. I remember how at meetings, when we tried to raise the issue of war and disarmament we were drowned by our opponents singing “Land of Hope and Glory”.
Times and policies have changed in the last thirty years. As the Labour Party has grown in power it has compromised. I am not blaming it for this; it was inevitable. When small it had to appeal to the deeply convinced, those who were tough enough to fight as a little minority. Now, when it is touch and go at elections, when the marginal vote must be caught, the L.P. has to assure the middle-class voter that its policies will be good for him too, has to prove to the shopkeeper and the small business man that its socialism is not aimed at the liquidation of their little ventures. As time goes on there is less appeal to rock-bottom principle. Now it is true that many business men support the Labour Party, and a very large number of the most intelligent professional people. Eton and Harrow are well represented on the Labour benches, and there are, I believe, more university graduates on that side than on the Conservative side.
In the meantime the Conservative Party has also had to modify itself greatly. Whereas once it sneered at those who were strongly anti-war and was all too ready to call them anti-British, it must now be anti-war at least in outward intention because war has become so obviously a menace to the whole of the world. It must be in favour of the social services that it was once reluctant to accept, because it has been shown that a modern highly complex state cannot work without them. It must provide – or try to provide - equal educational opportunity for all in spite of the fact that traditionally most of its strongest supporters came from the so-called Public Schools of the Eton and Harrow tradition type.
The result of this is now that there seems to be little choice between the parties, and I have never felt so much as I do now how, in face of the really desperate issues in world politics, how little difference there is between them. I feel almost disfranchised. Nevertheless, we must never expect in politics to find anything completely to our liking, and however small the difference may seem, we must make a choice. Where shall we begin? Are there any considerations that we ought to thrust on one side? Yes; here are some of them. Irrelevant things that have nothing to do with the real issues. Some people – certainly some women – actually decide on the basis of whether the candidate is handsome or not, in other words whether he has sex-appeal. We have actually heard nurses make a decision on this basis. But equally irrelevant are the many other subtle things associated with accent, manner, charm of personality. It is still true that the Conservative candidates have more self-assurance on the whole, because they are often chosen from among the socially or financially “successful” people, whereas Labour candidates are often people who have had to struggle against difficult conditions and bear the marks of struggle in their faces and habits of speech. What has to be sought for is sincerity – and to find this we have to go deep down below appearances. A thoughtful manner and a willingness to admit mistakes or faults is a far better sign than a tendency to be always “right”.
I think too of the fact that there is quite a number of members of the Society of Friends among the Labour candidates, wheras (sic) there is only one among the Conservatives, and that one, as far as I know, has no reputation in the Society for outstanding Quakerism.
So, you see, I shall vote Labour in the hope – though not with much expectation – that we shall have a Labour Government in which a vigorous minority of Labour members will be active in their advocacy of the things I care about. If a Conservative government is elected, there will be no none (sic) among its supporters, as far as I can see, who will urge the things that matter to me. It is a curious position to be in.
I hope I have not taken unfair advantage of my position as Headmaster to put before you my political judgements in a Sunday evening talk. But you must admit that I am no enthusiastic partisan, trying to work up enthusiasm instead of asking you to think carefully. I have voiced my own bewilderment as a voter, and there must be many like me who wish there was another party for whom they could vote with whole hearts and greater confidence. But we can never expect to have such an ideal where parties and governments are concerned.
Archive reference PP/KCB 3/7/3 document 20