From T. Marshall

[p035] T. Marshall Joining the Labour Party A. GREEN'S letter in the July-August Labour Review [p.ii of cover] shows once again that the new generation of socialists which is developing in the forum movement feels constantly the ‘pull’ towards joining the Labour Party as individual mem- bers. All but incurable dilettantes want to play their part in day-to-day political work and want to contribute their ideas as well. As the next General Election draws nearer, more, and more of us will doubtiess get involved in helping with can- vassing and such practical work to help put the Tories out and a Labour majority in; yet hardly anyone feels convinced by the Strachey line that the reformists can or will do the job of building socialism. Conséquently those who plunge into the Labour Party may do so without any very clear idea of what they want to do when they get there, and those who have already spent part of their lives in arduous and unrewarding mass work under King Street leadership naturally do not want - to squander more of their years.

[p036] A. Green indirectly points towards a solution, for his letter ends with the phrase ‘I intend to remain in the Labour Party which is, at least, waging the class struggle’. The sec- tarians can seize on this loose phrase, for it is only too evident that the top leadership of the Labour Party, whose positions are owed to past class struggles and to the place of the workers in society, do not wage the class struggle and have no inten- tion of doing so if they can avoid it. Further, they have no in- tention of letting anyone else wage it either, if they can help it. No one could claim that Transport House has taken any seri- ous part in leading the widespread feeling against the Rents Act or the H-bomb tests. But in the ranks of the party it is different. Despite the passivity of the women’s sections and the cliques of Right-wing councillors, there are in the Labour Party large numbers of militants who do their best to resist the trend of the official leadership. They usually have little theory to guide them, but they take up and carry forward into action many of the progressive phrases expressed by the Right wing, which the Right wing would like to remain as phrases. A Careerists’ Textbook The Fateful Years, by Hugh Dalton (London: Muller, 30s.) THERE IS, so far as I know, no satisfactory textbook suitable for a young man who is about to embark on a Labour Party career. ‘Getting on’ is still a fumbling matter, learned by pain- ful trial and error. Dr Hugh Dalton, who has long been noted for his helpful- ness to the young, has now done something towards filling this urgent need. He has published the second volume of his memoirs. The book, which is written in the bluff, bouncing style of the real-life Dr Dalton, contains no list of do’s or don’t’s. Yet it conveys more about what makes the Parliamentary Labour Party tick than any other work so far published. The service may be unintentional. But it is none the less a service. At the top of the doctor’s implicit list of qualifications is: a staggering personal conceit. Success will certainly elude a student politician who cannot honestly match utterances like this: _, I said that I was not a candidate for the leadership. I did not want it. This did not mean that, if at some later stage there was a strong demand that I should take it, I should necessarily refuse. But I had other desires. “The Foreign Office was not a prize for which, in the present state of the world, one would hold out glad hands. But I believed that I could fill it better than anyone else in our party: And, if the external world was quiet, I would like to take over the Treasury and do something big on the home front. ‘But, as for the leadership of our party, I thought that that should go to someone who had not had exceptional op- portunities; to a man of working-class origin, who had not been to a public school or a university.’ This passage comes from a report of a conversation be- tween Dalton and Herbert Morrison one Saturday morning in October 1935. It was Dalton’s way of telling Morrison that he should run for the leadership—that he was the ‘someone who had not had exceptional opportunities’. Dalton records that Morrison was ‘a good deal taken aback by this’. It does not seem to have crossed his mind why he was taken aback. But no wonder Herbert was surprised Such naive honesty must have shocked an old political warrior who had long been used to playing his cards very close to his chest. Book Reviews 159 These militants regard the Labour Party as their party; they have not developed any serious prospect of forming a new party. In this sense the Labour Party offers to us all an oppor- tunity to wage the class struggle and to fight from within, in alliance with a militant stratum, against the policies of the leaders. This seems to me to be a better chance to do our duty than exists outside the Labour Party, and I think that the General Election struggles will make the Left of the Labour Party an even stronger pole of attraction for working-class militants in the next year or so. But no one will listen to you in the Labour Party if you suddenly pop up from nowhere. We can earn the right to be heard in the coming struggles only if we start principled socialist work now among the Labour Party rank and file. The struggles to defend our working-class neighbours against the landlords offer an immediate chance to carry out joint work with the Labour Party militants. Leicester