GREAT BRITAIN: Very Free Speech

The right of free speech still existed in Parliament last week, and British radicals exercised it to the point of violent sweating.

The most radical man in Parliament is not Laborite Emanuel Shinwell, the chief voice of those few Labor Party members who have refused to march along with the Churchill Conservative-Labor coalition Government. Nor is it Parliament’s only Communist, moon-faced Willie Gallacher, who is delighted to find Winston Churchill marching along with Joseph Stalin.

Well to the left of both are the three Independent Labor Party members, most notable of whom is broguish John (“Jock”) McGovern, 54, a bull-tempered Scottish Socialist who believes that Dictator Stalin has long since sold Karl Marx and the Workers of the World down the river; who once, when Stalin arrested some Indian Communists as Trotskyists, lambasted Communist Gallacher as “a creature so completely under the thumb of Moscow that he does not dare to stand up and defend British subjects.”

Jock McGovern, a former plumber who represents Clydeside ship workers of Glasgow, is as unreconstructed a Socialist as ever caused conservatives to wince at his bad manners. He is no scholar-&-gentleman leftist like Economist Harold Laski, who recently, and politely, observed: “. . . we must begin a revolution by consent now or we shall get a revolution by violence after the war.” But Jock McGovern would endorse this statement with the addition of a little invective.

In 1931, when Jock McGovern refused to sit down at the Speaker’s request, he was ejected from the House of Commons in a shirt-tearing, low-comedy uproar involving himself & friends v. the Sergeant-at-Arms and elderly assistants in ritual tail coats.

In 1933, just after the late George V had addressed Parliament, Jock McGovern addressed George and his Queen as follows: “You are a gang of lazy, idle parasites living on the wealth other people create.”

Early in the war, Jock McGovern advocated a negotiated peace, on the grounds that there was little to choose between capitalist Britain and totalitarian Germany. Recently, when told that he would have to do a turn of fire-watching on the House of Commons roof, Jock McGovern replied that he would “see the Government in hell.”

Last week British democracy allowed Jock McGovern and the other two Independent Laborites, Campbell Stephen and James Maxton, their day in Parliament. They blamed the war on capitalist greed. They attacked Prime Minister Churchill as a “commercial imperialist.” Jock McGovern called the Churchill-Roosevelt Atlantic Charter “one of the grossest pieces of deceit in modern times” since “it is to be applied to the nations that have been overrun by Hitler while the independent government which it proposes to give them is denied to territories overrun in the past by Britain.” He said that anything except guaranteed “independence of our own colonial peoples” was “humbug, deceit and hypocrisy of the worst kind.” He declared that the U.S. was ready to use British bodies “to blast a way into the markets of the Continent and establish the financial system of Wall Street.”

Finally the Independent Laborites offered an amendment calling for immediate self-government for British dependencies, for a Socialist Charter instead of the Atlantic Charter. As tellers, Jock McGovern and one of his Independent Labor comrades were prevented from voting. The amendment was defeated, 326-to-2.