Odd People

by Basil Thomson

  In March the storm centre moved from the engineering industries to the Triple Alliance and there were signs of co-operation between ex-servicemen and the extreme Labour organisations. The Sailors’, Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Union exacted a pledge from its members that they would take no part against strikers and certain branches of the National Federation of Ex-Servicemen were for supporting the miners on strike in south Wales. This attitude was perfectly natural. The men had been led by public speeches to imagine that they were coming home to find things much easier for them than they had been before the war: they found a shortage not only of houses but of many other comforts, such as beer. But there were hopeful signs: the Workers’ Committees were losing power; the propaganda in favour of shorter hours had failed; the ballot of the Electrical Trade Union on the question of striking to secure a forty-four-hour week had left the extremists in the minority and the report of the Joint Committee on the Industrial Conference was a step towards a better understanding between capital and Labour. All this illustrated a fact too little realised in England – namely, that the great body of Labour opinion is not and never has been in favour of violence. Unfortunately, the older men prefer the quiet of their homes in the evening to attending stormy branch meetings at which a number of hot-headed youths make speeches about the class-war without knowing about the interests of their trade and howl down any moderate speaker who talks common sense. Consequently, the extremists have things entirely their own way. They pass resolutions which are sent to headquarters as representing the real views of the branch and it is not until the time comes for a ballot that the real weakness of their position is made evident.

  During April there was a wide extension of craft unionism. Agricultural labourers, shop assistants, policemen and actors became trade unionists. Ex-servicemen had become persuaded that employers were attempting to re-engage men on pre-war rates and there were frequent demonstrations. As long as the international movement was concerned only with the general interests of Labour it was a more or less academic matter, but now for the first time we had in Europe a revolutionary government amply supplied with funds, which was prepared to finance and instruct the revolutionary agitators in every civilised country in the hope of producing a world revolution, without which its own tenure of office was recognised to be precarious. For the first time in history, the revolutionary agitator need not be a fanatic, for his profession had now become lucrative and a loud voice and a glib tongue became worth anything from £6 to £10 a week. The Soviet government, or rather, the Council of the Third International, under which it chose to screen its activities, had been told by its representative in England that a revolution was certain within six months. In France and Italy it was to come even sooner and in Germany the pressure of the extreme left would soon force the majority socialists out of power. Then the effigy of Karl Marx would be worshipped in every capital and the world would have entered into the Millennium.

  One result of all this was to augment the little band of intellectual revolutionaries who have always bloomed among us modest and unseen. Most of these are men who see in a future Labour government a short cut to power. They think that it is easy to be a Triton among minnows. Not a few of them are ex-officers in the navy and army; and even among the undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge and in one or two of the public schools, there are little cliques of ‘Parlour Bolsheviks’.

  At the Municipal Elections in November 1919 the Labour candidates had a sweeping victory. Many had declared themselves revolutionary and were determined to convert the municipal organisations into municipal Soviets, but responsibility soon began to dim these fiery spirits and it was maliciously reported that many of them were more concerned with the social status of their wives and with the question of payment for their municipal work than they were with revolution.

  Then began the great propaganda campaign for nationalisation of the mines. More than a million leaflets were printed, countless speeches were delivered and for a moment it seemed as if a passion for nationalisation was to sweep the country. Soon, however, it became evident that nobody quite knew what nationalisation meant. Many miners thought they were to own the mines themselves and work the number of hours that happened to suit them at a scale of pay laid down by themselves. When these were told that the government was to own the mines and that they were to have civil servants as their bosses they became grave. The moulders’ strike was gradually paralysing many industries and swelling the ranks of the unemployed. In December there were rumours of lightning strikes among the dockers, as well as the railwaymen and the abolition of the unemployment donation was causing widespread discontent. Ex-soldiers began to claim that the National Relief and the Canteen Funds should be used for their benefit. The year 1919 closed with the uneasy feeling that, though we might be readjusting ourselves more smoothly than any other nation, we must be prepared for serious disturbances.

  Forecasts in political matters are proverbially wrong. By the end of the year the great question of nationalisation was in a state of suspended animation, scarcely to be distinguished from dissolution. The Councils of Action which in August had almost threatened to become Soviets were now derisively termed in Labour circles ‘Councils of Inaction’, and little more was to be heard of them. Of the really great menace to civilisation that was so soon to fall upon the world nobody seemed to be thinking at all.

  About this time I remember having a long conversation with the late Dr Rathenau before he accepted office in Germany. He said:

  Hitherto we have always considered the consumer as a constant factor and concerned ourselves with over- and under-production. Before the war we never thought that the consumer could cease to consume. That is the real cause of the trade depression and unemployment.

  The trade depression, dark as it is, has had a sobering effect on the wilder spirits in revolutionary labour. Trade unions had blundered into the political field and had tried to coerce the government on matters of foreign policy which they did not understand. Many working men were under the delusion that the Councils of Action had prevented the government from going to war with Russia and they were considering what they should do about the Irish, the Japanese and the Indian questions. The effect of all this had been temporarily to impair the influence of Parliament, but the British working man never really takes much interest in foreign affairs and this insular tendency has been the great stumbling-block of revolutionary agitation.

  It was possible about this time to make an estimate of the number of class-conscious communists who would be prepared to lay down their lives for their ideals. The membership of the communist parties was then put at 20,000, but after a close study of individuals, extended over many months, I was inclined to put the number of would-be martyrs at well under twenty. The communists were quite aware that, though minorities could make revolutions, when one embarks upon revolution by bloodshed it is well to have the support of numbers. Otherwise, martyrdom may loom a little too near. It was all very well for Mr Tom Mann to boast that in Russia 60,000 communists were in control of more than 80,000,000 Russians, but where would 20,000 British communists, largely diluted with aliens and Jews, be when they tried to hold down 45,000,000 in this country? The Russians had devised a recruiting system of their own. In every union a ‘cell’ was to be established which would grow unseen, as in the incipient stage of cancer, until the heart of the union was eaten out. They counted upon the behaviour of some of the leaders of British trade unionism, who seemed to favour the dictatorship of the proletariat, not knowing that the more sober had been driven into the Councils of Action by the fear of being left out in the cold.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE RETURN TO SANITY

  AS I HAVE said, publicity has been the best weapon of defence against the forces of disorder. The fact is that there is little love lost between revolutionary leaders and an atmosphere of cold suspicion broods over their conspiracies. At one period German communism was rent in twain by excessive subsidies from Moscow, because those who
did not get what they held to be their fair share turned upon their leaders.

  I suppose that few men in England have had to read so many revolutionary speeches and revolutionary pamphlets and leaflets as I have. All display the same ignorance of elementary economics – an ignorance so childish that it cannot be assumed. They seemed to think that capital was gold kept in a box, perhaps under the capitalist’s bed, perhaps in the vaults of a bank and that when the ‘proletariat’ became dictators they had only to dip into the box to get all the capital they needed for running a communist state. If the capital ran short they could always raise money by taxation. It had never dawned upon them that there is comparatively very little gold; that under the communist state there will be nobody to tax and that as soon as private credit is destroyed capital goes up in smoke, as the Marxists in Russia have found out for themselves.

  Another of their fallacies is the belief, quite honestly entertained, that the proletariat is 90 per cent of the population, whereas, in fact, the people who work with their hands and their families form, in a country with a large middle class such as England, actually little more than half the population, and that the other half would not sit down tamely under the forcible rule of the least educated moiety of the community. Under the stress of unemployment they are beginning to understand that these islands cannot support a population of 45,000,000 except by foreign trade, but they do not even now know how much capital the people of this country have invested in undertakings abroad.

  The Statist gives the value of our foreign investments as follows:

  India and Colonies – £481,529,927

  Argentina – £118,339,585

  Brazil – £88,227,036

  Chile – £27,563,340

  Cuba – £14,563,385

  Mexico – £33,822,322

  Peru – £6,988,691

  United States – £164,201,850

  Rest of America – £11,128,188

  Austria – £6,247,896

  Bulgaria – £3,819,499

  Denmark – £6,844,600

  Egypt – £6,427,577

  Finland – £3,441,450

  Greece – £3,301,644

  Hungary – £2,077,240

  Norway – £4,833,250

  Romania – £4,429,875

  Russia – £46,214,906

  Siberia – £994,993

  Sweden – £4,556,000

  Turkey – £4,745,869

  Other European countries – £9,280,176

  China – £27,805,737

  Dutch colonies – £12,236,971

  Japan – £22,447,240

  Persia – £2,706,250

  Philippines – £2,238,283

  Siam – £1,102,500

  Rest of Asia – £175,000

  Africa – £2,702,603

  Others – £2,436,146

  Total – £1,127,431,129

  It has never been explained why the political phenomena in one country appear simultaneously in practically all civilised countries. The general wave of unrest among Labour in 1912 was not a local phenomenon; it was like the wave that ran through Europe in 1848, though of course it was less marked. From Norway to Italy, from Siberia to Portugal, the same phenomenon was to be noticed.

  As I said in an earlier chapter, on Armistice Day there were simultaneous attempts at revolution in Switzerland and Holland, countries which had suffered severely from the war though they took no part in it. Italy and Spain were unstable and in the United States and Canada the spread of Bolshevik ideas had begun to cause serious alarm. The Americans and the Canadians had passed legislation making it a penal offence to advocate a change in the form of government by force or violence, or even to carry the Red Flag in processions. In America they proceeded to apply the new law so drastically that there was some reaction. As long as the much abused ‘DORA’, by which the Defence of the Realm Act had come popularly to be known, was in force, there was no need for fresh legislation in England, but when the Act lapsed on 1 September 1921, the defects in the English laws against sedition began acutely to be felt. There was, it is true, an Act which gave power to the government to declare a state of emergency, when certain powers made under the Emergency Powers Act would come into force, but until a state of emergency is declared the authorities have to rely upon the old Sedition Laws, which entail indictment for seditious libel or seditious conspiracy, or for incitement to injure persons or property.

  Now procedure by indictment is a slow process and generally out of proportion to the offence: the offender is given what he most desires – an exaggerated importance and advertisement. If there happens to be on the jury one person who sympathises with his views or is terrorised by an Anarchist society, he will escape altogether and even if he is convicted and sentenced he must be treated as a first-class misdemeanant with privileges which, to persons of his stamp, reduces imprisonment to the level of a rather amusing experience. Moreover, the delay between the offence and the conviction deprives the sentence of its value as a deterrent. In the provinces a seditious speaker may have to wait four or five months for his trial. By that time the emergency which made it necessary for the government to proceed against him has gone and the prosecution is then accused of vindictiveness in continuing the proceedings when the need for a warning has lapsed.

  What is wanted is summary procedure, where the offender can receive a short deterrent sentence. It is true that he may now be summoned to be bound over to be of good behaviour, but this penalty is ludicrously inadequate. As it stands, the law punishes a subordinate who does some violent act at the instigation of another and leaves practically untouched the organiser of a campaign of violence and outrage. After the lapse of DORA there was a very marked recrudescence of incitement to violence. It is quite true that most of the inflammatory speeches and writings of irresponsible agitators may be treated with contempt, but from time to time cases do occur in which such incitement cannot safely be left unchecked. It has always been noticed that a timely prosecution and conviction of one or two persons has a very sobering effect on the rest and that when an agitator is sent to prison for two or three months he never regains his old ascendency.

  At present it is not an offence to introduce money or valuables from abroad for the purpose of inciting people to violent revolution in this country. Any bill prepared for the House of Commons should make it an offence to import any document of which the publication would be an offence in the United Kingdom, except for purposes of study and any money or valuables brought in with the above-mentioned object.

  It is curious now to look back upon our purblind extravagance during the two years following the war. We were far more alive in the early part of 1918 to the need for rigid economy after the war than we were in those boisterous days of rejoicing. The banks were full of money. There were strikes, but everyone felt that as soon as the moulders’ strike was liquidated there would be a boom in all industries. We continued feasting and dancing for many months. As far as unemployment is concerned, if people had been as careful about expenditure as they are now, they would have money free for purchasing what they need.

  Disastrous as it was economically, the coal strike which began on 18 August 1920 let light into many dark corners. It was the last chance of the Triple Alliance. It must be confessed that the coal-owners might have smoothed away many difficulties if they had issued at an earlier stage a statement of their case in simple terms and plain figures. As it was, not only the miners but the public failed to understand what their offer really was. Many of the steadier miners abstained from voting in the ballot and the extremists had things all their own way. There was an overwhelming majority for rejecting the owners’ terms.

  This brought matters to a head and there were few people who did not think that we were in for what amounted to a general strike. Knowing that if the other unions called out their men a minority only would respond, I felt certain that some pretext would be found at the eleventh hour for withdrawing from the false position. At the historic meeting in on
e of the committee rooms at the House of Commons, when certain members sought enlightenment, it cannot be said that the spokesman for the owners made matters much clearer, whereas Mr Frank Hodges conducted his case with the greatest ability. It was by accident that he happened to be in the lobby at all, but many crises are resolved by accident. He spoke the absolute truth when he said that the miners were less concerned about the National Pool than they were about their wages. Comparatively few miners understood what a National Pool really was; they did understand what a cut in wages meant and there were many wild stories about cuts of 9s. a week. The surrender of the National Pool was the turning-point. The strike had been called for midnight on 15 April and still I felt sure that the hard facts, which must be known to the railway and transport leaders, would prevail.

  The government was right in taking no chances. The organisation for feeding the large cities was even better than it was in the railway strike of 1919 and as a means of coercing the public the strike must have failed in any case. Everything turned upon the meeting of the other two unions. It was a stormy meeting and the leaders were glad to have the excuse of the surrender of the National Pool for calling the strike off.

  When the dust and the shouting had died down and the great captains were denouncing one another in private, it was possible to see what 15 April, ‘Black Friday’, which the Daily Herald hoped to be able to refer to as ‘Red Friday’, really meant. ‘Yesterday,’ said its editorial, ‘was the heaviest defeat that has befallen the Labour movement within the memory of man.’ If for ‘Labour movement’ the writer had said ‘communist movement’, the statement would have been accurate.