The nation . a unique defeat, butsimply that it is the normal opposi-tion party. The Conservative Party,Britain still being what it was, is thenormal governing party. Even thoughtwo-thirds of the working populationarc manual workers, between aquarter and a third of them havecontinued, apparently generation aftergeneration, to vote Conservative —and even solidly Labour working-class voters need more stirring actu-ally to vote than do middle-classvoters. Lor all the wild amateur so-ciological talk of the demise of work-ing-class jttitudes in Britain (havethese people ever looked at an Eng-lish i
The nation . a unique defeat, butsimply that it is the normal opposi-tion party. The Conservative Party,Britain still being what it was, is thenormal governing party. Even thoughtwo-thirds of the working populationarc manual workers, between aquarter and a third of them havecontinued, apparently generation aftergeneration, to vote Conservative —and even solidly Labour working-class voters need more stirring actu-ally to vote than do middle-classvoters. Lor all the wild amateur so-ciological talk of the demise of work-ing-class jttitudes in Britain (havethese people ever looked at an Eng-lish industrial town?), for all the real-ity of a small number of working peo-ple voting Conservative to fulfill so-cial aspirations, the Labour Partycould ignore all this completely —and could never lose — if it had isolved the old problem of the dcicr-; Tory working man and theLabour non-voter. loo many people are still underthe spell of a dogma of old Liberalideology: that two-party sysl December 10, 1960. somehow necessarily alternate—thusis freedom preserved. The belief iswidespread that continual defeat issomehow unnatural. On the contrary,it is the normal pattern of Britishpolitics — as it is in a majority ofthe states of the American , the swings of the allegedpendulum in American national pol-itics have been in generations, ratherthan decades. A party can certainlysurvive with very little hope of vic-tory; it may suffer in its recruitmentof leadership, but its popular votecan remain remarkably steady. TheLabour Partys share of the totalvote in 1959 was 44 per cent, andthis has been a remarkably constantfigure over the years. That year, aswitch of only two out of every hun-dred from Conservative to Labourwould have given a Labour major-ity. Two weeks before the election,the Gallup Poll was still showing aslim Labour majority. THERE are no real signs of a cumu-lative collapse in Labour of the last election agree thatthe Liberals (who doubl
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