Towards the Labour Party Conference

[p008] TOWARDS THE LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE HEN the annual conference of the Labour Party meets at Brighton on September 30 many problems will confront the delegates. Before they tackle the conference agenda they will have to decide for themselves what sort of a conference this is to be. Will they be content with a leisurely discussion of the various policy statements which have emanated from Transport House? Or will they look upon the conference as the starting point of a great campaign to drive the Tories out of office and return a Labour Government to power? On the answer to these questions depends the sort of policy which will emerge from Brighton. For Lab- our will never rally the necessary support at the polls if it depends only on the criminal record and ‘mis- takes’ of the Tory Government. What the rank and file of the Labour movement expects from the Brighton conference is a positive Socialist policy: not just a tin- kering with the capitalist system here and there or the pie in the sky of a better pension in 1990, but a policy which will establish the definitive foundations of a socialist economy immediately after the next General Election. Labour needs a policy which will so fire the imagination that it will force the Tories out of office long before the ‘normal’ three years which remain of this Parliament have passed. In this past year Labour had great opportunities. The old-style imperialist attack on Egypt last Novem- ber roused the workers as nothing has done since the end of the war. All they needed was a call from Transport ‘House and the Trades Union Congress and 9 the people broke out of the strait-jacket of Parlia- mentary formalism and demonstrated on the streets. Yet if-the Tory leaders still live in the age of Palmer- ston and gunboat diplomacy, the official Labour lead- ership behave as if we were still in the pre-1914 era, when concessions could fairly easily be wrung out of a British capitalist class enjoying world supremacy. However the unmistakable mood of the workers in the mines and factories, the militant demonstrations up and down the country halted Eden’s Suez madness. Gaitskell’s two-faced speeches in the House of Com- mons achieved nothing. The Tories ran away before the all too obvious hints of extra-Parliamentary action. If such action had taken place, who could tell whe- ther there would not have been more than a mere replacement of Eden by Hugh Gaitskell at No. 10— perhaps, a pressing forward to the ending of the capi- talist system itself? If the workers were roused to action by the naked- ly imperialist foreign policy of the Tory Government, they were stung to fury by the openly anti-working- class character of the Rent Act. The publication of the Rent Bill was another golden opportunity for many-sided working-class action: in Parliament, in in- dustry and on the streets. On this issue, too, the tradi- tion of working-class struggle was on the side of in- dustrial action, for it was the striking workers of Clydeside who in 1915 won the first battle for Rent control. Here again the Labour leaders lost a fruitful opportunity. They confined their opposition to the new Rent Bill almost entirely to Parliamentary debate: To

[p009] add insult to injury, Morgan Phillips announced a nation-wide campaign for May, only a few weeks be- fore the Bill was due to become law. This campaign never got further than the Transport House circular letter. Labour and the middle classes The hypocrisy of the Right-wing Labour Party leaders was also exposed in another way by this fail- ure to wage a militant campaign against the Rent Bill. For years we have been hearing from Herbert Morri- son and others how important it is for Labour to win the support of the ‘middle classes’. Here, if ever, was an issue on which that support could have been won. Wide sections of the middle class were shaken out of their sense of security by the Rent Act’s implied threat to their homes. They looked round desperately for leadership—and this should clearly have come from the political and industrial wings of organized Labour. All the middle class received, however, was a set of Parliamentary speeches which achieved practically no- thing. There can be no doubt that at Brighton the Labour leadership will be called to account for this abject failure. . Unlike the Labour leaders, however, the rank and file are expressing their determination to launch a counter-offensive against the Tories. In South Wales, for example, the miners have called for direct indus- trial action against the Rent Act. This mood is matched in other centres throughout the country. Even now, after this vicious measure has become law, the work- ers are eager to fight to prevent the landlords from putting the Act into operation. This same militant spirit is also reflected in the anger which has greeted the anti-nationalization speeches of Sir Hartley Shawcross and Richard Stokes. Aneurin Bevan, sensitive as ever to the changing moods of the rank and file of the Labour Party (he has an unerring instinct for saying today what the workers were saying yesterday) calls for total opposi- tion to Britain’s manufacture and testing of the H-bomb and supports a policy of bringing the workers out on to the streets to make this demand felt. This, then, is the mood of rising militancy which the platform will have to face when the delegates as- semble at Brighton. The Right-wing leaders will try to direct the discussion into safe channels, and the agenda will undoubtedly arrange for most of the discussion time to be given over to consideration of the various policy statements which Transport House has issued since last year’s conference. These statements are undoubtedly very important. They merit the closest attention. It is because of their importance that Labour Review has decided in this and subsequent issues to publish editorial comment and criticism of Labour’s policy statements. We hope our readers will send us their own comments for pub- lication. It is the clear duty of the Marxist movement to try to help the delegates at Brighton to prepare the ground for a General Election programme for Labour, a programme which will win a large majority of the electors and put an end, for all time, to Tory domina- tion of British political life. Labour’s colonial policy We begin this series of discussion articles with this review of the three pamphlets dealing with Labour’s 101 colonial policy. We start with the colonial question not only because these pamphlets happened to be the first of the series to be issued but also because the sincerity of any socialist living in a metropolitan coun- ‘try is tested by his attitude towards the struggles of the colonial peoples for national independence, for their right to determine their own form of government. The first of the three pamphlets on colonial policy, called The Plural Society, is already official Labour policy; it was adopted last year at the Blackpool con- ference. Two more statements, Economic Aid and Smaller Territories still remain to be debated at an annual conference. Plural society ‘Plural society’ is the term used to describe those British colonies where people of different races are liv- ing together. It is an omnibus term of ever there was one, for it is used to group together such countries as Trinidad in the West Indies (where the descendants of African slaves live side by side with people of Euro- pean, Indian and Chinese origin), Malaya (where we find Malays, Chinese, Indians and Europeans) and Southern Rhodesia (where a tiny white minority exer- cises a monopoly of political power over the African people). The general tone of the pamphlet betrays its Fabian origins. It talks about the British Government impersonally—as if it is a matter of no importance whether a Labour, Liberal or Tory Government is in power at Westminster. On page 10 for example, we read: ‘But the British Government could not overlook the fact that there were large African populations to whom it owed as much responsibility as to the small European groups.’ The intention behind this method of treating the problems of colonialism is clear. It is to maintain the tradition of a ‘bi-partisan’ approach to colonial questions. As a result the Labour theoreti- cians are quite unable to come to grips with the real state of affairs in the colonial areas today. Naturally no importance is attached to the fact that the British Empire came into existence as an essential part of the development of British capitalism. On the contrary one is left: with the impression that we are still ex- pected to believe in the ‘white man’s burden’, in the hoary old fable that the British Empire grew up as a result of a missionary zeal to bring civilization to primitive. backward peoples. We are apparently ex- pected to ignore the ‘nasty’ materialistic explanation which talks of capitalism’s drive for new markets, for new sources of raw material and, later, for profitable fields of investment of surplus capital. To maintain the imperialist grip on these colonies, successive colonial administrations (those appointed by Tory, Liberal and Labour Governments alike) have deliberately fostered in colonial territories a policy of ‘divide and rule’, carefully nurturing the privileges of the white minorities and, with equal care, ensuring that the native colonial populations provided capitalist en- terprises with cheap labour-power to produce super- profits for British capitalism. This has always been the sole aim of colonial policy, and any realistic analysis of British colonial policy has to start from this point. _ At seems to be impossible, however, for the ‘offi- cial’ thinkers of the Labour Party to break from the ideology of imperialism. Imperialism is of course pre-

[p010] dominantly a system of economic exploitation; in or- der to conceal it, a flowery ideological superstructure has been erected, an ideology stressing the ‘civilizing’ role of the conquerors. The Labour leaders do their ‘utmost to foster this justification of imperialism inside the Labour movement. Thus throughout ‘Plural Societies’ we find again and again a patronizing attitude. ‘We are determined to establish democratic societies in the colonies.’ ‘The common electoral roll is indeed the vital test of political democracy in the plural society.’ ‘We cannot expect however to establish the com- mon roll immediately everywhere.’ This paternal atti- tude—‘we’ will do this, ‘we’ will do that, ‘we’ will not allow the other, is very, very far removed from a socialist approach to the question of freedom for the colonial peoples. In it there is not a breath of sugges- tion that the African peasant and the British engineer are in reality comrades and allies in a joint struggle against a ruling class which denies freedom to both. In every colonial country today there has grown up a movement for national liberation. These organi- zations of the exploited colonial peoples themselves are actively leading the fight for national liberation. Traditionally, and in our own direct interests, the British Labour movement has one duty and one duty alone towards the colonial people: to give every assist- gance to these colonial movements, to help them in every way to fight and win their battles against imperi- alism. It is not for ‘us’ to decide what form of govern- ment any country should have. That right belongs, exclusively, to the people of the country itself. And if the forms of democracy which they fashion for them- selves do not conform to the definitions of democracy laid down by the Transport House ‘experts’ on demo- cracy, that is for Transport House to worry about. They can always rewrite their definitions. Parliamentary democracy on the British model, for example, if applied (by ‘us’) to countries like Kenya or the Rhodesias, would inevitably mean the con- tinued political supremacy of the economically domin- ant white settlers. This would be true even if there were universal suffrage. For neither in Africa nor Britain is the State an independent organ above class, but rather the instrument of those who own and con- trol the means of production. For this reason the workers and peasants of Rhodesia and Kenya, for ex- ample, will find it necessary to work out for themselves a form of democratic government which will wrest political and economic power out of the hands of the white minority. When however the people of British Guiana, through the electoral victory of their Peoples’ Progressive Party in 1953, looked like doing this, the legally and democratically elected government was illegally and unconstitutionally overthrown, on orders from Whitehall, and its Ministers put in jail. The British Labour Party officially identified itself with the repressive action of the Tory Government. At the Brighton Conference it has another opportunity to wipe out the shame of this decision by promising full support for the national liberation movements in all British colonies, with special assistance for their socialist wings. Economic aid If a different attitude to colonial freedom had 102 been put forward in The Plural Society, then Economic Aid would undoubtedly have been very different from the present pamphlet of that name. Certainly capitalist Britain owes an enormous debt to the colonies. For several centuries the British ruling class has sucked untold wealth out of the col- onial peoples. It has organized the economic struc- tures of these countries in a lop-sided manner to suit its own ends. Largely as a result of this super-exploita- tion of the colonies, the average annual income per man, woman and child in Britain today is £300, com- pared with a mere £60 for Jamaica and a pittance of £18 in Kenya. Here is an international debt which must be paid: only a Socialist Britain will honour it. A working-class, socialist government in Britain would immediately and unconditionally recognize the right of the colonies to national independence. Then it would negotiate with the new governments of the former colonial countries a series of economic agree- ments which would benefit all the countries concerned, including Britain. British economy, reorganized on a social basis, would be able to increase very rapidly indeed the pro- ductivity of industry. As a result Britain would be placed in a position where it could grant massive as- sistance to the former colonial countries to help de- velop their own natural resources and increase their own industrial production. We believe that British workers would not hesi- tate to accept some sacrifices in order to make good the ravages inflicted on the colonial peoples by British capitalism. But there would in fact be no need for any ‘sacrifices’ to be subtracted from British workers’ liv- ing standards. Ernest Bevin once threatened in a de- magogic way that every workers’ pay packet would be emptier if the colonies gained their freedom. But, as usual, he was wrong. Economic Aid, which repeats this threat, is wrong too. The Labour leaders hesitate to apply a thorough socialist plan to British industry and therefore cannot envisage the tremendous surge in industrial productivity which socialist industrial rela- tions and planning would create very quickly once the capitalist deadweight had been lifted. British industry would be able to create an abundance of goods. From this fund Socialist Britain could play a very important part in developing the economic resources of the for- mer colonial countries. This is the real possibility of the future; but Economic Aid is content to announce, in words which sound very noble, that ‘an average of one per cent of our national income over a period of years’ will be Britain’s contribution to the development of back- ward and colonial territories. Colonial policy cannot be separated from domes- tic policy. Capitalist Britain grew to be a world power through exploiting the peoples of half the world. Soci- alist Britain will find ways of developing still further her productive resources without the ‘benefits’ of im- perialist super-profits. In so doing she will enter into economic agreements with the former colonies on a basis of complete equality, without economic or poli- tical strings. Agreements of this sort, unlike the eco- nomic diktats of the imperialists, will bring lasting benefits to the peoples of Britain and of what are now her colonies.