The nineteen-thirties resumed in July 1945, when the third Labour Government was elected and took office with a majority of 180 seats. This was the climax of the political and economic movements which had arisen from the great depression, now given special character and strength by the resolve that post-war Britain should be indeed a new world severed from the miseries of the past.
The Labour programme was a sweeping one. Set forth in a thin pamphlet called Let Us Face the Future, it proposed the implementation and extension of the wartime scheme for social security, and the nationalization of the major industries and public undertakings. It promised to bring every resource to bear on the gigantic housing and rebuilding problem, ‘to get the houses as it was necessary to get the guns and planes’.
It undertook to bring the anarchy of capitalist production under control by economic planning which would lift the levels of both production and consumption and supervise investments and prices. ‘The Labour Party is a Socialist Party, and proud of it’, the manifesto said.
The SPGB kept up with the spirit of the time. The election campaign interrupted by the war was resumed. East Ham North had to be abandoned because there were no longer the necessary ten members resident in the constituency, but Paddington North presented itself. Groves’s candidature was transferred there, and all the Party’s energy was thrown into the few weeks preceding the election. The effort was a fantastic one. Members poured into Paddington (it was rumoured that some took lodgings there to get on the electoral roll — not so much for the trivial advantage to be gained by the Party as to have the thrill of voting for the world’s first socialist candidate). The front page of the Socialist Standard was headed A SHADOW FALLS ACROSS THE CAPITALIST WORLD, and the article ended:
‘Yes, the tide is beginning to turn at last. The workers are on the scent of the source of their slavery. Let the ruling class tremble at this portent of the flood which will sweep privilege and class rule from the earth for ever. ’
A hundred thousand printed addresses were sent out from the election office in Paddington. Leaflets on special subjects were
distributed. Seventeen hundred posters were displayed all over the constituency. George Orwell came to the office and made enquiries; a member buttonholed Churchill and told him about the Party. There was remarkable interest in everything the Party did — hundreds at a time stood listening to the street-corner speakers, more than a thousand in one place on the eve of the poll. Most exciting of all were the two meetings held in the huge Metropolitan Theatre. Each time, more than two thousand people filled the place: Ambridge, who had served on the Party’s Parliamentary Committee from its inception in 1929, described it afterwards as ‘a thrill which the writer of these words will never forgot, thousands of men and women to hear the Socialist case’.25
The emphasis was entirely on the socialist case. The publication of photographs of Groves was prohibited. So was any phrase like ‘Vote for Groves’. (Two years afterwards, when an elderly woman member told the Conference that she had seen ‘Vote for Groves’ on a placard, Ambridge stood shaking with rage and shouting across the hall: ‘A lie ! That’s a bloody lie !’) Voters were urged at every meeting and in every piece of literature not to support the Party candidate unless their understanding of the socialist case was complete. Nevertheless, Groves commanded attention for himself. In one of the major parties he would have been a certain winner; the socialist case prevented his being elected, and confined his abilities to yelling at the other candidates: ‘I haven’t kissed any snotty-nosed babies ! ’
472 people voted for the SPGB candidate. The total cost of the campaign was nine hundred pounds: the votes had cost nearly two pounds each. The Party was anything but dismayed, however. It was a first attempt, and the thing was bound to grow. What gave every en¬couragement was that North Paddington had 472 convinced socialists.
If this could happen after only a few weeks’ work in a constituency, it meant that there were perhaps almost a quarter of a million socialist votes ready to be won in Britain. Nothing but the paucity of the Party’s resources stood in the way of the realization of this force making for the new society; the aim now was to put more and more candidates into the field.
There was every anticipation that the Labour bubble would soon burst. The SPGB did not believe that any problem would be solved, or that anything would be in any way different, in the post-war world; the laws of capitalism would re-assert themselves almost immediately. One of the election leaflets predicted the way things would go. Living stand¬ards were to fall:
‘The Labour Party claims that higher wages is the solution . . . International agreement to reduce wages is a much more likely
eventuality.’
Mass unemployment would return:
‘At all times, employers are scheming to get the same output with fewer workers, by introducing new machinery and more efficient methods . . . Capitalism cannot exist without unemployment, without the exploitation of the workers and without trade rivalry with foreign capitalists. ’
There would be fresh depressions, as dreadful as those of the inter-war years:
‘At the time Mr Clynes made his statement, unemployment was 500,000. By the middle of 1921, less than two years later, it was over ‘2, 000,000. Then it declined but remained well over 1,000,000 until the crisis of 1931 when it jumped to record levels. This will happen again if the a working class continues to vote for the candidates of the capitalist system.’
The statement by J. R. Clynes, in November 1919, had claimed that because of the shortage of peace-time goods full employment was assured ‘for at least a dozen years’. What it indicated for 1945, in the SPGB’s view, was the vanity of any hope that capitalism could do without unemployment or avoid crises. By this token, the Labour Govern¬ment was doomed to failure. Turner prophesied to his Hyde Park multitude that the government would fall in two years. Hardy, in the Standard, was equally confident: ‘Socialists do not need to wait to prophesy failure . . . the workers will discover that Labour administrators cannot make capitalism function in any but the accepted way.’
The SPGB’s propaganda, in fact, became increasingly pre-occupied with discrediting the Labour Party. Two pamphlets were pub¬lished, Nationalization or Socialism and Is Labour Government the Way to Socialism ? Figures were produced to show that the nationalization in 'public ownership’ of industries did not take away their capitalistic character. The shareholders remained members of the capitalist class, drawing their interest from the government stock which had been issued to them as ‘compensation’. In some cases — for example, the railways — the buying-out was even advantageous to the owners: without suffering loss of income, they were relieved by the state of enormous capital expenditures which had been in prospect. Nationalization was simply an attempt to raise the profit-making efficiency of industries by removing their self-conflicts, and no benefit at all was offered to the working class.
These arguments were, as they had been intended to be, unanswerable by the majority of the Labour Party supporters. The term public ownership’ had conveyed to the unsophisticated Labour rank-
and-file that capitalism was deposed, that the coal-mines, the railways and the other nationalized concerns were somehow to be everyone’s property (the SPGB seized with glee such instances as that of the man who stole eighteen penceworth of coal and was told by the magistrate that all coal now belonged to the King). And the Labour members of Parliament who debated with the Party were hardly any less confused: insisting that they were socialists who believed in common ownership, they had no reply to the Party’s demonstration that nationalization strengthened private ownership.
During the Labour Government years there was more than a little Conservative interest in the SPGB’s assertion that the Labour Party were not socialists at all. ‘Candidus’, in the Daily Graphic, took note of it and referred to the Party with approval more than once:
‘The only Socialists who have been consistent. . . in their attitude to genuine Socialism — are the members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, commonly known as the SPGB. The “official” Socialists are terrible snobs. They have a deep respect for size, so they sneer at the SPGB as the “Small Party of Good Boys”. But, dialectically, the SPGB possess all the aces. ’
One journalist came hurrying to learn about the Party from a strange little incident at one of the Prime Minister’s press conferences. He had asked a question which, by coincidence, implied the Party’s argument against the Labour Party. Attlee had swung round angrily and said: ‘I know you — SPGB !’ The journalist had never heard of the SPGB before, but he could not wait to discover why Attlee had been so sensitive. Not all the Labour leaders took the Party quite so seriously, however. In 1946 Groves debated with Sir Waldron Smithers, and in the retiring-room before it began the old Conservative confided that Herbert Morrison had said to him: ‘Be careful of that bunch, Sir Waldron — they’re not real socialists, you know.’ Sir Waldron had taken the words to heart, but the Party members for once appreciated irony.
The difficulty which the Party felt most strongly was that of obtaining publicity for itself. Its numbers continued to rise. By 1948 there were a thousand members (one recalls Joyce Millen pushing out of the EC room at Rugby Chambers, shouting deliriously into the General Office: ‘We’ve got a thousand ! We’ve got a thousand !’), and in another year eleven hundred was reached. The fact remained that the majority of people in Britain had scarcely heard of the SPGB. At the end of the war the Conference had agreed that the principal task con¬fronting the Party was to make itself known nationally, but this was more easily said than done.
The election campaign was disappointing in this respect. If there
Was, as many members believed, a conspiracy of silence about the Party, it had to be broken by a national election: the national press and the broadcasting authorities would have willy-nilly to make the Party widely known. In fact, very little about the SPGB was published.
Attention was focussed almost exclusively on the struggle between the big parties. What appeared in the London editions of national papers was little more than scraps, concerned mainly with the curiosity of Groves’s candidature: the man who asked people not to vote for him, the excellence of Turner’s dress (newly prosperous since the war, he had entered a phase of elegance). The sole utterance by the BBC was in the announcement of the results. They first described Groves as an Independent candidate: the members who rushed to telephone boxes were proud that they had caused the Party to be specially mentioned when the correction was made, but it was all very disappointing.
One attempt which was continually being made to obtain publicity was the flow of letters the members sent to papers. Local newspapers in most places had no objection to persistent advocacy of an unpopular cause and some members went on for years. Often they promoted controversies by replying to their own letters; a man who had written one week to state the Party’s anti-Labour case was likely to write the week after as ‘Indignant Labourite’ and perhaps ‘Christian Socialist’ too,
hotly disputing it and so initiating several weeks’ exposition of the Party Principles. The national newspapers rarely published members’ letters, however. Most members attributed this to the conspiracy; what is at least as likely in many cases is that the letters were overlong tracts designed to gain publicity rather than contribute to matters of the day.
I am not sure if this explained the failure of attempts to gain broadcasting facilities. Before the war Moses Baritz had indicated that there was some possibility, and from time to time approaches were made to the BBC. There is no doubt that the exclusion of minorities from the system of party political broadcasts was, and remains, grossly unfair (and, incidentally, highly questionable from the point of view of the Representation of the People Act). Nevertheless, the SPGB had always the opportunity of submitting scripts. I attended their preparation on two or three occasions, and they were so heavy and unimaginative (to my mind) as to invite rejection. The failures were taken as evidence that the Party was banned by the BBC on capitalist orders: ‘They dare not let us broadcast,’ a member said, ‘because what we have to say to the working class is such dynamite.’ The only mention obtained was when in 1959 Honor Balfour, reviewing the candidatures in the London County
Council elections, broadcast a brief but wholly favourable account of the SPGB.
However, pithier and livelier scripts have been rejected just the same, and observation indicates that virtually the only chance a political minority in this country has of broadcasting is as a curiosity: probably among — vide Orwell — ‘every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker’, etc. to be found. I would guess the reason to be partly lack of ordinary newsworthiness, but partly also the existence of a strong-enough anti-‘extremist’ lobby. Individual members made broadcasts, of course. Apart from Baritz, in the early nineteen-sixties a long interview with Ted Kersley, called ‘The Art Trade Runner’, was praised and repeated as a radio masterpiece; and Bill Waters gave talks on London.
If the struggle for national recognition was slow, there were more stimulating signs in the growth of communications from abroad. The Party had had a ‘Foreign Secretary’ for some time, with relatively little to do beyond keeping in touch with the companion parties. The title was changed, for obvious reasons, to ‘Overseas Secretary’, and after the war the volume of work in this department grew enormously. Literature from foreign left-wing organizations and all kinds of enquiries flooded in to the Party’s offices. The Overseas Secretary (from 1947 it was Waters) had a team of correspondents and translators working for him, and here again was an impression of a new awakening to the socialist message.
Much of the overseas correspondence came from people in the Commonwealth countries which were now beginning their fight for independence. In very many cases they were concerned not with socialism but with gaining political stature through the education in economic theory the Party offered; several of the native administrators who have risen to power in the world’s new nations were among the SPGB’s regular correspondents and enquirers. At least once, the performance was exposed. An enthusiast in Malaya followed his enquiries by describing his foundation of a scientific-socialist group which had every prospect of bearing strongly on political life there. Delighted, the SPGB Executive gave every encouragement, and sent gifts of books to help the growth of socialist understanding in Malaya. A seaman member took the opportunity to visit these new comrades — and at once wrote to tell Waters the truth. The group was virtually a fiction, its ‘founder’ an ambitious labour leader to whom the SPGB’s tuition was more than useful.
Similarly, several of the European correspondents were men with little or no intention of allying themselves with the SPGB. A number of the German social-democratic leaders were in touch for years to take in Marxist theory, just as a former generation of Labour leaders
in Britain had received their grounding in the SDF. Others were simply habitual letter-writers looking for arguments just as the SPGB members did; there was a man in Austria who wrote interminably about his conviction that world affairs were manipulated by mysterious financiers.
Ironically, the SPGB encouraged these correspondents, presumably because they wrote as individuals with an interest in the Party, but rejected all approaches by organizations which hoped to establish common ground with it. In 1947 the Spartacus Group of Holland organized a conference in Brussels of revolutionary parties. The conference, the organizers said, ‘had but one aim, and that was to establish initial contact between all the spread-out revolutionary parties, to gather together their various ideas about the present situation and on the working-class struggle for emancipation’. The small parties from France, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland which comprised the conference were shown by preliminary documents to be so close to the SPGB in doctrine and spirit that it ought, one thinks, to have been overjoyed by the news and the invitation.
Instead, the Executive Committee called a meeting of London members to discuss the matter. There were several members who saw the conference as a fresh ray of light. The organizations concerned were anti-Communist; they condemned the anarchists for supporting the Spanish war, they excluded everyone who had supported the world war, and they prognosticated doom and disaster in the post-war world. All intentions towards them vanished in doubt, however. Hardy recalled the Party’s early experience of a European conference and described International trade-union conferences as he had known them. The Initiators of this conference were not plain-minded socialists looking for a way out of chaos, he said, but hardened politicos. Thus in the end the Party agreed that it had nothing to declare but its hostility to the European revolutionaries.
It was, of course, precisely with those who seemed nearest to it that the SPGB quarrelled most strongly. One sensed, at the use of ‘socialist’ and ‘revolutionary’ from an unknown source, the hackles rise and the search for the catch which undoubtedly would be there. In forty-odd years the Party had learned to suspect not only claims of accord but any proposal for accelerating or easing the socialist process.
‘A job done quickly is a bad job,’ said one member, ‘Evolution must by definition take place slowly,’ said another. Did one sense also in these voices the feeling that socialism was, like the end of the Golden Road In Samarkand, ‘always a little further’ ?
The only centre of Party contact in Europe to which no doubt attached was in Vienna. Here, an elderly man named Rudolf Frank kept
a tiny spark alive. He had discovered what he called ‘the SPGB university’ in Britain before the 1914-18 war; ever since, he had laboured to spread the socialist message. With astonishing bravery, he had carried on all through the Nazi occupation, keeping a little stock of English pamphlets and duplicated leaflets under his bed and distributing them whenever opportunities arose; for several years, he might have been sent to a concentration camp at any time. He sent regular letters to the Overseas Secretary and the Party Conferences, detailing the ‘confusionism’ and ‘trickery’ (Fitzgerald had been his friend) of the Austrian parties. And in the parliamentary elections he composed lengthy statements of the revolutionary position for his little group of associates to write on their ballot papers. One has nothing but admiration to feel for these few old men standing in the polling-booths writing microscopically for half an-hour at a time to show that, Nazi terror or democratic government, capitalism was all the same to them.26
The Labour Government in Britain did not fall in two years, and the depression did not come. Nevertheless, the SPGB continued to ride high. The meetings were prolific, the membership bigger than it had ever been. The Party found money for elections, for more mass rallies at the Metropolitan, and even to employ speakers to lecture and organ¬ize in the provincial cities. If there was no mass unemployment as yet, there was the obvious start to the inevitable economic troubles in the balance-of-trade crisis of 1947. The Labour Party was forced to make the workers tighten their belts, just as the Party had predicted. Govern¬ment posters were displayed all over the country: WE WORK OR WANT. The Party produced similar posters and stuck them everywhere possible: WE'SOMETIMES WORK, WE ALWAYS WANT.
But there were clouds as well. In 1946 the seat at North Paddington fell vacant, and again Groves stood for the Party in the by- election. This time, his poll was not much more than half the previous number. The members produced ingenious hypotheses to explain the decline to their opponents; McClatchie, who had written ‘A Shadow Falls Across the Capitalist World’, argued in the Standard that it showed an advance in socialist understanding. The truth was only too sadly obvious, however. The 472 convinced socialists had not existed; half or more had been momentary sympathizers, affable idiots prepared to try anything, perhaps even old people unable to mark their ballot-papers properly. A section of the Party declared itself against any further electoral attempts. Several hundred pounds, they said, given to the capitalist class with the promise of more to come — and all to confirm what the Party already knew, that the working class were not yet socialists.
The possibility of years of decline for the Party and the left- wing movement could not then have been envisaged. Who in 1946 could have imagined that unemployment and depression — iron laws of the capitalist system — were to recede for a whole generation, and that working-class living standards would become in fifteen years higher than they had ever been ? The personal circumstances of most members had changed for the better since the war, but no-one saw significance in the fact. It presaged not only social conditions in which the socialist case would struggle to find relevance, but also the disappearance of the indigent, defiant, self-taught working man who had given the Party its unique existence. The changes of attitude within the Party were largely, indeed, the unconscious recognition of social development.
New and unattractive individual attitudes appeared. The Party had traditionally maintained that the non-political conduct of its members was none of its business. In earlier years this had referred simply to the shifts and illegalities which were part of the struggle to keep heads above water. Now it became a problematic principle in the face of a section who claimed, implicitly or explicitly, that the working class who believed in the capitalist system were fair game. At a time when membership and activity were high, it provided a shameful and worrying note for many of the Party. Twenty years later an anarchist paper, stung by an attack in the Socialist Standard, recalled the SPGB having petty criminals and fraudsters and a couple who ran a call-girl agency in its milks. Younger members were astonished and disbelieving; but it had been only too true.
Whatever the members did, the Executive was without ground or mandate for taking action. The common sentiment was Hardy’s: ‘Why can’t these damned people get out of the Party ? ’ After the spectacular trial and Sunday-paper ‘confessions’ of the Langtrys — the call-girl agents — Mark Langtry resigned, but his wife remained a member and, immediately after the case, sat as a delegate to the annual Conference. It was, of course, an intensely difficult situation. To create a facility whereby the Executive or the Party could judge people unworthy of membership would have been impossible. It would be unfair to convey that there were not members who thought the unworthiness palpable. Many did. I sat beside Ambridge at the tellers’ table when Joyce Langtry was at the Conference, and he said with loathing: ‘The cow ! Sitting here among decent working people ! ’
But their feeling did not rule the Party. In 1944 a branch asked the Conference to consider:
‘That the private conduct of a member can be of serious injury In the Party, and if in a particular instance the EC is reasonably satisfied that it is, the EC shall be at liberty to conduct an investigation. ’
The resolution was lost by a decisive majority, however. And when a member applied to re-join after lapsing while he served a sentence for burglary, there was a faction in his branch that would have rejected him because his conviction was for burgling poor working-class houses. They were over-ruled; the sole condition of membership was socialist knowledge.
No doubt several factors contributed to this state of affairs. What it signified in its Party context, however, was a loss in working-class identifications. Partly, of course, it was that changing times had brought a different type of member; the founders and their like were passing away. However, the real identification had failed earlier, in the acceptance of pacifism as a basis for opposition to the war. I do not mean that pacifism itself is a delinquent attitude. But the attempted hybrid of if with class interests meant having a foot in no camp, and thence to the absence of a sense of obligations in dealings with fellow-men.
The truly disreputable thing in members’ eyes was to have served in the Armed Forces. Even though the rules had acknowledged the power of conscription, and the decision remained that servicemen were eligible for membership, the prejudice was strong. In 1948 a serving airman applied to join my own branch; he answered every question on socialism admirably, but the members judged that his knowledge was not established, and the motion to enrol him was lost. In 1950, when the Executive named Bill Waters as one of the two Party candidates for the General Election, the West Ham branch which covered the constituency were adamant that they would not have him. The argument covered every phase of suitability, but the true reason was known to everyone: Water, had not only accepted his military service, but had become a sergeant as well.
There was, indeed, a special antagonism to Waters arising from a remarkable incident during the war. To show that the Party ruling on military service was no dead letter, the EC invited him to be chairman at the Easter Conference during his leave. But not even the Executive Committee expected Waters to come in uniform, looking — he was a magnificently-built, crag-like man — every inch a sergeant. A military chairman at a war-resisters’ conference ! The heart of the members’ hostility to conscripts was touched on here. As the situation presented itself to them, it was they, the conscientious objectors, who submitted to the hardships, and the called-up men who took the easy way.
If the nominal argument over anti-working-class employment had been all the story, other occupational lines would have been drawn by the prejudice against servicemen. But policemen were not barred from membership — a railway policeman named Thurlow sat on the
Executive and the Parliamentary Committee for years; another member was a bailiff; and in pre-war days there was even a very old parson who went to lectures sometimes at Great Dover Street and said it was only his age that stopped him joining. As has already been indicated, the Party refused to take up questions over what its members did. The real complaint against Waters and the others who had gone into the forces was, paradoxically, that they had dodged the column and had an easy war while others slept in prison and struggled on land-labourers’ pay.
Thus, ex-servicemen were expected to apologize and explain.
‘I suppose you feel ashamed of what you did ? ’ was the standard question to them, and ‘Well, I resigned before I went’, or ‘It was before I met the Party and learned better’, the standard answer. It remained a sharp point, a generation afterward. In the post-war years Wilmott was a doyen of the Party, the most sought-after of all the members after Hardy and Turner. He was to be found always surrounded by a crowd, dispensing knowledge and wit while he drew at his eternal shag cigarettes. But it was never forgotten that he had gone and joined the Air Force. In dispute, there was always someone to say ‘You helped kill members of the working class’; and when he left, it was remembered above all.
These attitudes, the expression of the SPGB members’ convictions about their relationship to society, were to be the mainsprings of controversies which pulled the Party apart when the second decade of the ’thirties had ended. In the immediacy of the post-war years, they were obscured by the excitements of meetings, debates, arguments, watching the Party grow, and waiting for the depression to come.
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