G eoffrey Ashe’s colum n

CONSISTENCY. Is it a real virtue or not? Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” But on the other hand, if someone makes speeches or writes articles pontificating on major issues, that person’s views will carry rather more weight if they are the same as they were a year ago, five years, ten years; or, anyhow, are not the exact opposite.

A magazine like Resurgence tends to attract people of radical outlook who have shifted their ground. Very likely they once belonged to a mass movement —the Labour Party for instance, or CND. Now they don’t. Their non-membership is apt to be vociferous. If they look back over their ideological history, they may simply confess to having altered. But there can also be a more self-approving and encouraging explanation. You — supposing you to be such a person —may say: “ I’ve really wanted the same things all along. Only I was deceived into hoping that the Labour Party” (or some other movement) “would bring them. I’ve got over that and am not afraid to say so. But at heart I am consistent, even if I now attack what I once supported.” With hindsight this can be easy and comforting. Is it true, though? Can you prove it? Or if you were to turn up old pieces of writing which preserve what you actually thought a few years ago, would you, like Arthur Koestler, find them horribly ‘grinning at you’ with evidence of your own mental vagaries?

I was formerly active (not very, but somewhat) in the Labour Party myself. If I now take a Resurgence-type stance, the obvious comment might be that I’ve seen the light and undergone a conversion. Well, 1 would challenge that, on the grounds just stated. And oddly enough I can prove it. Recently I dug out an article which I once wrote for a Labour periodical, edited by a journalist who has since risen high in Fleet Street. It offered some advice to the Labour Party, then in office. I am going to reproduce most of it here. The fact that such advice was publicly offered, at that time, in the official Labour movement, may have a certain antiquarian interest. Resurgence z talk has been going on for longer than you may think. ‘At that time’: at what time, you may ask? Have patience. I prefer not to reveal, just yet, which Labour Government this was, and have cut out everything that would give the game away. None of the cuts alter the message.

Quotation begins. “The proper development of Labour policy depends on our regarding the Party, not as a dogmatic ‘socialist’ force, but as the chosen expression of British radical thought. We need to understand the characteristic malaise of Britain, and to state clearly what all the shouting and shooting has been about. Once this is done, I believe, a new Labour programme will follow naturally from the logic of our movement’s historical background . . .

“Out of fifty million inhabitants, thirty million have no visible means of nutrition. To feed the urban multitude, food has to be bought abroad. To buy the food, the aforesaid multitude has to lavish its creative skill on making excellent products which it cannot keep for itself. To make these products, in turn, raw materials have to be bought abroad. To buy the raw materials . . . however, we know the story by now. The British nation . . . has nothing to sell but its labour power; it depends for its life on the production of goods for others . . .

“ In unbalance we have the key to the situation. All the great British radicals have grappled with one problem at different stages: the Problem of the Irresponsible Plutocrat. The whole purpose of Labour is to undo the harm he has done. And it is the special achievement of the Irresponsible Plutocrat in this country that he has wrecked the balance to an unparalleled extent. He has been more irresponsible in America, more plutocratic in Spain, more evil in a number of places; but nowhere else has he perpetrated the wild paradox which is his legacy to Britain. This is no mere retrospective interpretation. It has been the complaint of social critics ever since the early Enclosures —of Thomas More, for instance, who condemned the uprooting of the peasants, and William Cobbett, who denounced the conversion of the rural craftsmen into the city wageearners.

“Nor did the unbalancing process end with the Industrial Revolution. In the 1920s, while the Irresponsible Plutocrat was fast ruining even his own urban edifice, the unhealthy drift continued. Between the wars, 300,000 farm workers left the land, and Canadian wheat, ushered into Britain by a business man’s government, reduced acre after acre'to idleness. Village life, once so full of industry and activity, completed its decay. Local powers and privileges collapsed.

“The trouble with Labour Social Democracy has always been its excessive stress on the modern aspect of the problem. Obviously the first need is to curb the Irresponsible Plutocrat and turn his industrial contraption to better uses. But William Morris at least saw further. He saw that Cobbett and More were wise in their generation. His Utopia is not a group of reformed ant-hills with wilderness between: in the future England of News from Nowhere the distinction of town and country, the concentration of power, and to a large extent the concentration of industry, have disappeared. Nowadays we have lost a great deal by forgetting Morris. We are in danger of building a centralised bureaucratic society in which the citizen will have unrivalled opportunities to do almost anything, except breathe.

“This island . . . can feed itself. By feeding itself, it can cut down its import needs, hence also its export needs . . .

“Several schemes have been put forward for making Britain more or less independent of overseas food sources. The prime necessity, however, is to decentralise, and by de-centralising to reclaim the idle land, which has been computed at 16,000,000 acres. How far this huge territory can really be used for food production remains to be seen; but the unexploited potentialities . . . are certainly enormous. The Government should make a survey in detail (which could be started at once) and propose . . . to nationalise the marginal and submarginal lands. After nationalisation, these lands should be brought into production under a Homestead Act similar to the one which opened America’s West to the pioneers. Individuals, local authorities, and societies (co-ops, for instance) should be invited to develop the land with State aid. Once in production, each new farm should revert to the people who have worked on it, subject to a guarantee of continued output. Meanwhile, acting as far as possible through ad hoc regional corporations, the Government should supply the materials for a new countryside capable of standing on its own feet —a democratic countryside of light industries, village colleges, and smallholdings ....

“This proposal is a logical growth from past Labour measures, such as the Agricultural Land Utilization Act o f 1931 . . . If some such plan is in the foreground . .. we shall make far more effective contact with the real permanent aspirations of common humanity. Further nationalisation [of industry], however good the case for it, will not rouse much enthusiasm outside the trade unions ; . . The sense of a terrible impersonal ‘They’, entrenched in the metropolis, has become overpowering. Offer people a wider vision, with the clear promise of doing something and getting somewhere, and they will rise up in hundreds of thousands. . .

“ The restoration of complete life and liberty to this half-paralytic island of ours; the ending of slavery to the foreign buyer and the American politician; the opening of a new frontier at home, a more thrillingly hopeful frontier than most of those which allure the emigrant: here and nowhere else is the proper goal of our next endeavours.”

Quotation ends. May I now disclose, with irrepressible satisfaction, that the Labour Government which I thus exhorted was not any of Harold Wilson’s, but Clement Attlee’s? The article appeared in the magazine Progress, published by the Labour Party in Windsor, on November 15th 1948. V.