LABOUR AND THE "CAPITALIST" PRESS.
(To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.")
Sia„—Your correspondent Mr. E. T. Good writes a plausible article trying to make out that the capitalist Press is "quite fair and even indulgent" to Labour, and I, as " a practical working man" too, would like to reply to his arguments. He says he is a confirmed trade unionist, yet ho defends and even eulogizes a Press which does not let one day pass without printing some dirty attacks or lies about the Trade Unions. According to the "newspapers," they are a lot of greedy, grasping people who won't let the poor employer carry on his business. That's the sort of blackguardly statements they make, when any working man knows it is a damned lie. All that the unions have been trying to do is to get something like decent wages and conditions. The masses of the people are no better off than before the war; wages.have never caught up with prices. Why is Mr. E. T. Good a trade unionist if what the capitalist Press says about Trade Unions is true? Because he knows that his fair and indulgent friends would treat him like a dog if he did not organize with his fellow-journalists. Then about the reports of Labour men's speeches, Ac. When do we ever see reports of speeches by men like Snowden, Lansbury, and other "dishonest agitators," of whom will your correspondent dare give the names? One might think they were as dumb as Coalition M.P.s. The speeches of the miner's leaders have been reported (more or less) because the news bosses were compelled to, knowing the miners weren't to be sat on, the wicked fellows not being " constitutionalists," i.e., tame, servile creatures, willing to do and believe what their "betters" tell them, after the style of the German working class before the war. The ideal constitutionalists, were they not, Mr. Editor?
Does Mr. E. T. Good remember that chapter in Mightier than the Sword where one journalist tells another that to describe truly the scene of a mining disaster would. be "rank Socialism "P Or does he not remember Sir P. Gibbs's state- ment recently that "journalism has sunk very low "? He ought to know. I would sooner take his word than Mr. E. T. Good's. Finally I should like to remind him of Upton Sinclair's book, The Brass Check Will he deny the truth of
these revelations about the American Press, than which our own is but a shade better? That book alone disproves a thousand times Mr. E. T. Good's childish article.
As a renegade Labour man he is now, I suppose, Tory or Liberal, not that there's any difference, and a supporter of the Coalition, the worst, most unprincipled, most anti-Labour Government we have ever been cursed with. And he calls himself a " practical working man "I Could hypocrisy go further? I once believed (to my shame) the piffie and the rot one reads in the Press about the Labour and Socialist move- ment, but determined to find out for myself, and discovered
the Press were blackguardly liars. All the Labour and Socialist people I have come across have been sane, intelligent, good men and women, a refreshing discovery in this mad world. I hope you will print this letter, Sir, though it may not be on a level as regards grammar or style se the writings of the ponderous scribes of the Spectator, owing to the capi- talists condescending to give me such a splendid elementary "education" when it was found to pay.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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