The More Things Change...

I'm re-reading Daniel Martin, by John Fowles. This passage, a quote from a character who is a Conservative Member of Parliament, struck me.

"I think that the notion that we shall all obediently queue up for a place in the Marxist paradise is based on a fallacy about the British. Of course we're very good at enjoying deprivation when faced with a Hitler - an external threat. My own guess is that we shall lose our sangfroid when it is imposed from inside. It will suddenly dawn on countless people, and by no menas just on middle-class liberals like yourself, that they've been flagrantly led up the garden path. I have no doubt they will be extremely frustrated and very angry. And at the same time they will by then be faced with a very considerable apparatus of state repression of dissidence. I rather doubt if the ethos of the cricket-field will see us through that."

The book is copyright 1977.