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Practical Socialism for Britain
Hugh Dalton
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Practical Socialism for Britain
Hugh Dalton
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About This Book
First published in 1935, Practical Socialism for Britain presents an assessment of the Labour government's policy options and aggressively advocates for socialism Britain's panacea. Citing apathy and panic-mongering as the greatest enemies of the Labour Party, the author asserts that the Labour Party can restore meaning and sincerity to politics by bringing about tangible development and eliminating the militarisation of politics. He also exhorts the Crown and the civil services to be politically neutral and pledge allegiance to the Constitution. Strictly anti-fascist and anti-communist, this book will be of interest to students of history, political science, and government.
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PART I INTRODUCTORY
DOI: 10.4324/9781003308119-1
CHAPTER I THE BACKGROUND OF BRITISH POLITICS
DOI: 10.4324/9781003308119-2
âEngland is different,â a curiously remote island, cut off from Europe by a little ditch of sea water which, except mentally, has ceased to be a barrier, either in peace or war.
âFor one who spent in Paris the greater part of the six months which succeeded the Armistice,â wrote Mr. Keynes in 1919, âan occasional visit to London was a strange experience. England still stands outside Europe. Europeâs voiceless tremors do not reach her. Europe is apart and England is not of her flesh and body.â It is still true. And again: âan Englishman who took part in the Conference of Paris . . . was bound to become, for him a new experience, a European in his cares and outlook. There, at the nerve centre of the European system, his British preoccupations must largely fall away and he must be haunted by other and more dreadful spectres.â 1 The spectres are there still, growing a little grimmer year by year. But too few Englishmen are haunted by them. If more saw them clearly, we might drive them off and save our island, and Europe, and the Outer Continents as well, from fear of dreadful dooms. But here I touch foreign policy.
The nature and conditions of British home politics are difficult for foreigners, and even, it seems, for some British circles to understand. From cloistered coteries visibility of the outside world is poor, whether from Carlton Club or Communist Cell or Highbrow Hall.
England is different. But how?
Pictures of national characteristics can only be painted with a broad brush, and I am concerned here only with qualities which bear on politics. Perhaps, if not thus limited, the picture would flatter us less. The British people, in the mass, differ from many others in their distrust of logic and distaste for doctrine; their cult of the practical and their gift for compromise; their sense of humour; their interest in sport; their sense of what they call âfair play,â a term notoriously hard to translate into foreign languages; their capacity, gained through long practice, for all forms of self-government, including the art of running every sort of voluntary organisation; their dimness of class-consciousness, alongside their tendency to snobbishness. To talk or act, in politics, as though these qualities were not widespread among us, is to court rebuff.
Typical of us was the football match, played in a seaport town during the general strike in May, 1926, between the strikers and the police. It is related that a French journalist, sent across the Channel by his paper to report our bloody revolution, found that the only important item of local news that day was that the strikers had beaten the police by two goals to one. He took the next boat back to France, exclaiming in disgust, âYou English are not a serious people!â
Football, it might be held, is one of the clues to our national character. Those who play it, or watch it, or âfollowâ it from afar, are a large percentage of the British electorate, some part of which treats an election just like a football match, and backs its favourite team, and cheers it on, and wears its colours. Our taste for sport is a clue to our political pacifism. We prefer throwing cricket balls to throwing bombs, and kicking footballs to kicking political opponents lying helpless on the ground. British political contests are generally strenuous, sometimes bitter while they last, often crude in their methods, often discouraging to those who love truth more than victory. But it is significant that one of our unwritten rules, which is seldom broken, is that rival candidates shake hands after the declaration of the poll, as after a sporting contest.
By contrast with some other countries, we have succeeded so far in keeping our politics free from deep personal hatreds, clean from the murder habit and from other extreme manifestations of bestiality and hysteria. I doubt whether in any other country a general strike could have lasted nine days, and a minersâ lockout six months, without bloodshed. We have much to learn from many foreign countries, but less about the decencies of politics than about most other forms of human activity.
It is not surprising that neither Fascism nor Communism has struck easy root in our soil. Both preach violence or, by a quibble, proclaim it as inevitable. Thus both offend our instinct of political pacifism. Both are too weak to win even a single seat in Parliament,âthe Fascists, hitherto, too weak even to have a try. Neither a Saklatvala nor a Mosley seems to find his spiritual home in British public life. Both speak like strangers in a foreign land.
Political murder gangs became social institutions after the War in Germany and Italy. Communists and Fascists murdered each other daily in the streets, and often murdered peaceful citizens as well, until between them they had murdered Liberty. In both these countries it was Communist violence which prepared the way, and made the atmosphere, for the triumph of Fascist counter-violence. And the failure of the constitutional parties of the Left to act boldly, or to attract the young, made this triumph easy. The Russian case was different. There Communism conquered chaos, in a land which had never known Liberty.
The only serious lapses in recent times from British political pacifism in home affairs have been, not in this island, but in Ireland. And the sequel is that Ireland, apart from its Northern province, is no longer part of our home affairs. But it was a growing sense in Britain of outraged political decency which stopped the exploits of Mr. Lloyd Georgeâs Black and Tans, and compelled the negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Treaty.
The earlier lapse was when, once more in Ireland, politics became militarised through the formation of rival private armies, Orange and Green. Sedition in Ulster, the miserable weakness of the Liberal Government, counter-sedition in the South of Ireland, Tory attempts to seduce the British Army. These were the successive scenes in the drama, which on the eve of the Great War was moving to its climax. Some think it loosed that war. They argue that the German Government plunged, calculating on our enforced neutrality in Europe, with civil war raging in Ireland and part of the Army refusing to obey orders. If this be so, Carson and his Tory friends bear a burden of moral responsibility beyond all human reckoning. With the outbreak of war, the curtain fell on our home drama. Once again England, and Ireland too, was different from foreign expectations.
No British Government should ever permit the militarisation of our politics. Private armies, if ever and by whomsoever formed, should be suppressed without hesitation, as recently in Sweden and in Denmark, in both cases by Socialist Governments, defending democracy and domestic peace. Arms and military drilling should be a monopoly of the Armed Forces of the Crown. Private enterprise in this field is equally repugnant to civic Loyalty and to Socialism.
It is open to any political party to seek to persuade the British people to accept proposals for peaceful change, however far-reaching. The British Labour Party has put forward its proposals. My object in this book is to expound them.
Whatever may be true of other countries, I believe that here it is possible to make a peaceful, orderly and smooth transition to a better social order; 1 and that, with a working Labour majority in the House of Commons, five years of resolute Government could lay the foundations of that order. Thereafter, at the next election, the people would be free to choose whether or not the work of Socialist construction should continue.
The two great enemies of the Labour Party are apathy and panic-mongering. âYouâre all alike,â says the tired woman in the mean street to the canvassing candidate, âyou all make wonderful promises at election time, and then do nothing for us when you get to Parliament.â Too often in the past she has been right.
Politics, both in a democracy and under a modern dictatorship, is always in danger of degenerating into Ordeal by Oratory. And oratory, as Froude said, is the harlot of the arts. The divorce between words and deeds tends to discredit all political activity. It is easy to stand braying on a platform, drawing cheers by mouthing big phrases. But some who listen will have doubts. We of the Labour Party can help to restore meaning and sincerity to politics, if, when our next chance comes, we perform what we have promised, and if meanwhile we promise only what we honestly believe we can perform. Success in performance would kill apathy.
Panic-mongering is our other enemy. When first I stood for Parliament, I believed that the electors would vote on a rational comparison between party programmes. I was soon undeceived. Bogies were conjured up, to scare the credulous. In my second contest a leaflet was issued by my Conservative opponent suggesting to the electors that, if I was returned, all churches would be burned down, and all copies of the Bible destroyed.
Panic, running in subterranean streams, defeated our candidates in 1931. Millions of electors feared that, if we won, the pound would be worth less than a penny and that their small deposits in the Post Office Savings Bank would disappear. High authorities, including Messrs. MacDonald, Snowden and Runciman, shamelessly fed these fears. Likewise in 1924 panic defeated many of our candidates, because a Mr. Zinoviev was thought to have written to some obscure correspondent in this country a vaguely threatening letter. Panic-mongering will be tried again by our opponents. Terrible tales will be told of our intentions, which, therefore, we must make clear and well understood beforehand.
I pass now to consider briefly some important factors in our British situation, in their relation to the peaceful achievement of Socialism.
First, the Crown. âI have no fear of the Royal Family,â writes George Lansbury. âThey have shown their willingness to accept the nationâs will too often to allow of any doubt on that score.â 1 âI would never lift a finger,â said the late John Wheatley, âto change this country from a capitalist monarchy into a capitalist republic.â In this country, as in the British Dominions, we have acclimatised the Crown to the growth of democracy. The Scandinavians have done the same. So have the Belgians and the Dutch. Elsewhere there have been failures.
Many years ago, I heard a Liberal Cabinet Minister propose the Royal Toast in these words: âWe are the descendants of the men who turned the Kings of England into constitutional monarchs, and therefore we are loyal to the Throne.â Those words have stuck in my memory. The Labour Party, too, is in that line of descent.
The corridors of the Houses of Parliament are decorated with many scenes from our Civil War when Parliament first beat the King, and then beheaded him; and with an earlier scene, King John coerced at Runnymede, sitting in the rain, his Crown awry. Members of Parliament, of all parties, show these pictures to visiting constituents. They frame the history of our political liberties.
But the Crown is no longer, as when John or Charles wore it, a Party emblem. There is to-day no Republican Party in this country, and nowhere any visible or audible hostility to the Throne.
This is a recent change. The earlier Georges commanded little respect. And the young Queen Victoria, just after her accession, was hissed at Ascot by a wealthy Tory crowd, because she had refused, in spite of all the blandishments of Peel and Wellington, to give up her Whig Ladies of the Bedchamber, and to instal Tory ladies in their place.
Later it was only Gladstoneâs forbearance, in face of the Queenâs undisguised aversion, that prevented the growth among Liberals of Republican sentiments. Even so, Joseph Chamberlain, after the French Revolution of 1870, said publicly that âa Republic must come soon in this countryâ, and his friend Dilke carried on frank Republican propaganda from within the Liberal Party. Again in 1910 there were murmurs among Liberals of a rising storm, when it was falsely reported that the King had refused to promise to create new peers sufficient to overbear the resistance of the Lords to the Parliament Bill. An election was threatened on the slogan, âthe King and the Peers against the Peopleâ, and there was talk in the National Liberal Club of a Republican demonstration in Trafalgar Square. On the other hand, the Ulster gunmen and their Tory allies in this country rebuffed the efforts of the present King, on his accession, to find an Irish compromise. It was an Orange orator who threatened in a public speech to âkick King Georgeâs crown into the Boyneâ, unless the Home Rule Bill were withdrawn; and it was Joynson Hicks, later renamed Lord Brentford, who yelled at the Armed Forces of the Crown, âfire and be damned!â This is a black chapter of Tory disloyalty.
The Labour Party has never adopted such attitudes towards the Throne. Yet for all democrats loyalty to the Crown is conditional on the Crownâs loyalty to constitutional usage. If, contrary to all recent experience, this became doubtful, sentiment would soon change. The almost mystic halo, which now surrounds the Crown, would quickly fade. The cheers which now, even in the most depressed areas, greet any member of the Royal Family, would be mixed with other cries.
The most disloyal subjects of the Crown are those who seek to make it partisan, including those who run about behind the scenes pulling political wires that were best left untouched, trying from Royal backstairs to queer the pitch for Ministers or their policies. It was suspected in some quarters that such busybodies were at work in 1931 against the Labour Government. These rumours left a nasty taste behind.
If ever such intriguers should succeed in pushing the Crown into open partisanship, or even rouse serious suspicions of its political neutrality, they will shake its moral authority, and split British opinion down a new line of cleavage. A political party, which had the open support of the Crown against its opponents, might win the first round. But it could not count on winning the second, and it would have undermined, perhaps fatally, the Crownâs stability.
To-day the Crown is honoured and safe, because it stands above the battle, respecting electoral verdicts, welcoming Ministers, whatever their policy, who are supported by the House of Commons, and acting constitutionally on their advice.
Like the Crown, the Civil Service should be politically neutral. It should be the loyal servant of the Government of the day, whatever its political colour. I believe that such loyalty can be counted on, by a Labour Government not less than by any other. My experience at the Foreign Office from 1929 to 1931 supports this view.
If, in particular cases, it should prove otherwise in future, there should be bumps and promotions. Some Socialists fear that, especially near the top of the service, class prejudice will show itself obstructive towards great changes. If so, the remedy is simple.
It is important to preserve the right relationship between Ministers and officials. The Minister should tell the officials what his policy is. He should not, on large issues, ask the officials what to do. He should tell them what is to be done, and ask them to advise how best to do it, what difficulties stand in the way, and how these can most effectively be overcome. Otherwise civil servants are placed in a false position, that of civil masters.1 At the Foreign Office, on Mr. Hendersonâs instructions, I circulated to all Heads of Departments, for their...