A year of prophesying

17.5.24

Mr. Smillie, a little while ago, was talking of the peculiar mental virtues of the Labour Party. It was “out to deal with root causes” and so forth. There was to be no parleying with Liberals. This was immediately before Mr. Snowden produced the greatest Liberal Budget in history; something off something for everybody and no Socialist confiscation. I was moved at the time of Mr. Smillie’s speech to point out that the Labour Government had not been caught looking at the root cause of anything whatever since it came into office. It had put on its Court livery like little gentlemen, and done as it was told. That “root cause” delusion was created in the mind of Mr. Smillie by reading the election addresses of his associates.

For a time, until it got into office, the Labour Party was a magnificent hoarding for the constructive Radical. At bottom it is a party of feelings rather than ideas. It became boldly, out-spokenly Socialist. It was declared to stand for a broad collective handling of our common interests, for scientific method. It wasn’t afraid of bankers or landowners or Protection-seeking trade monopolists. It stood for the free, high constructive future against the injustice and mean limitations of the present. It was the New Age struggling to be. But really it wasn’t for all those things because it was so at heart, but because it had to say something different from all other parties, and the creative Intelligenzia prompted it. So long as it was out of office active constructive minds could do its public thinking for it. But now that the Labour Party has taken office it has come of age and become an adult political party; it has lost the wild freshness and promise of youth, and begun to act for itself. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, with his piety and his political dexterity, is extremely like a Scotch, instead of a Welsh, Lloyd George, and the array of his colleagues is revealed as the very twin brothers of the Tory and Liberal knights, local councillors, provincial mayors, and so forth we have always known. The Labour Party brought down from the cloudland of promise to performance is seen to be little more than another of the numerous Liberal parties that have appeared in the vast inchoate world of British Liberalism. It has appeared and struggled to office because Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith were tiresome, obstinate egotists without an up-to-date idea between them, and because the complexity of self-conscious interests in Great Britain is too great any longer for the magnificent simplicity and “loyalties” of the old two-party system.

All this is perfectly natural and necessary. All political parties must represent the present, existing interests, existing social fears and jealousies, current delusions. No political party can represent the future, as Mr. Smillie would have us believe the Labour Party does. But it was the delusion of Karl Marx that the expropriated masses of mankind, living at a disadvantage, would necessarily realise the desirability of a more highly organised Socialist State and evolve a collective will to bring it about. This idea, through the devoted repetition of the Marxists, has infected the greater part of Socialist thought. It had manifestly infected Mr. Smillie. In so far as modern social inequalities and injustices, illuminated by modern educational influences, have brought out a steadily increasing hostility between the masses and the classes with an advantage, Marx was right, but in so far as that has involved the development of any capacity whatever to achieve a new and better order, he was wrong. The uncomfortable masses seek uncritically for some expression of their antagonism to the lucky, the dexterous, the unscrupulous, and the far-sighted who enjoy the advantages of the existing social and economic tangle, and their suffrages and passion will go to support the particular lucky, dexterous, unscrupulous, or far-sighted politicians who seem most in harmony with the hates and hopes of the stinted, hampered, and oppressed multitude. But the antagonisms and discords of the present system are as much a part of the present as its order and its success. The Labour Party as a Labour Party is no more inherently reconstructive than the Banking Interest or the Shipping Interest. Like them, it merely wants an excessive and inconsiderate share of present power and satisfactions.

I suppose if we could set aside the entangling influences of social position and traditions we should find that men and women fell into a series between two extremes of temperamental type; the Conservatives at one end, who like things to go on very much as they are going, only to be just a little richer and sounder and sunnier, and at the other end the disturbers who like fresh things to happen and who make fresh things happen. And of the disturbers there seem to be two main types: the personal adventurers who want a series of vivid events centring upon themselves, and do not care very much how much disorder is caused by their careers, and the innovators with an instinct or a mental habit of creative service—the scientific worker, the educationist, the innovating artist, the men with a passion for industrial and financial and social organisation, who will ultimately remake the world. These types mingle in most of us, we are all something of each, but in such prominent British figures as Lord Birkenhead, Mr. Winston Churchill, or Lord Beaverbrook we seem to have almost pure adventurers, and in Mr. Sidney Webb or Mr. C. P. Trevelyan almost pure creative service innovators. But the great financial adventurers are not in politics. They are behind politics. The un-co-ordinated, inexplicit world of to-day is all for the bold acquisitive egoist; he causes wars and prevents peace, the industrialist is in his financial net, he does things to the exchange and the money in our pockets becomes worthless counters, he controls the news in our newspapers, and buys the house over our heads and the ground under our feet. He turns up in all parties as they suit him, and his eternal antagonist, the creative service innovator, must use all parties as he can against him.

No party has a monopoly of creative ideals; the Labour Party little more than the Conservative. For consider what the great constructive ideas before the world at the present time are. There is the rescue of civilisation from the destructive pressure of unregulated births through the extension of the necessary knowledge for efficient birth-control. There is the reorganisation of educational method throughout the world to develop the habits of service and co-operation upon the lines so admirably demonstrated by Sanderson and the re-orientation of educational aims and material by making universal history the basis of the conception of a universal citizenship. There is the rescue of democracy from its hopeless suffocation under the party system, by the reduction in the size of representative bodies to efficient proportions, and the adoption of the method of proportional representation in large constituencies. Only in that way can the ordinary citizen be released from his slavery to party managers and brought into a direct personal relationship to the member his vote elects. There is the liberation of the economic life of the world from restrictive and destructive financial manipulations by the creation of a world authority for a regulated currency and the clearing of the world debt jungle. There is the lifting of the waste and weight of private profiteering and nationalist sabotage, from shipping and world transport and the staple productions of the world, through the creation of a group of world authorities for these ends. Everybody of intelligence knows that these are just possible achievements for mankind, and that the outlook for mankind is dangerous and on the whole dingy until they are attained and secured. But there is no political party in the world that dare do more in office than fumble and prevaricate about any of them.