GREAT BRITAIN: Party Conferences

The one thing everybody expected from the Labor Party last week when it opened its annual conference in Southport was that it was finally going to uncork its long-bottled plan of giving England Socialism and no more fooling. The only question was: just how strong a Socialist dose was the Party going to offer?

No man in the Party wanted it more potent than rich Sir Stafford Cripps who, although he is a graduate of swank Winchester College and a bencher of the Middle Temple, stands as far Left as any Briton will go who still recoils from Communism. Sir Stafford and his Leftist “Socialist Leaguers” wanted three main points incorporated in the platform on which Labor will stand when it goes before the nation either next year or in the 1936 general elections: 1) cooperation with the Communists. 2) immediate abolition of the House of Lords, 3) confiscation of industries, banking and estates without compensation.

Aligned against him were onetime Minister of Transport Herbert Morrison who at the end of last week’s conference loomed large as a candidate for Laborite Prime Minister, and “Uncle Arthur” Henderson who last week resigned from his 25-year-old secretaryship of the Party without, however, losing his influence in the Party’s affairs. But even more formidable than these antagonists were Britain’s 6,500,000 Laborites themselves of whom nearly two-and-a-half million sent postcards to the conference voting against Sir Stafford’s proposals. Deluged by this repudiation, Sir Stafford was content to take a comparatively minor place in the Party’s national executive committee, thereby giving Labor a united front far different from the faction-riddled Conservative Party’s, and making it clear that for the present, at any rate, he endorsed the milder Henderson-Morrison plan of action.

This plan called for an absolute repudiation of Communism, an eventual abolition of the House of Lords to be accelerated only if the Lords should impede Labor’s socializing activities. All industry is to be socialized, beginning with the railroads, but only after “the fullest consultation with the trade unions”—and with compensation. In the case of transportation properties, compensation to owners will be a “net reasonable maintainable revenue.” Other compensations will probably be by stock issues.

On the subject of confiscation without compensation Herbert Morrison shrewdly explained the Laborites’ reaction to the Crippsites’ demands: “Great Britain is not the type of country and has not the type of people who are going to respond readily to confiscation. At the last general election it was the working classes who were mortally afraid that their humble shillings and few pounds in the Post Office Savings Bank were endangered by us. Every Labor candidate knows that and curses it.

“One of the facts that we must face is that the workers in some ways are more concerned about their little investments than are some of the capitalists about theirs.”

Meanwhile in Bristol the Conservatives were holding their annual conference, marked as usual by factional differences over India. What interested Britons, however, was not India, but the action of the Conservative conferees regarding lotteries.

All thrifty Britons dislike lotteries but even more they dislike seeing Britain’s strict laws drive £1.000,000 a year out of Britain into Ireland. Last year His Grace the jovial, sporting Duke of Atholl ran his own disguised lottery, got £60.000 for British charities and a £25 fine for himself. To plug up the loophole he had found, the Conservative Government jammed through Parliament a new and stricter law.

Last week Britons were technically violating it by the hundred thousand to subscribe to this year’s Irish Sweepstakes. In the closing hours of last week’s conference of the Conservative Party, up rose Sir William Henry Davison, a fellow member with Atholl of the swank Carlton Club. “Ordinary citizens,” he cried, “resent the Government’s attempts to … prevent them from having a flutter. . . .” (Cheers.) Before the party leaders could collect themselves, Sir William shouted his motion: “. . . The Government should give facilities for a national lottery.” Aye! And up went hundreds of hands. Nay! A feeble few.