From George Atkins

[p028] George Atkins the Russian Revolution and, against this background, the relations between the Labour Party and the Communist Party, he has remained too much on the high-level surface of events, so that the role of rank-and-file struggles and changes of mood ‘ among the mass of the workers does not stand out sufficiently. For this reason the real causes of happenings ‘at the top’ are sometimes obscured. Thus,. the ‘Jolly George’ incident, though mentioned briefly, appears to drop out of the blue (p. 92). The importance of this rank-and-file action in im- pelling Bevin to move against the Government is acknow- ledged, but we are not shown how it was prepared and by whom. Dr Graubard might have consulted with advantage Harry Pollitt’s pamphlet ‘A War Was Stopped’. Again, though the Minority Movement receives mention, its remarkable ‘Stop. the Retreat!’ campaign, which revived a depressed working-class movement in 1923 and made possible Labour’s success at the polls, does not. Vv The book’s general thesis is that the Labour Party leaders, though very properly hostile to the British Communist Party, were regrettably friendly towards Soviet Russia in these years. Some readers will feel that Dr Graubard is unfair to the communists in other ways besides playing down their very teal positive contribution to the workers’ struggles. In his treatment of the Workers’ Weekly articles in 1923 on the subject of Clynes’s income (pp. 252-4) he conveys the im- pression that here was just a mean stunt thought up by the communists, with which nobody outside their ranks could possibly sympathize. Yet we know that a well-placed observer very far from the communist standpoint felt much-the same

[p029] in this period on the question of the Labour bureaucrats’ way of life. Beatrice Webb, even if she did see fit to make her sentiments public, wrote in her diary at the time of the Labour Party Conference of 1921: ‘The leading trade union officials and Labour MPs were there with their wives, living at expensive hotels and en- joying the brilliant sunshine at a fashionable seaside |resort], without any consciousness of the disparity between their lives and the circumstances of their members . . . I think the standard ought to be a simpler one.’! It is strange that Dr Graubard apparently did not use Beatrice Webb’s diaries, for they contain much that is relevant to the topics he deals with. Dr Graubard sticks up for Bevin and Thomas over the ‘Black Friday’ sell-out. It would have been interesting to read his comments on the contemporary impression of the Fabian First Lady: ‘The leaders clearly funked it ... There is .. . something strangely ludicrous in these unauthorized friendly talks with the capitalist Government and the capitalist MPs after all the talk about “the enemy”... As for Thomas, he feels himself at home in Downing Street, and among noxious competitors in a trade union conference.’2 On Dr Graubard’s basic theme of Labour-Soviet relations Beatrice Webb has some fascinating pages on the personal contacts involved: it was she who, inter alia, introduced Messrs. R. P. Arnot and R. P. Dutt to the late L. B. Kamenev... A new source from which Dr Graubard has drawn some useful information is the unpublished Reports and Minutes of the Labour Party’s Advisory Committee on International Questions. It appears that when this Committee discussed, . in July 1918, whether or not to recommend support for anti- Bolshevik intervention in Russia, among those voting in favour of the interventionist policy was Sidney Webb, the later co-author of ‘Soviet Communism: A New Civilization’. Vv Dr Lyman, another American scholar, has written a com- petent, straightforward narrative of the Labour Government of 1924, based upon the memoirs of public figures, news- paper and periodical files, Hansard and_ interviews with some of the surviving actors in the political struggles of that time. (Conspicuously absent among his list of inter- viewees is J. R. Campbeil, central figure in the ‘Campbell Case’, which was the immediate occasion of the Labour Government’s fall. One wonders whether the author—who is assistant professor at Washington University—tried to meet the editor of the London Daily Worker. Perhaps fear of the witch-hunt may have got in the way of scholarship here?) The book concentrates mainly on the details of the elec- tions of 1923 and 1924, and on events in Parliament, and brings out particularly well the final collapse in that period of the Liberal Party as one of the two major partners in the British political system. Incidentally, it throws revealing light on the growing, though concealed, role in the inner circles of the Labour Party leadership of ex-Liberal and other ruling class individuals such as Lord Haldane. The Zinoviev letter episode is well reviewed, showing how Foreign Office heads, notably Sir Eyre Crowe, Permanent Under-Secretary, and J. D. Gregory, in charge of the de- partment dealing with Soviet affairs, acted in such a way (exploiting MacDonald’s known anti-communism) as to play into the hands of the Tories. Dr Lyman records that E. D. Morel expressed ‘regret that the Labour Government had not revolutionized the Foreign Office’. This book reminds one again of the need for a life of John Wheatley, whose Housing Act was perhaps the most positive achievment of the 1924 Labour Government, and who remained down to his death in 1930 an honest and deter- mined leader of the Left in the Labour Party. An analysis of his successes and failures, strength and weakness, could be a valuable contribution to the historical literature of the British working-class movement. I hope to discuss Julian Symons’s important book “The General Strike’ recently published by the Cresset Press, in the next number of Labour Review, in connexion with a study of the first six years of the Communist Party of Great Britain. J. REDMAN \Beatrice Webb’s Diaries, 1912-24, p. 211. 2Tbid. pp. 207-208. 185 The Eclectic Professor by J. D. Bernal (Watts. Second Edition. 42s.)