YOUNG BRITAIN IS RADICAL Some Opinions on Post-war Planning

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 240, 28 January 1944, Page 6

YOUNG BRITAIN IS RADICAL

Some Opinions on Post-war Planning

THIS is a condensation of the first of two articles written for "Foreign Affairs" by Barbara Ward, foreign editor of the "Economist," and a well-known radio broadcaster. Both articles should be read in conjunction with the cable message from London last week announcing the introduction in the House of Commons of a Reinstatement in Civil Employment Bill which provides for compensation for servicemen who cannot be reinstated in their old jobs. For our illustrations we have used British Official Photographs issued by the Ministry of Information. GREAT majority of the young A people in Britain are in the armed forces. They are discouraged from writing to the newspapers and from speechmaking. They cannot vote in by-elections. They cannot take part in organised political work, except to stand as candidates for election. They are cut off from ordinary contacts and ordinary responsibilities by a life of strong discipline, much hard and usually unfamiliar work, interspersed with periods of very great boredom: The regular surveys of public opinion-official and private-are concentrated on the civilians. All these factors would make it difficult to be definite about youthful British opinion in the forces-which is the majority of youthful British opinion-were it not for certain changes in army education introduced in this "war, changes which are designed to "encourage free discussion and the formation of opinion among the soldiers. The experience of ABCA (Army Bureau of Current Affairs), makes it possible to speak with some certainty of young: opinion in the Army. Unfortunately, this experiment has not so far been extended to the R.A:F, Nor has it reached the Navy. Here, the chief guide to opinion is. the. unco-ordinated experience of. various Service lecturers. This obviously is more unsatisfactory, since it is the lecturers, not the men, who do most of the talking. Nevertheless, the experience of these lecturers does not differ very much from that of

ABCA, save for their report that the highest percentage of boredom and frustration-called "browned-off-ness"-in all three Services is found among the R.A.F. ground staffs, where the inevitable gulf fixed between the flying and non-flying personnel is a permanent source of dissatisfaction; and that the standard of intelligence in the Navy is remarkably high, particularly among the. technicians. The young people working outside the Forces are covered by a number of opinion-sampling operations. The British Institute of Public Opinion uses the same methods as those of the Gallup Survey. Mass Observation undertakes specialised research. Some Other Tests Apart from the direct evidence of those whose job it is to collect information about public opinion, any intelli-

gent observer can pick up a great deal of suggestive material simply by listening and looking and reading and talking. Changes of policy in newspapers obviously dictated by popular. opinion are a good guide. So are changes of outlook in public men-both politicians and soldiers-which are traceable to changed opinion among the people with whom they are in contact. The kind of books that get written and published; the questions put to the BBC "Brains Trust," the answers given, and the relative success of different "Brains Trust" performers; the most popular talks over the radio;\ the most popular films of the documentary type-all these indicate. the movements and shifts in public opinion. Obviously there are gaps and inadequacies in all the ways of collecting evidence on the state of young opinion in Britain. The remarkable fact is the unanimity revealed in all the reports, coming from whatever source. Young opinion in Britain is radical. Young people in Britain want change. They see that the times are revolutionary. They think Britain has fallen behind. They want reform and progress. They want things to be different. They are frightened at the idea of another 20 years of appeasement, and when they think it may be inevitable, they grow cynical and violent: They are in the same measure eager and responsive if something-the Beveridge Report, the victories in Libya-suggests that there are after all, new and exciting horizons ahead. There is no mistaking the mood; radicalism is the only word for it. Not Ideological Radicals I use the word. "radical" deliberately. "Left" and "Leftism" in Britain suggest an ideological approach connected with the popular Marxism of the London School of Economics and the great publishing house of Gollancz. It is true that the dominant trends of young radical opinion are to the Left, but it is all very unideological. Most ABCA officials are emphatic that the men are not Communist. Only a very small minority have active faith in any political party, and probably a considerable percentage of these (Mass Observation puts it as high as 50 per cent), are Communists. But in spite of the great advantages for propaganda which Communists enjoy due to Russia’s resistance and the universal desire for a Second Front, e number of Communists has increased very little, and their influence is still over-shadowed by the memory of

their antics in 1940 when, during Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, they were for "a People’s Peace" with Hitler. : Wartime Efficiency in Peace Given these two strong points of interest, it is easy to see why the war has had such a radical effect on young people’s minds, The standard of living of thousands of families is better, in spite of restrictions and blackout and harder work. The boys going home on leave find better food and _ brighter faces in their fully employed family circle. The young workers in the war industries have better wages and steadier work than many of them could have hoped for without a war. Steadiness and universality of employment, everybody with jobs, shipyards busy after years of decay, every productive unit producing more than ever befare, new factories going up-all this can be done in war. Why can’t it be done in peace? The ordinary citizen knows that a good steady job is the best guarantee of his living standard. If the Government can see he has one in wartime by spending so much money on guns, what is wrong with spending some of it in peacetime, too? The better wartime standard is due, too, to rationing, cheap food, controlled prices, utility goods. It seems just common sense to carry on with the milk schemes and guaranteed prices after the war. The Ministry of Food is unquestionably the most popular Ministry. People have seen that better sharing can be brought about by the State. Why not in the future, too? When the future of Britain and of the world can be saved by a group of lads in Spitfires, and when people’s homes are blown up in the night and little Johnnie next door turns out to be a hero and gets the George Cross for unexampled bravery, it is not ideology at work. It is experience. And it all points in ore direction. The conditions of the 1920’s and the 1930’s were not inevitable. They were a bad mistake. We can do better, and any interests, vested or otherwise, that try to stand in the way, have got to go. Not Eager to be "Planned" Himself There are a great many things the soldier wants to get back to as well as away from. He does not mind the idea of a planned economy, but this emphatically does not include the idea that they will plan Aim. The idea that the cure of unemployment will entail some sort of "direction" to new kinds of work is worrying a lot of workers. Again,

in the sphere of education, he wants his children to have a fair start, but is very strongly against having them sent off to State boarding schools. A majority of women war workers want to get back to their own homes. Opinions about communal feeding are very mixed. A lot are against it because "it might break up the family." There is, indeed, a lively and, among the soldiers, nostalgic desire for family life. In a recent survey of housing needs, a vast majority were emphatically against flats, and wanted detached houses and cottages with ;a bit of garden. Extreme Conservatives (who have recently set up two new propaganda organisations, "The Society of Individualists’ and "The National League of Freedom,") are using the average citizen’s distrust of bureaucracy and control in order to make the post-war world safe for their own kind of control. The point is that there exists a feeling against interference which they can hope to exploit. We must take it into account in assessing Britain’s radicalism. Problems in Priority One of the remarkable facts about the mood of the younger generation inside and outside the Forces is the similarity of the reforms they want and the degree to which their programme seems to be that of the country as a whole. It is a very long time since Britain was so much of one mind. Discussions, reports, letters, articles, all tell the same story. Ask any moderately progressive Briton, young or old, to list the reforms he would like to see incorporated in the Four Year Peace Plan (or Five or Ten), and the list would, in the main, be interchangeable. Even Mr. Churchill has been drawn into the nation’s most popular pursuit-peace planning-in spite of his vigorous preference for concentrating entirely on the war. The young people’s list is longer than Mr. Churchill’s, but it covers all his ground. A large part of it is concerned, as I said before, with living standards. As a term in general use, Social Security was almost unknown before the war. Now it is the accepted way of describing the first priority of reconstruction. This priority point is important. Everybody in Britain has been made very conscious of priorities during the war. This kind of thinking in terms of choice and priorities is gradually being extended to cover post-war economics. Are there priorities for peace? Is a decent standard of living for everyone further up the list of national priorities than luxuries for a small group

of people? If so, what techniques of control or allocation or rationing are needed to secure a decent standard, a "National Minimum," for all? It is this priority point that the Government missed completely in the Beveridge debate. People — particularly young people-did not want to be told whether or not they could afford it, They were not impressed when the Chancellor listed all the other future (continued on next ‘page)

(continued from previous page) burdens on the Budget-housing, debt armaments. They knew that the list of national needs would be long. What the Beveridge Report seemed to give them was the assurance that the National Minimum-Social Security-would be at the top, not the bottom of the list, that it would stand in the same relation to the peace effort as tanks and fighters to the war. It was not enough for the Government to accept 75 per cent of the Report. The people wanted its place fixed on the reconstruction priority list. Hence the insistence on the importance of the time factor and the agitation still going on for the setting up now of a Ministry of Social Security. Acceptable Programme Perhaps the best way to describe the reaction of young people to the problem of living standards in the post-war world is to give the analogy which Sir

William Beveridge himself is trying to popularise. The destruction of the dictators is the aim of the British War effort.. The peace effort, too, must be directed against the great common enemies of the British peoples-the Giants of Want, Disease, Idleness, Ignorance and Squalor, Against Want, the weapons are an expanding economy with good wages and sound insurance; against Disease, a National Health Service and a National Food policy; against Idleness, full employment; against Ignorance, an extended educational system open to all on a strict basis of capacity (no more "old school tie"); against Squalor, a National Housing policy, town and country planning, and national cotrol or even ownership of the land. From one end of Britain to the other, the young people would unanimously accept this as a decent programme of living standards, (To be continued)