The Slate-Blue Right

By CHRISTOPHER MARTIN

URLEY is our first target. They are pretty well off there and they are real rightists. We only go for the A and B classes, of course. Get their names out of the telephone directory. Then we shall go for Bournemouth, Harrogate, Chelten- ham, those sorts of places.'

Edward Martell was talking about his 1963 plans for promoting the New Daily. It is the three-year-old organ of the 'Freedom Group,' which he calls his movement, and is the only national daily newspaper to have been launched successfully since the war, the only one 'inde- pendent of all combines and unions.' Martell claims for it a circulation of between 38,000 and 42,000, virtually all to subscribers. 'We had to withdraw our point-of-sale stands,' he explained. 'They were being systematically broken open. And anyway,' he went on, warming, 'the news- paper vendors wouldn't touch them. I rang up the editor of the Evening Standard. Oh, yes, per- fectly all right by him. But the vendors wouldn't touch it. Somewhere down the line there was interference going on. Now we rely on sub- scribers. I saw two New Daily's being read in the train up from Hastings this morning . . . only one Telegraph, one Financial Times. Things are on the move. Give it a year or two longer and I see no reason why we should not overhaul The Times and the Guardian.'

If the New Daily is not designed for mass circulation, the 'sincere Christian' paper for which plans were announced a month ago certainly intends to be popular. Its editor-designate, the Rev. Harold Goodwin, in his recent book William Temple's Political Legacy undoubtedly revealed a close affinity to Martell's political views; whether he would be capable of producing the uplifting tabloid that Martell told me he plans remains to be seen.

Martell has been knocking around in politics long enough to be chary of wild predictions. Now in his late fifties, he comes from a Methodist rentier background. Till 1955 he was a Liberal, standing at parliamentary elections as 'Your Three-Star Candidate.' He also worked in Liberal Party headquarters and particularly in the 1945 general election did yeoman service for the party, which was chronically short of funds.

After 1955 his links with the Liberal Party were finally severed (the Liberal Party had begun to veer left). A year later, with a loyal band of lieutenants, Martell set about founding his own movement, which is now made up of five asso- ciated arms. First to be formed was the People's League for the Defence of Freedom, established to combat what it feared as the power-giants of today—the trade unions, industrial monopolies and 'arrogant' bureaucracy (with a peculiar antipathy towards the first of these three). In the same year, 1956, the Free Press Society was started, to offer printing services entirely inde- pendent of trade union control. The Anti- Socialist Front followed, to throw its weight against Labour in the 1959 general election. The New Daily itself appeared in April, 1960, and the quintet was completed at the beginning of 1962 with the foundation of the National Fellow- ship as 'a gathering together of all men and women of good will.'

About the time that the People's League was founded, rumours of political malpractices in the Electrical Trades Union had begun to break, and bourgeois fears of Communism were ripe to be 'mobilised for freedom'. Mobilising for freedom has so far taken various forms of lobbying and swift action, of which two in particular have attracted some public notice. The League found its first great opportunity in the prolonged London bus strike of 1958, when it gained much publicity by running its fleet of eighteen 'Free- dom Buses' which gave a skeleton pirate service over a few popular routes. The second scheme introduced by the People's League was the Urgent Mail Delivery announced as a riposte to the post office workers' go-slow in January, 1962. The scheme attracted considerable publicity, par- ticularly as special consideration was promised for vital medical supplies. Its usefulness, how- ever, was limited. No sooner had it started, on January 11, than a communication was received from the Postmaster-General declaring letter- carrying to be illegal. As Martell agreed when we discussed the episode, with a general carrier's 'A' licence it would probably have been possible to conduct a letter-carrying service legitimately, but at the time no steps were made to apply for one, and in the meantime the League enjoyed sympathy on a double count—for its entangle- ment with red tape as well as its fight against the trade union.

The weekly broadsheet of the People's League, which, with nearly 50,000 members, is the most widely supported division of the Freedom Group, is the People's Guardian. This not only provides members with information, but has the value, as Martell declares, of enabling him to mobilise all his movement's members at short notice. 'If, for instance, the ETU struck at Bath, we should very quickly be able to put enough of our non- union .electricians into operation to maintain the city's essential services.' There is the thrill of battle in the offing as he describes his members, 118,000 of them now associated in one way or another with the movement. 'They are your body, your bones, your muscles and your blood.'

'I wish I could reveal the names of some of my most influential supporters,' Martell went on, turning now to consider the National Fellow- ship, which seems most fully to embody his political aims and attitudes. 'You'll find a lot of distinguished names amongst its sponsors,' and certainly the lists published in The Times and elsewhere are heavily peppered with senior officers and the lesser-known aristocracy.

'NATIONAL REVIVAL OR ECLIPSE?' was the heading under which the National Fellowship launched itself, with full-page, M RA-like, ad- vertisements in the quality dailies, and Martell wears its 'Resurgat Britannia' badge in his lapel. It sought to attract membership by outlining its policies, and most concisely by a for-or-against questionnaire which asked such questions as: If you believe in loyalty to the Crown score 3. If you are a Republican score 0; If you believe that 'do unto others as you would be done by' is the golden rule of life score 3. If you believe in self-interest score 0; If you think the Welfare State has gone too far and is sapping a proper sense of respon- sibility in our people score 2. If you are fully satisfied with the Welfare State and its implica- tions score 0.

There are others in similar vein on such issues as Communism, heavier penalties for dangerous driving, the legitimate rights of the settlers and the well-being of the natives in the colonies, trade unions and so on.

`No, certainly, I'm not a hanger and flogger myself, though I think I'm in a minority in our movement,' said Martell. 1 was asking him why the questions Were so obviously, if skilfully, loaded; why, for instance, on the Welfare State there was no compromise between full satisfac- tion and thorough-going criticism. 'Of course we could have weighted the questions the other way equally well. But we simply wanted to find out our supporters. And we did.'

No doubt it is the success of such canvassing methods that leaves the movement free from financial worries. Martell mentioned how re- cently he had written round to his members for £120,000, and 'got it in no time.' He emphasises that there is no one big backer, and that he would not allow it, for fear that some outsider might get control. Thus it is written into the articles of association of one recent enterprise, the Tileyard Press (which is officially independent of the Freedom Group), that voting control is such as to prevent any 'possibility of a successful takeover by hostile elements.'

As for the Sapphire Free Press's acquisition of Waddington's North London works this week, Martell is obviously overjoyed to have prompted this head-on clash with the printing trade unions. The front page of Monday's New Daily was devoted entirely to the matter, and Martell clearly finds it a happy coincidence that the deal has come to a head in the week of the TUC conference. If Waddington's directors were embarrassed to discover that they had landed a pig in a poke, and had to go dashing off all matily to Brighton, this all provides Martell with additional publicity in his fight against trade union power.

Martell is certainly confident of his imme- diate plans for the movement. 'Where do we expect to be in five years' time? By then we should have thoroughly infiltrated the Conser- vative Party, and stopped this creeping pink Socialism of Macleod's. My instructions to our members are to get in on their local councils, get in on the committees of their constituency Conservative associations, so that they can ensure the kind of candidates who will be sympathetic to our cause. Not that I have any parliamentary ambitions myself. I have far more power out- side. MPs are just lobby-fodder. There's no point in paying them more . . . they shouldn't be paid at all. Then we'd get the right kind of men back to Westminster. At present we're suffering from the rule of second-class brains.'

Martell's own intrusion at Bristol South East was apparently made for effect, and in picking up over four thousand of the 10,231 votes Malcolm St. Clair received in 1961, he not only saved his deposit, but gave some indication of how many Tory voters are undeterred by the National Fellowship sub-title.

Martell then unfolded his underlying political convictions. believe that nature's natural laws must be respected . . . and if Britain, which is a country with a long and honourable history, lets her muscles grow slack, and doesn't keep them in training, then she risks being submerged. That is what I am lighting to prevent.' This re- minded me, mutatis mutandis, of a declaration of faith I had beard from Robert Welch, founder of America's John Birch Society, and I said so. 'Oh, but they're very far right, aren't they?' answered Martell.

The tvVo movements are strikingly similar. To regard them as Fascist is misleading: though Martell and his followers hate Communism, and want to put organised labour firmly in its place, the last thing they want is a corporative State, the true Fascist goal. They represent, after all, traditionally prosperous but now uneasy middle- to upper-middle-class groups rather than the petty bourgeois from whom Hitler and, indeed, Mussolini drew their strength.

'Poujadist' is another tempting phrase. It was used by baffled commentators of the mass of Orpington Liberals, but it is no more appropriate for them than it is for the supporters of Mar- tell's movement. Martell's 118,000 may want lower taxes and less welfare, and yearn for their own easier situation amidst generally harsher conditions before the war, but in so far as they have an interest through their investments in the realities of national and international trade, they cannot take kindly to Poujadist parochialism.

Whoever coined the phrase 'blue whigs' to de- scribe one persisting element in the Liberal Party came much nearer the mark. It is a dull shade of blue. To be a blue whig is to exhume from the early nineteenth century a horror of all com- binations, but to lack any compensating interest in reform. With all its talk of freedom, the Freedom Group has no real interest in better education, better health provision or improve- ments in our penal system. It is much more obsessed with 'proper punishment,' much stricter discipline' and a reduction of the Welfare State. It knows well that such beliefs are unpopular in the prevailing liberal mood, and relishes the thought of such unpopularity. For British politics as a whole, the most serious danger is that hard times ahead may give this movement too easy opportunities for foisting its dreary policies on the nation.