The new alignments of parties in the House were most
interesting. Mr. Maxton has firmly established himself and his dissentient group as a separate unit on a separate bench. The Speaker called on him immediately after the representative speeches on behalf of the official Opposition and of the Government had been delivered, thereby giving his group an acknowledged and distinct Parlia- mentary entity. The Speaker's action reflects a fact. The new Opposition, in spite of its shrunken numbers, is indeed a microcosm of the old Parliamentary Labour Party, with the difference that the section of the extreme Left is relatively stronger. The electorate has decisively condemned that form of Socialism which endeavoured to co-operate with capitalism while at the same time abusing and harassing it. The Labour Party has now to choose between a genuinely evolutionary Socialism of a syndic- alist character of which beginnings may be detected in .the Melchett-Turner conferences, and an uncompromising Socialism of the type represented by Mr. Maxton, who summed it up on Tuesday by declaring that the working classes never had and never would share in the prosperity of capitalism.
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