SIR, —The whitewashing of Ramsay MacDonald which Robert Blake contrived so
subtly in his article last week was perhaps intended to move the reader to ask why Mr Wilson does not imitate the great statesman and form a coalition government to deal with such a similar financial crisis. Robert Blake is too young to have known MacDonald and his account of how—`after much heart-searching and some persuasion by the King'—MacDonald got him- self set up as head of a national government gives a very wrong impression of a vain, withdrawn and woolly-minded man who found it easier to talk to George V and the Opposition leaders than to his own humble colleagues, whom (with the exception of Snowden) he kept in ignorance of his goings-on. By contrast Mr Wilson hides nothing. He goes down to the Trades Union Congress openly telling them that, because of the financial crisis, men must be thrown out of work and that the redundant must be sacked for 're-deployment' and leaving them to eat the words of their former economic policy in shame at their restrictive practices. He even ends his peroration with a vision of 'a just society'—but not a socialist one. How different from MacDonald, who ended an address to a party conference with the words: 'The progress of socialism must be slow and evolutionary but we are moving in a great eternal ocean of surge towards righteousness, to- wards fair play and towards honesty.' Robert Blake may be assured that if Mr Wilson is to split the Labour party it will be honestly done and not by forming a national government in the MacDonald manner.
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