3 January 1943

Dear Editors,

It is just on two years since I wrote you my first letter. I wrote that one to the tune of A.A. guns, when we were in desperate straits and also on what appeared to be the edge of rapid political advance. I begin this one at a time when the military situation is enormously better but the political outlook is blacker than it has ever been. My last letter but one, which I wrote in May of this year, you headed on your own initiative ‘The British Crisis’. Well, that crisis is over and the forces of reaction have won hands down. Churchill is firm in the saddle again, Cripps has flung away his chances, no other left-wing leader or movement has appeared, and what is more important, it is hard to see how any revolutionary situation can recur till the western end of the war is finished. We have had two opportunities, Dunkirk and Singapore, and we took neither. Before trying to predict the consequences of this, let me sketch out the main tendencies of this year as I see them.

Although the individual incidents don’t fit in so neatly as they might, the rule has held good that the Government moves to the right in moments of success and to the Left in moments of disaster. Collapse in the Far East – Cripps taken into the Government, Cripps’s mission to India (this was probably so framed as to make sure that it should not be accepted, but was at least a big concession to popular feeling in this country). American victories in the Pacific, German failure to reach Alexandria – Indian Congress leaders arrested. British victory in Egypt, American invasion of North Africa – tie-up with Darlan and fresh bum-kissing for Franco. But over the whole year – indeed I have mentioned it in earlier letters – there has been visible a steady growth of blimpishness and a more conscious elbowing-out of the ‘reds’ who were useful when morale needed pepping up but can now be dispensed with. The sudden sacking of Cripps merely symbolizes a process which is occurring all over the place. Apart from the general rightward swing there have been two other developments which seem to be significant. One is the Second Front agitation, which reached its peak about July and thereafter took on a more definitely political colour than before. The North African campaign has temporarily silenced the clamour for a Second Front, but in the preceding months the controversy had not really been a military one but was a struggle between pro-Russians and anti-Russians. The other development is the growth of anti-American feeling, together with increased American control over British policy. The popular attitude towards America has I believe changed in the last few months, and I will return to this in a moment. Meanwhile the growing suspicion that we may all have underrated the strength of capitalism and that the Right may, after all, be able to win the war off its own bat without resorting to any radical change, is very depressing to anyone who thinks. Cynicism about ‘after the war’ is widespread, and the ‘we’re all in it together’ feeling of 1940 has faded away. The great political topic of the last few weeks has been the Beveridge Report on Social Security. People seem to feel that this very moderate measure of reform is almost too good to be true. Except for the tiny interested minority, everyone is pro-Beveridge – including left-wing papers which a few years ago would have denounced such a scheme as semi-Fascist – and at the same time no one believes that Beveridge’s plan will actually be adopted. The usual opinion is that ‘they’ (the Government) will make a pretence of accepting the Beveridge Report and then simply let it drop. The sense of impotence seems to be growing and is reflected in the lower and lower voting figures at by-elections. The last public demonstrations of any magnitude were those demanding a Second Front in the late summer. No demonstrations against the Darlan deal, though disapproval of it was almost general; nor over the India business, though, again, popular feeling is pro-Congress. The extreme Left still tends to be defeatist, except as regards the Russian front, and at each stage of the African campaign its press has clung almost desperately to a pessimistic interpretation of events. I think it is worth noting that the military experts favoured by the Left are all of them defeatist, and haven’t suffered in reputation when their gloomy prophecies are falsified, any more than the cheery optimists favoured by the Right. However, this comes partly from jealousy and ‘opposition mentality’: few people now really believe in a German victory. As to the real moral of the last three years – that the Right has more guts and ability than the Left – no one will face up to it.

Now a word about Anglo-American relations. In an earlier letter I tried to indicate very briefly the various currents of pro- and anti-American feeling in this country. Since then there has been an obvious growth of animosity against America, and this now extends to people who were previously pro-American, such as the literary intelligentsia. It is important to realize that for about fifteen years Britain has differed from most countries in having no nationalist intelligentsia worth speaking of. The average English intellectual is anti-British, and though chiefly worshipping the U.S.S.R. has also tended to look on America as being not only more efficient and up-to-date than Britain, but more genuinely democratic. During the period 1935–9 the Left intelligentsia were taken in to a surprising extent by the ‘anti-Fascist’ antics in which so many American newspapers indulged. There was also a tendency to crouch culturally towards America and urge the superiority of the American language and even the American accent. This attitude is changing, however, as it begins to be grasped that the U.S.A. is potentially imperialist and politically a long way behind Britain. A favourite saying nowadays is that whereas Chamberlain appeased Germany, Churchill appeases America. It is, indeed, obvious enough that the British ruling class is being propped up by American arms, and may thereby get a new lease of life it would not otherwise have had. People now blame the U.S.A. for every reactionary move, more even than is justified. For instance, even quite well-informed people believed the Darlan job to have been ‘put over’ by the Americans without our knowledge, though in fact the British Government must have been privy to it.

There is also widespread anti-American feeling among the working class, thanks to the presence of the American soldiers, and, I believe, very bitter anti-British feeling among the soldiers themselves. I have to speak here on second-hand evidence, because it is almost impossible to make contact with an American soldier. They are to be seen everywhere in the streets, but they don’t go to the ordinary pubs, and even in the hotels and cocktail bars which they do frequent they keep by themselves and hardly answer if spoken to. American civilians who are in contact with them say that apart from the normal grumbling about the food, the climate, etc., they complain of being inhospitably treated and of having to pay for their amusements, and are disgusted by the dinginess, the old-fashionedness and the general poverty of life in England. Certainly it cannot be pleasant to be suddenly transferred from the comforts of American civilization to some smoky and rainy Midland town, battered by three years of war and short of every kind of consumption goods. I doubt, however, whether the average American would find England tolerable even in peacetime. The cultural differences are very deep, perhaps irreconcilable, and the Americans obviously have the profoundest contempt for England, rather like the contempt which the ordinary lowbrow Englishman has for the Latin races. All who are in contact with the American troops report them as saying that this is ‘their’ war, they have done all the fighting in it, the British are no good at anything except running away, etc. The lack of contact between the Americans and the locals is startling. It is now more than eight months since the first American troops arrived, and I have not yet seen a British soldier and an American soldier together. Officers very occasionally, soldiers never. The early good impression which the American troops made on the women seems to have worn off. One never sees them except with tarts or near-tarts, and the same thing is reported from most parts of the country. Relations are said to be better in Scotland, however, where the people are certainly more hospitable than in England. Also, people seem to prefer the Negroes to the white Americans.

If you ask people why they dislike Americans, you get first of all the answer that they are ‘always boasting’ and then come upon a more solid grievance in the matter of the soldiers’ pay and food. An American private soldier gets ten shillings a day and all found, which – with wages and income tax as they now are – means that the whole American army is financially in the middle class, and fairly high up in it. As to the food, I do not imagine that people would resent the troops being better fed than civilians, since the British army is also better fed, so far as the ingredients of food go, but the Americans are given foodstuffs otherwise reserved for children, and also imported luxuries which obviously waste shipping space. They are even importing beer, since they will not drink English beer. People point out with some bitterness that sailors have to be drowned in bringing this stuff across. You can imagine also the petty jealousies centring round the fact that American officers monopolize all the taxis, drink up all the whisky and have inflated the rents of furnished rooms to unheard-of levels. The usual comment is ‘I wouldn’t mind if they were fighting, not just talking.’ This is said out of spite, but it is a fact that the attitude will change deeply if and when the American army is engaged in Europe. At present the parallel with our own relations with Europe during the phony war is all too obvious.

Whether this state of affairs could be altered by better propaganda methods is disputable. I note that people newly returned from the U.S.A. or with knowledge of conditions there, especially Canadians, are concerned about Anglo-American relations and very anxious that the British war effort should be more loudly boosted in the U.S.A. Britain’s propaganda problems, however, are more complex than most people realize. To take one example, it is politically necessary to flatter the Dominions, which involves playing down the British. As a result the Germans are able to say plausibly that Britain’s fighting is done for her by colonial troops, but this is held to be lesser evil than offending the Australians, who are only very loosely attached to the Empire and culturally hostile to Britain. This dilemma presents itself over and over again, in endless variations. As to America, some propagandists actually hold that it is better for the Americans to be anti-British, as this gives them a good opinion of themselves and ‘keeps their morale up’. Others are dismayed because we are represented in America by people like Lord Halifax – who, it is feared, may be taken for a typical Englishman. The usual line is ‘Why can’t we send over a few working men from Wigan or Bradford to show them we’re ordinary decent people like themselves?’ This seems to me sentimentality. It is true, of course, that Lord Halifax is just about as representative of Britain as a Red Indian chieftain is of the United States, but the theory that the common people of all nations love each other at sight is not backed up by experience. The common people nearly everywhere are xenophobe, because they cannot accustom themselves to foreign food and foreign habits. Holding left-wing opinions makes no difference to this, a fact which impressed itself on me in the Spanish Civil War. The popular goodwill towards the U.S.S.R. in this country partly depends on the fact that few Englishmen have ever seen a Russian. And one has only to look round the English-speaking world, with its labyrinth of cultural hatreds, to see that speaking the same language is no guarantee of friendship.

Whatever happens, Britain will not go the way that France went, and the growing animosity between British and Americans may not have any real importance till the war is over. But it might have a direct influence on events if – as is now widely expected – Germany is defeated some time in 1943 or 1944 and it then takes about two more years to settle Japan. In that case the war against Japan might quite easily be represented as ‘an American war’, a more plausible variant of ‘a Jewish war’. The masses in Britain have it fixed in their minds that Hitler is the enemy, and it is quite common to hear soldiers say ‘I’m packing up as soon as Germany is finished.’ That doesn’t mean that they genuinely intend or would be able to do this, and I think in practice majority opinion would be for staying in the war, unless by that time Russia had changed sides again. But the question ‘What are we fighting for?’ is bound to come up in a sharper form when Germany is knocked out, and there are pro-Japanese elements in this country which might be clever enough to make use of popular war weariness. From the point of view of the man in the street the war in the Far East is a war for the rubber companies and the Americans, and in that context American unpopularity might be important. The British ruling class has never stated its real war aims, which happen to be unmentionable, and so long as things went badly Britain was driven part of the way towards a revolutionary strategy. There was always the possibility, therefore, of democratizing the war without losing it in the process. Now, however, the tide begins to turn and immediately the dreary world which the American millionaires and their British hangers-on intend to impose upon us begins to take shape. The British people, in the mass, don’t want such a world, and might say so fairly vigorously when the Nazis are out of the way. What they want, so far as they formulate their thoughts at all, is some kind of United States of Europe dominated by a close alliance between Britain and the U.S.S.R. Sentimentally, the majority of people in this world would far rather be in a tie-up with Russia than with America, and it is possible to imagine situations in which the popular cause would become the anti-American cause. There were signs of this alignment in the reactions to the Darlan business. Whether any leader or party capable of giving a voice to these tendencies will arise even when Hitler is gone and Europe is in turmoil, I do not know. None is visible at this moment, and the reactionaries are tightening their grip everywhere. But one can at least foresee at what point a radical change will again become possible.

There is not much more news. Another Fascist party has started up, the British National Party. It is the usual stuff – anti-Bolshevik, anti-Big Business, etc. These people have got hold of some money from somewhere but do not appear to have a serious following. The Common Wealth people have quarrelled and split, but the main group is probably making headway. There have been further signs of the growth of a left-wing faction in the Church of England, which has had tendencies in this direction for some years past. These centre not, as one might expect, in the ‘modernists’ but in the Anglo-Catholics, dogmatically the extreme ‘right wing’ of the Church. The Church Times, which is more or less the official paper of the C. of E. (enormous circulation in country vicarages), has for some years past been a mildly left-wing paper and politically quite intelligent. Parts of the Roman Catholic press have gone more markedly pro-Fascist since the Darlan affair. There is evidently a split in the Catholic intelligentsia over the whole question of Fascism, and they have been attacking one another in public in a way they usually avoid doing. There is still antisemitism, but no sign that it is growing. Our food is much as usual. The Christmas puddings, my clue to the shipping situation, were about the same colour as last year. It is getting hard to live with prices and taxes as they now are, and what between long working hours and then fire-watching, the Home Guard, A.R.P. or what-not, one seems to have less and less spare time, especially as all journeys now are slow and uncomfortable. Good luck for 1943.