After Leyton, What?
The Leyton by-election has passed into political history, and for a long time to come will be one of the psephologists’ favourite test-tubes.
It was also the psephologists’ nightmare, disproving all their predictions and setting the opinion polls to searching for what went wrong. This is all strongly reminiscent of the Truman victory in the United States in 1948. None of the pollsters cared to recall, after Leyton, that in 1948 they said they had found a hidden defect in their systems, that they had eliminated it and that such mistakes would not happen again.
In fact, there were signs before the votes were cast that things were not going too well for Mr. Gordon Walker. The Wilson government had not produced the promised rabbits out of the expected hats. The pensioners were annoyed about having to wait for their rise, the mortgagees were furious that their rise—in the interest rates—came upon them so quickly. On 20th. January, The Guardian’s reporter noticed “… a remarkably consistent switch away from Labour. It would not be sufficient to upset the Foreign Secretary’s anticipated election . . . but (it) would reduce his majority considerably.”
As it turned out, that was an understatement. Leyton confirmed a trend which has been developing for some time now —the trend towards an electoral mood more volatile than that which, for years after the war, stolidly returned “no change” verdicts in by-election after by-election. Orpington Man, now old and well established, has been followed by the perhaps more menacing figure of Leyton Man.
Along with the psephologists, the Labour Party are also looking for what went wrong. In a letter to The Observer, Lord Sorensen made it clear that he thought the defeat was caused by what he called “unworthy abstentions.” Having been kicked upstairs so that Mr. Gordon Walker could lose his seat, Lord Sorensen obviously feels the defeat especially strongly. But during the election, the Labour Party were content to accept what they presumed would be a favourable result: “I will consider the result a verdict on the Government and on the Opposition’s performance to date.” (Mr. Gordon Walker, at Leyton, 14th. January.) Well, the verdict is plain; even the verdict of those who voted by staying away from the polling booths. The Labour government has not been able to inspire its supporters to turn out to vote for it, which says very little for their talk, during the general election, of action and progress and urgency.
Lord Sorensen did not confine his strictures to abstainers: “… the deliberate denigration of Gordon Walker . . . demonstrates how far we have to go to ensure that electors vote on principles and policies rather than being swayed by extraneous secondary matters.”
Two things are apparent from this statement. The first is that Lord Sorensen is complaining about votes which lost his party a seat; if the election had gone the other way, he would have been full of praise for the voters’ sanity and principles. The second point, which follows from the first, is that what Lord Sorensen means by “voting on principles” is, in fact, voting blindly for the Labour Party, whatever their record, whatever hardships they impose upon the working class and however many promises they break.
It will be interesting to ask, now, what the Labour Party does to realise Sorensen’s dream of people voting on principles and policies. The first step in this should be, of course, for the Labour Party themselves to have some principles for the electors to vote on. But a look at the programmes which they have offered shows that principles are the last things the Labour Party has, or indeed wants.
What has happened, for example, to the “principle” of the nationalisation of land? To the “principle” of abolition of the House of Lords? (Lord Sorensen himself should be able to answer that one.) What has happened to the “principles” put forward by the Labour Party at the more recent elections —nationalisation of “sections of the chemical and machine tools industries” (1955) and the renationalisation of road haulage (1959)?
There was no mention of either of these in Labour’s 1964 programme, which means that any elector who was anxious to vote for them, innocently thinking them to be part of Labour’s principles, was disappointed.
Even more to the point, what has happened to the Labour Party’s opposition to the Commonwealth Immigration Act? When the Conservative government introduced the measure, Labour fought bitterly against it, and perhaps convinced some voters that they did so on grounds of principle. But since then their “principles” have, apparently, changed; the tears of defeat were hardly dry on Gordon Walker’s face when Labour’s Home Secretary Sir Frank Soskice was telling the House of Commons that, far from abolishing the restrictions on immigrants, the government intends to ” … make stricter use of the existing powers of control . . .” This must have been very confusing to anyone at Leyton who wanted to vote, as Lord Sorensen advises, on the principle of the thing.
This confusion is cleared up only by realising that the Labour Party has no principle other than their basic support of capitalism. Within that, they will support any policy, temporary or otherwise, which seems expedient. To get into power, they will promise all sorts of things—Gaitskell’s tax cuts in 1959, George Brown’s three per cent mortgage last October—which they think will attract votes. They do not particularly care who joins their ranks, recruiting freely anyone who will pay their dues. (Some prominent men they have actually invited to join.) Labour’s preoccupation with collecting votes means that they do not bother about the intention and knowledge behind the votes. They anxiously solicit the support of people who are politically ignorant. The very last thing they intend to do is to encourage the electors to vote on principles, because that would be the death of them and of the parties like them.
This is not to say that the Labour Party does not offer a substitute for principles. Their leaders are constantly making what seem to be brave statements of conviction and intent, which probably impress people who do not care to look behind the empty phrase. Wilson, for example, told the T.U.C. last September that this is “… a time for choice, for action, for decision, for exciting change …” Gordon Walker told the voters at Leyton that he stood for “… the abolition of all weapons, both nuclear and conventional, except those needed for internal security and international peacekeeping,” which is the same as saying, that he stands for the abolition of all weapons except those that he wants to keep. It is this sort of mishmash of nonsense that the Labour Party offer as their principles, and which Lord Sorensen wants us to vote on.
The inevitable result of this is that the vote which elects a Labour MP is unstable. It is not a vote for any political principle, let alone a vote for Socialism, with all that implies. Sometimes it is a vote for a set of capitalist reforms like the National Health Service or an alteration in the Pensions Scheme. More often, it is a vote for a vague and ill-informed idea of what the Labour Party stands for—a vague idea that they stand for the interests of people who live on council estates, for closer relations with Russia and so on.
Perhaps it was this which caused Leyton to pass its scathing verdict on the Labour government before it had even had time to bring in the reforms which it had promised—an apt comment on the instability of a vote which is based on a lack of political consciousness. Perhaps it also brought about the defeat of Gordon Walker at Smethwick; the voters there apparently wanted immigration control yet they rejected a man who, as he himself pointed out, stood for just that.
But an unstable vote which switches from Labour to Tory in one election will as quickly change back to Labour again. It is reasonable to assume that anything which the Labour Party may have lost on the swings of electoral instability they have gained on the roundabouts. There are probably plenty of voters who support the Labour Party because they are convinced that they stand for higher wages, or that they would pursue a different policy from the Tories in disputes like those in Malaysia and Arabia. Now if the Labour Party was as interested in political principles as Lord Sorensen would have us believe, they would discourage such votes by pointing out, firmly and clearly, that on these issues their policy is as imperialist as that of the Tories. But this, of course, is something they never do.
No capitalist party can try to destroy the mutually supporting circle of ignorance and futility which keeps one or other of them in power. Any examination of the policies of these parties, in terms of principles and effectiveness, would compel the admission that practically every one of them was useless and that many of them were inspired by vote-catching expediency. It would compel the admission that, after all the speeches and the programmes and the promises, the problems which afflicted the working class when the Labour Party was born are still, in one way or another, troubling them today.
The Labour Party would have to admit something else besides. After nearly sixty years of their propaganda, after the position of great power which they have held and still hold, there are still enough workers who harbour racial prejudices to hound a Labour Minister from one Parliamentary seat to another. Racial theories cannot be separated from the rest of the false political ideas which the working class hold, and which the Labour Party have done nothing to dispel. If it is true that racism is among the more primitive and vicious of working class delusions, that is a bitter comment upon the confusion and ignorance which the Labour Party has helped to spread.
They can have no complaint if this confusion, which may help them at one time, harms them at another. From some aspects, elections are depressing affairs, because it is never very inspiring to witness the working class opting for another dose of capitalist suppression. But even more depressing the 1964 election saw the emergence of race as an issue, strongly in some constituencies, and underlying the campaign as a whole.
Douglas-Home has now indicated that the Conservatives intend to bring immigration more and more into the forefront of political controversy. It is not comforting to reflect upon the history of similar situations, and upon the possible outcome of this one. The alarming thing about racial theories is that, unlike most other working class delusions, they are so often asserted in the most extreme and relentless violence. Leyton at the moment is a psephologist’s test tube, but who dare say that one day it will not be remembered as the start of the experiment which blew up the laboratory?
IVAN