POLITICS AND POLITICIANS TO-DAY

II. THE LABOUR PARTY

HAD the Labour Party been a politicians' machine to the degree to which the older political parties have, in the course of generations, become so; had it depended for its mobilisation on an enormous hoard produced by traffic in honours, on the backing of organised financial and industrial capitalist interests, or on the election manifestoes of statesmen who, still panting from the interchange of energetic (and well-deserved) denunciations of incompetence and dishonesty, could, at the vision of a chance of regaining office, rush into a mutual embrace and, for the period of a flashlight photograph, smirk resolutely with interlocked hands on public platforms; if it could have been crippled by the unscrupulous boycotting and mendacity of a syndicated Press, if it had failed in the test of Parliament, it would probably have dropped half a million votes on its 1922 poll and a third of its representation. As it is it has increased its poll (as I write) by 256,000 votes, not counting those given to independent candidates, some at least of whom are not its opponents, and its representation by fifty members, an augmentation of 35 per cent. These details appear on the surface and speak for themselves. There lies below them still stronger cause for congratulation among the membership of the party. What is the explanation and what the significance of this remarkable manifestation ?

Much of the explanation was indicated in advance in an article which I contributed to the last August number of this Review-in brief, that the Labour Party is an organic and growing tissue of men and women who join it because they reflect, because they have certain chronic needs and experiences which have convinced them in the course of the last thirty years that the present industrial organisation of society needs to be changed, because they have appreciated the critical analysis of its defects and because they are satisfied that the constructive programme which their organisation has framed, working downwards from the intellectual standpoint and upwards from the experience of organised wage-workers in their struggle for subsistence and

freedom, alone offers any practical promise of giving effect to their reasonable human demands.

When Mr. Baldwin, like Saul on his way to Damascus, experienced a sudden illumination, namely that unemployment was the most pressing national problem of the moment, and, like that other Saint, not only was stricken with blindness, but fell to the ground (after a similar interval, it may be hoped, to resume activity as a convert to the faith he was proceeding to persecute), the supporters of the Labour Party recognised that it had been vouchsafed to him to discover what to them had been obvious for more than a generation. It was an acute crisis of unemployment forty years ago that started the Socialist movement in this country, and it is the analysis of the causes of unemployment and the demonstration (recently emphasised by Lord Milner, as it had been by many thinkers of nimbler intelligence) of the characteristic vice of the capitalist industrial system to produce such crises that has continually and perhaps most effectually recruited the Socialist school of thought in England, converted the trade unions to that movement and created the political Labour Party. This recognition might, therefore, be counted to Mr. Baldwin, in the ranks of the Labour Party, for righteousness, and it will always remain to his credit that he was the first Prime Minister to pledge himself to attempt as his primary task a solution of that recurrent problem.

The naïve amateurishness of the proposals for solving it which, under whatever influences, he hastily decided to offer, need not here be criticised. Labour candidates, knowing that among their own adherents their fallacy and futility needed no argument, spent little breath against them in election meetings, except in replies to Protection-bitten hecklers. The electorate has disposed of them. But in so far as the problem of unemployment was a prominent topic in the election (which Mr. Baldwin did not succeed in convincing his party so fully as he had convinced himself that it should be) he had struck on the issue about which the Labour Party had the most distinct convictions, to which it alone had given prolonged and directly interested consideration, and on which it knew that it had a programme and meant business with it—a programme the emergency details of which were urged on the Liberal Government by Mr. Webb as early as 1914, when there was expectation of unemployment during the war.

Any party, in fact, that might go to the country on the issue of unemployment would, as Mr. Baldwin did, challenge the Labour Party on its strongest ground, that in which the rank and file of its supporters are and have all their lives been most keenly interested, and on which they have worked out their ideas, whilst other parties have neglected the problem or taken their counsel about it solely

from the side of organised capitalist employers and the financial authorities who support them. I am far from suggesting that the capitalist employers' party, the bankers, and all the intermediate chorus of somethings in the City and of the classes parasitic on property have nothing to say worth listening to on the subject of unemployment; they are competent expert witnesses from the employers' point of view, and I shall touch on one aspect of their arguments presently. Just here I am merely noting the broadest factors that influenced voting in this election. The Labour Party and those for whose interests it stands saw clearly that even if Mr. Baldwin (apart from his party) was sympathetic about unemployment his programme was worse than futile, whilst of the Liberals the leaders as well as the rank and file of both factions had hardened their hearts and declared themselves actively hostile to anything that the party that had given most attention to the subject might propose or desire. Labour was to be kept out of power at all costs. Mr. Churchill promised that even if Mr. Baldwin could not be displaced Mr. MacDonald should no longer lead the Opposition. This attitude naturally consolidated and reinforced the will of the Labour Party and brought it new adherents.

But the party itself was very far from accusing individualist capitalism in England of being directly responsible for the prevalence of unemployment during the last two or three years. The party and its supporters clearly recognise that Mr. Lloyd George's Peace, Mr. Bonar Law's Tranquillity, and Mr. Baldwin's Simplicity are ruining Europe, and with it the British markets. Labour Party audiences, therefore, showed greater interest in criticisms of foreign policy than they did in Mr. Baldwin's prescriptions. They knew what the Press boycott has sedulously concealed from the middle-class readers of penny papers: that the Labour Party criticism of foreign policy and its practical programme for dealing with it has been continuous and consistent. What the Labour Party has said on this subject in Parliament is scantily enough reported in but a few papers, but readers at any rate of the Herald have been kept fairly aware of it. What it has done and said outside Parliament has hardly reached the consciousness of the readers of other penny papers at all. So much is this the case that when a Dominion statesman, General Smuts, galled possibly by remorse for the pretext which he had given to Mr. Lloyd George at Versailles for including in our claim for reparations provision for war pensions, contrary to the understanding on which the Armistice had been made, unburdened his soul in denunciation of what Great Britain had tolerated in the post-war proceedings of France and of the ghastly spectacle now presented by Europe as a result of apostasy from the ideals of

those who fought in the war, when he repeated the identical censures which the Labour Party has been passing for years on those conditions and called, as the Labour Party had done, for a new world conference, to include all the principal nations, to revise the Versailles Treaty and attempt a new basis of settlement, his pronouncement was loudly applauded as an astonishingly courageous and illuminating new departure by Liberal publicists who had ignored or belittled the identical urgings of Labour politicians. The Labour Party knew what the attitude of its leaders had been, and this, too, was a factor of strength and confidence in its electoral temper.

The adherence of the Labour Party to its policy of a levy on capital for the redemption of debt was criticised by many who are in sympathy with other parts of its programme as 'a mistake in tactics.' This consistency, which has the undivided support of the party, has, of course, drawn heavy attacks from the opposing political parties on economic and practical grounds as conceived by them. Detailed criticism of those attacks would lie outside the scope of this article, but the significance of the proposal and its importance as a consolidating item for the party may be here briefly indicated. The value of capital holdings in this country, of which those exceeding 5000l. would be amenable to the proposed debt levy, had increased between the beginning of the war and 1921 by about 5,400,000,000l. (nearly 50 per cent. on their pre-war total). According to the income tax returns, the number of persons in receipt of incomes exceeding 5000l. a year had increased during the same period from upwards of 15,000 to upwards of 24,000 (a good deal more than 50 per cent.). The real incomes of the wage-earning and salaried classes are (to put the case at its weakest) not now higher, on the average, than they were before the war. In a great proportion of cases, to say nothing of the unemployed, they are substantially lower. Apart, then, altogether from any consideration of the expediency of relieving taxation by the extinction of debt interest, there occurred during the period of the war and of the peace negotiations an enormous displacement of the balance of property and income as between the property-owning and the wage-earning classes. This accounts for the conspicuous continuance of profuse social expenditure on luxuries in a period of acute industrial poverty. Knowledge or appreciation of these statistical facts seems, unfortunately, I think, to be extremely restricted among the comfortable classes; the criticisms and discussions on fiscal topics which are admitted to publication by the Press habitually and sedulously ignore it. Were it generally recognised, I believe it would affect the judgment of many conservatively disposed citizens in regard to the demand for a capital levy to reduce the

National Debt, as it does unquestionably affect those who know it and make the demand. It commends itself to Labour Party audiences and recruits the party on the broad general ground that, whereas the mass of the nation (including all classes, but in enormous predominance those who earned their living by work) paid for the war by the sacrifice of their lives or their health, and this human loss and tax remains unredeemable, property ought for its part to be called upon to redeem the war debt, which is not wealth, but a permanent claim for taxation upon that same working part of the nation which has already paid its share in its own kind of the war cost. This argument, even if the balance of the two classes of wealth, Labour and Property, were approximately what it was before the war, is one which appeals, very naturally, to the mass of plain-thinking people, and on this broad ground the demand for a capital levy in redemption of war debt is steadily making way among all classes outside those who fear they would be directly touched by it in their pockets. This would be so if the pre-war balance had been maintained. It is far more strongly the case when it is realised that, through profits made in the war, not, indeed, entirely at the expense of our own countrymen, but principally so, if also at that of all other nations with whom our manufacturers and traders did profitable business during the war, the propertyowning classes in this country have been enriched about 50 per cent. When this consideration has been referred to, I have heard interrupters suggest that the propertied classes also gave their lives and their health. So they did; but such interruptions illustrate inability on the part of those who make them to realise that whereas to the common people human lives are indeed commensurable, and the loss of a rich man's son as grievous as, but no more so than, that of a poor man's, the value of property is not commensurable with that of lives, and even if a property owner's son were, as seems often to be assumed, as much more valuable than a poor man's as his fortune is the greater, the fact that a property owner has lost his son in the war is absolutely irrelevant to the question whether his property as well as human life should not be levied on to meet the war expenses.

On these broad human grounds, then, this item of the Labour Party's programme typifies to its supporters a sound and just principle, which they resolutely declare and support; that is to say that, the human tax of the war having been borne by the nation's humanity its funded financial burden should be borne by its funded property, and much the more so seeing that property by exploiting humanity's agony increased itself during the war by something like two-thirds the total amount of our war debt.

While I cannot discuss the surface problems involved in the