Book Review: ‘Loyalists and Loners’
May 9, 2017
Sour milk
‘Loyalists and Loners’, by Michael Foot (Collins, £15.00)
The Socialist Party of Great Britain
Part of the World Socialist Movement
May 9, 2017
Sour milk
‘Loyalists and Loners’, by Michael Foot (Collins, £15.00)
February 15, 2017
A campaign is afoot outside Labour Party circles to build up Mr. Bevan. A typical comment on him was that of a political columnist of the Empire News on Sunday, December 9th.
“Nye was superb on Wednesday. The speech was witty, persuasive, colourful and trenchant. It held the House enthralled By comparison, Hugh Gaitskell sounded like a tired and irritable schoolmaster.”
Of course one reason for this boost of Bevan is to score off Gaitskell, and make trouble in the Labour Party—it takes attention off the Tories’ troubles over Eden. But there is more to it than that. Some weeks ago, the Economist, which owes no particular allegiance to the Tory Party, being more concerned with the wider problem of keeping British Capitalism safe, wrote that Bevan “might be capable of being a very good Foreign Secretary indeed.” (Economist 6/10/56.)
February 10, 2017
A not very secret service
‘MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations’, by Stephen Dorril. (Fourth Estate, London 2000. 907 pages)
Even before this book had been put on sale in bookshops, review copies had given rise to considerable controversy. Towards the end of MI6 (p.722), Dorril asserts:
“Another MI6 catch was ANC leader Nelson Mandela. Whether Mandela was recruited in London before he was imprisoned in South Africa is not clear, but it is understood that on a recent trip to London he made a secret visit to MI6’s training section to thank the Service for its help in foiling two assassination attempts directed against him soon after he became President.”
October 10, 2016
The race is on for the Labour nomination at Northloft, a safe seat where the present MP, Fred Parcel, stands down at the next election. Northloft lies athwart a main line railway which in the nineteenth century changed it into a blackened industrial suburb. Some famous Victorian capitalists set down factories there, with terraced streets with workers’ homes in red brick and grey slate. Between the wars council estates were laid out and then came wedges of speculatively-built, cherry-blossomed semis whence clerks set out each day to ride on the railway to the office.
September 17, 2016
It was announced in the Press on January 2nd, 1941, that the Home Secretary, Mr. Morrison, had suppressed the Daily Worker and a journal known as The Week, because of their “systematic publication of matter calculated to foment opposition to the prosecution of the war to a successful issue.” This action was taken under Regulation 2D of the Defence (General) Regulations. The Times (January 22nd) gives the following further details : ―
“The effect of the Orders (the announcement continues) is that if any person prints, publishes, or distributes, or is in any way concerned in printing, publishing, or distributing either of these papers, he will be committing an offence.
Trade Unions today are respectable organisations. Their leaders move in lofty circles, both nationally and internationally, and sit on royal commissions and boards of major charities. Unions, too, are to some extent partners with employers in the management of production, and are consulted to varying degrees by governments who need their advice and cooperation. But this situation is fairly recent: less than fifty years ago, union involvement with government was minimal. It is only just over a century since unions achieved any adequate legal status, and fifty years before that they were actually illegal.
July 5, 2016
It is with great sorrow that we report the death on 10 March of Bristol comrade Jim Flowers following a stroke.
Jim was politically active right up until his death, attending meetings and following up his well known correspondence with the local press. He joined The Socialist Party in 1936 and for several decades was a well known figure on Durdham Downs, where he struggled to keep alive the ideas of socialism.
Jim had a secular upbringing from which he never strayed. His father, who refused a CBE, was a co-founder of the TGWU along with Ernest Bevin. He was a trade unionist the whole of his working life and, when a local newspaper report referred to Jim as the draughtsmen’s leader in a DATA strike at the British Aircraft Corporation, he promptly wrote in to point out that he was merely their representative. Of his early experience in the Labour Party Jim said he always thought there was something wrong because there were so many parsons in it.
June 5, 2016
Since 1932, when the Glasgow dockers broke away from the Transport and General Workers’ Union and formed their present organisation, the Scottish T. & G. W. Union, they have opposed the English dockers’ struggles for decasualisation of dock labour. Recruitment to the Glasgow Union has (with one exception) been always based on the hereditary principle and restricted to docker’s sons.
March 15, 2016
Political groups are nowadays two-a-penny. Facing the Tories, National Liberals and National Labour Party, which make up the Chamberlain Government are the opposition Liberals, the Labour Party and its affiliated parties, the Co-operative Party, the I.L.P. and the Communists. Then there is Lloyd George’s Council of Action, the Labour Co-operative joint campaign, the Churchill-Sandys-Atholl ‘Hundred Thousand’ movement, and the latest addition, the Cripps’ Manifesto for an alliance of all genuine friends of democracy and opponents of the Chamberlain Government. Sir Stafford Cripps argues that if all the genuine friends of democracy got together, they would be numerous enough to defeat Chamberlain at the next election, but lots of genuine friends have lost no time in telling Cripps that he is a disruptionist, and they will have none of him and his movement.
December 3, 2015
A Labour leader looks back
‘The Braddocks’, by Bessie Braddock, M.P., Macdonald, 30s.
When Labour achieved its landslide victory under Attlee in 1945, one of its leaders (Mr. Greenwood, father of the present “shadow cabinet” minister) made a speech to the jubilant crow of M.P.s at Westminster saying what a fine varied lot they were: barristers, solicitors, doctors, business men—as well as trade union leaders and the sons of toil. We do not recall that he said anything about noticing any Socialist among them; but no doubt this might be because it was taken for granted that they were all Socialists.