I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction. - Aneurin Bevan

The fact must be faced that Europe will never return to the practices, conventions and principles of pre-war. There is not only political paralysis in Western Europe; there is a profound lack of confidence in conventional values; and this is true for all social classes. This is accompanied by a deep spiritual malaise arising from a prolonged hesitancy to choose between a number of proffered alternatives. It is probably true that Western Europe would have gone Socialist after the war if Soviet behaviour had not given it too grim a visage. Soviet Communism and Socialism are not yet sufficiently distinguished in many minds. The large Communist votes in Western Europe, especially in France and Italy, are evidence that millions of men and women do not believe that competitive private enterprise has any future; at least of a sort that would commend itself to them. It is extremely doubtful whether the Communist vote is a vote for Communism. It is partly a protest vote and partly a demand for Democratic Socialism after the fashion of the first five years of the British Labour Government.

Just consider, all the little nations running for shelter here and there, one running to Russia and another to the United States. In that situation before anything else would happen, the world will have been polarised between the Soviet Union and the United States. It is against that negative polarisation we have been fighting for years. We want to have the opportunity to interpose between these two giants a moderating, modifying and mitigating diplomacy.

The technical achievements of the past hundred years have produced a type of society different from any that has ever before existed, posing novel problems for mankind. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, it has changed the character of the adaptions the individual has to make to his environment. His is now a straggle with society and not with nature. The vicissitudes that now afflict him come from what he has done in association with other men, and not from a physical relationship with the forces of nature. The division of labour into which he is born weaves his own life into a series of interdependencies involving not only his own personal surroundings, but moving in everwidening circles until they encompass most parts of the earth. Modem industrial society is no longer a multiplication of a number of simple self-sufficient social groupings, each able to detach itself from the others without damage to itself. It is multicellular, not unicellular. Each part is connected as though by an infinite variety of nerves with all the others, so that separation is now a mutilation. It is similar to a physical organism, but with this difference: that it has no head and therefore no mechanism with which to receive and co-ordinate the vibrations. This is so, not only between nations, but within each nation of the laissez-faire type, because such a philosophy by its very nature rejects the propriety of an a priori principle. There is no way of saying how far such a society has realised the intentions of its architects, because there was no architect and no intention. There is only an emergent. Science works for predictability: capitalist society is profoundly unscientific. It proceeds upon no hypotheses, because that would imply an order of values.