From George Atkins

[p030] George Atkins The Thunderer Regrets BRITISH society is made up of a large, propertyless majority ruled over and exploited by a small rich majority. This is a fact well-known to readers of Labour Review. One of the methods, however, by which the minority maintain their power over the majority is to try to persuade the majority that it is untrue. That is why they are afraid of reality, of what they call ‘material interest’. They find it increasingly difficult to advance any kind of consistent argument for their position and that is why they are afraid of philosophical ideas, of what they call ‘doctrines’. At popular festivals such as Christmas the majority are disposed to think well of everyone and this is a favourite occasion for the minority’s sermonizing. The minority are accustomed to regarding God as their staunch friend and ally; because men used to believe that they were all equidistant from God, they would be induced to ignore the wide gaps between themselves. Regretfully the minority nowa- days recognize that the religious argument no longer carries much weight in what they call a ‘progressive and secular civil- ization’; recently they have tried to enlist sociologists into their organization but they are not certain whether or not they are really any use. Here, for example, is the cracked but authentic voice of ‘the Establishment’ pealing out uncertainly from the leader columns of The Times on Christmas Eve 1957. ‘Society is not in its nature a simple unit; it is a complex of lesser units each of which has not only its own material interests but its own consciousness expressed sometimes in a distinctive code of manners.’ This is a fairly straightforward statement. It does not take us very far. One might quarrel with the use of the word ‘consciousness’ in this context. It is accurate enough as a first description. But already the leader-writer has seen an awkward problem on his left flank which he would prefer to ignore. He brings up his tame sociologists to provide some covering fire while he tries to infiltrate. Are the ‘material interests’ of the units compatible? Will not the conceding of greater equality lead to the complete supersession of the minority’s rule? But already he is in full retreat. It is more convenient to assume that these ‘lesser units’ have not in fact got common material interests. Have not the sociologists defined the middle class as ‘those English people who regard themselves as members of the middle class’? Hope- fully he asserts that the idea of a social hierarchy in which each man has his appointed place is deeply ingrained in Eng- land (The Times is honest; it makes no pretence of any con- cern with Scotland, Ireland or Wales) and can survive ‘even the achievement of a large measure of real equality’. But what is ‘real’ equality which has nothing to do with ‘material interests’? Perhaps the sociologists have defined this too! By extension from the case of the English middle classes, the leader-writer goes on to assume that all the lesser units (it seems that he includes the proletariat among these) are merely ‘people who suppose themselves to occupy the same rung of the ladder’ and who ‘tend to come together for play’. They resemble one another in dress, speech and behaviour; but, again he reassures himself, these things are not after all important, they are like the code signs of children’s gangs. Still whistling manfully, he goes on to claim that these marks of distinction (i.e., between the ruling minority and the subject majority) are ‘innocent’. That is to say, they are not consciously directed towards the overthrow of the minority’s rule. They are even ‘salutary’ (they positively help to maintain that rule). Here panic enters the mind of the leader-writer. In a wild mixture of metaphors we learn that sectional allegiances are the ‘cement’ of society when they are ‘purely cultural in the broadest sense of the word’, what- ever this may mean. But when these same allegiances cease merely to be ‘cement’ and begin to acquire the status of edifices with ‘material or doctrinal foundations’ (read here ‘real’ and ‘philosophical’) they tend to destroy society. What on earth is the poor old Thunderer worried about? The vague awareness of not being liked is beginning to trouble the ‘Establishment’, it seems. Some rude people have been writing frivolous books in which the marks of ‘upper class > origin’ are satirized. The ‘simple-minded’ have been reading 27

[p031] LABOUR REVIEW these books and they are no longer impzessed with the moral, cultural and social superiority of their betters. Even though the proletariat has no ‘material or doctrinal’ foundation for its existence, it has the ill-bred presumption to be ‘sincerely convinced of its own moral superiority’. May not this be the beginning of the end for the minority? May there not come a time when the proletariat will establish its physical superiority also? Perish the thought! The leader-writer of The Times (can it have been Sir William Haley himself preaching this Christ- mas sermon?) looks back, not ‘in anger’, but with regret to the days when the ‘simple-minded’ still had a sense of duty, when they touched their caps to the squire and his relations and kept their proper stations. January-February 1958 The two elements which help to maintain the hierarchical. society are ‘a sense of duty’ and ‘pride’. The ‘simple-minded’ have lost the former, unfortunately, and the latter has swollen to alarming proportions. How can they be persuaded to re- cognize something which is ‘honest and of good report’ in whatever setting they find it, i.e., among the upper class? Coming so soon after the Bank Rate Tribunal this is what the Americans call ‘a good question’. And the poor old lady of Printing House Square knows that there is no real answer to it. So after all, perhaps there is no substitute for religion, ‘a common dependence on God’s mercy’ as a unifying force in society. Or perhaps someone has told her about the pro- letariat and its historical function. Leeds