BOOKS
Party and Movement
By ll. W. BROGAN
IN the past week or two a Labour MP has been telling the Co-operators that the Labour Party is in danger of losing its soul, and Mr. Hugh Gaitskell has been telling them tha't they are in danger of losing their business. And to many active Co-operators, Mr. Gaitskell's advice is a sign of the danger to the Labour Party's soul, for is based on the assumption that the main business of the Co-operative Movement is to do business on the terms imposed by the success of those odious chain stores, while, for disciples of the Co-operative Movement, there are higher things than dividends and service; there is the Movement. And what goes for the Co-operators goes for the Labourites. They can usefully .3e divided into those who think of the Labour Party as a going political concern with good prospects, and those who thifik of it as the 'Movement,' something sacred, to be cherished in ill repute ,e_ven more than in good, to be clung to as mem- bers of evangelical sects cling to their Connec- tion. The first type of Labourite may be full of information about marginal seats, political levies, the impact of the Liberals and the latest oracles of the Oxford psephologists. But the follower of the Movement, if not indifferent to such things, is above them. From a height of moral superiority, he or she regards the Cities of the Plain where
in hoggish ignorance and sin, Tories and the arbiters of Transport House.
Professor Pokier in this fascinating account* of the early years of our great political machine p°Ws, with great skill, the interweaving of the arty and the Movement. He shows the Move- ment, older, more loved, more inspiring, getting its Party form or, perhaps, to be more exact, getting into an uneasy alliance with the nascent Labour Party. It is a story that has been told a _,(:)0(1 many times, but Professor Poirier has a good deal that is new to say, and a good deal that is not new is set in a new framework. It is his duty, to which he comes with little reluctance, to debunk tile claims of the Fabians, especially the Webbs and Shaw, and he reveals, more than perhaps he ,realises, how much of an 'Establishment' organisa- tion the Fabians were, how much a purely London organisation the Fabian Society was. (The provin- cial Fabians were not the same thing as the London machine at all.) It was not in London London at the Movement' took root. The great days for were in the future, the days of Mr. Her- nil Morrison. The London of the first decade of the century was dominated by the extra- o. rdinary John Burns. In a better-organised world 1,t Would have been dominated by Beatrice Webb, but before you could have a party you had to have ..iMovement and John Burns was a London diver- sionary action of the first magnitude. t_ 'Plat left the field to the provincials, above all ° Scotland and Yorkshire. And in these remote Provinces the Movement was incarnate in Keir rrs lrIFIE ADVENT OF THE LABOUR PARTY. By Philip P. oirier. (Allen and Unwin, 25s.) 1' SOCIALISM AND THE MIDDLE CLASSES. By AndreW ‘'run. (Lawrence and Wishart, 15s.)
Hardie, and the Party that was to be in another Scot---Ramsay MacDonald. It is the main novelty of this book that it restores MacDonald to his rightful place as a maker of the Party. He was never forgiven for 1931, as George Barnes was never forgiven for replacing Henderson in 1917. But these long-enduring blood feuds in the party of fraternity should not be allowed to cloud the mind of the historian who is not himself a serving brother in the Movement. Ramsay MacDonalds are scarcer and more necessary than Keir Hardies. They are as necessary as Beatrice Webbs (but for Ramsay Mac there might have been no Lord Passfield). Of course, they are not as attractive.
It is easy, at a distance, to think reverently of Keir Hardie defying the Establishment in his cloth cap. Who can resist the charm of the assault on a fellow Scot, Archbishop Davidson?
'And thereafter arose the graceless Archbishop of Canterbury, a sprawling, ungainly figure, with a fleshy, expressionless face, and a noisy, empty, voice. He wore full canonicals. From his neck hung a gold chain on which was hung a gold cross. A cross of gold! As he from time to time raised his fleshy right hand, a great gold signet ring showed itself on his third finger. When he moved his left hand a gold ring gleamed upon the little finger of that hand. . . . And for twenty minutes he mouthed stale nothings. He the representative of the Carpenter of Nazareth! He with fifteen thousand a year upon which he ekes out his miserable existence !'
Bryan could hardly have done it better and the style may be commended to stout Tories hot after those oddly linked Fathers in God, Drs. Fisher and Makarios. Superior, angry, censorious, there is The Movement! The Labour Party is still full of Movementers. Nor need they be on the Left; Dr. Summerskill is Movement-minded to perfection.
But Keir Hardies are not enough; they are often, indeed, a good deal too much and we see various efforts made here to get Hardie out of the limelight, out of the chair, 'to let the practical politicians have their say. Of these James Ramsay MacDonald was the chief. He could talk the language of the Movement and probably meant it. But he knew how tender a plant the Labour Party was and so he did a deal with Herbert Gladstone which saved the infant party from the strains and losses of war to the knife with the Liberals. This pact had to be hushed up, but politics are full of things that have to be hushed up. Professor Poirier makes a good case for MacDonald (and for Glad- stone) and pertinently casts doubt on the popular thesis that asserts that the Labour Party was bound to become a major party. The first war did the trick, not the Fabians, the ILP or even the sluggish rallying to 'political action' of the unions endangered by Taff Vale and the common lawyers. But the Movement is more humanly interesting than the necessary deals of parliamentary action to which Shaw and the Webbs thought themselves superior. The de !taut en bas attitude of so many of the intellectuals infuriated the practical men.
`These social movements -for the benefit of, the nation, the elevation of the race cannot and must not be confined to, and captured by a small clique of professional prigs, middle-class men on the make, masquerading as Labour leaders, securing Liberal votes, manipulating Radical enthusiasm, exploiting Socialist sentiment, and eking a precarious political existence out of trade union funds to which they have not subscribed.' Who is this assailing Wykehamist domination of the Labour Party High Command or saving a sound and safe seat from Mr. Driberg? It is John Burns fifty years ago. John Burns who might have been an Ernie Bevin had he suffered less from vanity and been born twenty years later.
So the clash goes on. We can see the Movement at its most attractive in the pastoral picture of Bruce Glasier in the 'Van,' caravanning in the Cotswolds and bringing the gospel to the Cecil Sharp country. We can see the rich strains of miscegenation which bred the Movement when we see how often Carlyle, the most odious of great Scots, is claimed as an ancestor. We can see the same state of muddle in Mr. John Lawrence, the Lenin of St. Pancras, who left the Communist Party in 1941 when he discovered that it didn't believe in non-violence. But the Movement, at its silliest, has genuine appeal. It is preferable to the Conservative furies for the cat and the rope. It is preferable to ex-Movementers tortuously defend- ing the Russian crimes in Hungary—the 'conta- gion of the world's slow stain' indeed !
It is the Communist poison that makes the Movement, today, look silly rather than attractive. So many former lights of it have 'puked up their principles,' as William James put it, that the age of Keir Hardie seems golden indeed, although the age of Labour governments has a kind of interest for the philosophical observer that the days of dreaming and climbing cannot have. But since silliness is a part of politics, it is not in- conceivable that Mr. Grant's badly camouflaged appeal for a new People's Front' will warm the cockles of the hearts still fixed on the Thirties. How simple things were then ! (General de Gaulle, pace Mr. Driberg, will hardly fill the psycho- logical role that General Franco filled so adequately.) Appeals to all 'progressives' in Mr. Grant's manner, stir happy memories, but they also bring up, like a mouthful of bile, the memories of the great betrayal of 1939. To the faithful of King Street, no maxim is less proved than Chesterton's dictum : 'But a lie can never be young but once.'
Of course, not all that Mr. Grant says is merely dope for the dupes. I, for one, am willing to accept the fact that the great majority of the people of this country are members of the working class; they live by selling their labour (and, as Mr. Grant does not stress, their votes). 'A bour- geois,' wrote M. Andre Siegfried, 'is a man who has resources.' We are most of us non-bourgeois. But to jump from that to the assumption that we are proletarians as called for by the Marxist scheme is to jump 'too far and fall flat on your premises. The capitalist process has not worked according to plan. All that Mr. Grant has to say has been better said by Mr. Wright Mills. But his plea for a return of the dear, dead Left Book Club Days (that age needs its Sandy Wilson) dragged a real probl..m to the surface of my mind. What does a youthful Old Etonian going Commy do to dress the part nowadays? What is the equivalent of the corduroy trousers, the turtleneck sweater? Are proletarian Christian names still de rigueur? That Mr. Grant could doubtless tell us if he deigned. But the thesis of the book is so obviously Communist Party groundbait that it wouldn't have deceived old George Lansbury. Even the Movement chokes over the ultiinate absurdity and this is only good enough for people like the Webbs.
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