Speed-up Law Reform, by Robert S.W. Pollard

[p035] Speed-up Law Reform, by Robert S. W. Pollard (Fabian Research Series, no. 194. Fabian Society, 3s.) _ THIS pamphlet will not appeal to the widest section of the lay public. The main purpose of the author is to set forth proposals for the reform of the machinery of the law rather than the law itself. Nevertheless he does deal with several fields of English law which are in need of reform and I would have been happier to see a bolder approach in this respect. To be quite fair however to Mr Pollard, he says at the start that his conception of law reform ‘includes subjects which are not primarily questions of social welfare or economic policy or political warfare’. Even if his excessive caution is accepted, there appears to be no reason why he should not have dealt with topics where injustice is done to the greatest number of persons, e.g., as far as the working class is concerned, the need for employer’s strict liability in respect of machinery and methods of work which can be regarded as inherently dangerous, to replace the onus upon the injured worker of proving negligence, and, with it, amendment of the Factories Acts. This would have been better than consideration of the law telating to charities, for example. Or, under the heading of legal aid, the author should have dealt with the serious problem that the contribution required by the legal aid authorities is often prohibitive and sometimes as much and more than would be required by the applicant if he were to 63

[p036] LABOUR REVIEW run his case privately. Such is the impact of legal aid upon the average man or woman. : : Mr Pollard’s suggestion that the law should be modified (i.e., that the whole of the law should be set out clearly in the Statute Book) is a useful one. The main concern of the author is that there should be continuity in law reform to replace the present uncertain and hazardous methods of achieving it. He proposes that there should be a Minister under the Lord Chancellor who would head a government de- partment specifically charged with the work of law reform— a quasi-Ministry of Justice, in other words. A _ standing advisory committee of MPs would assist the Minister. Mr Pollard also proposes chages in House of Commons proce- dure to ease the passage of private members’ Bills. These proposals on reform of the machinery of the law are useful and sensible and probably go as far as it is possible to go within the existing constitutional framework. This pamph- let serves a useful purpose but it is a little too timid and unimaginative as far as reform of the law itself is concerned. RONALD SEDLER Manchester Massacre Peterloo. The Massacre and its Background, by Donald Read (Manchester University Press, 30s.) ON August 16, 1819—a fine, warm day—there converged on St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester, processions of men, women and children from Bolton, Oldham, Stockport, Middleton and all the surrounding area. They marched with banners, some of them five abreast, but orderly and peaceful. It was a much heralded meeting ‘to consider the propriety of adopting the most LEGAL and EFFECTUAL means of obtaining a ~-SREFORM?’ of .Parliament. A hundred thousand or so radical working. people.thus. gathered, and there to receive them were: a troop of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry in Byrom Street; another concealed in Pickford’s Yard off Portland Street; the Cheshire Yeomanry, of 400 men, in St. John’s Street; two squadrons of hussars, over 300 strong, and another troop, acting as escort to a troop of the Royal Horse Artillery with two long six-pounders; the whole of the 31st Infantry concealed in Brasenose Street and several companies of the 88th near Dickenson Street. March-April 1958 The meeting began, and an observer described it as like a gala day in its peaceful gaiety. But the Manchester magis- trates ‘felt a decided conviction that the whole bore the appearance of insurrection’, and ordered the troops to dis- perse the meeting. This they did with ruthless efficiency, and —in the case of the Manchester yeomanry—drunken brutality. Eleven innocent people were killed and many others wounded. A week later The Times reported: ‘Manchester now wears the appearance of a garrison, or a town conquered in war.’ Mr Read’s book examines in close detail the local back- ground of this famous event and attempts an estimate of its significance. He has gathered together a great deal of inter- esting information about the Manchester cotton trade, about the organization and activities of the middle-class and working-class radical movements in Manchester and about the ‘loyalists—the Church and King Tories who were res- ponsible for the massacre. He also traces the effects of Peterloo upon political trends—again focusing chiefly upon the local repercussions. All this is valuable work, and clearly enough presented. Mr Read also analyses carefully the relations be- tween the Tory Government and the local magistrates and comes to the conclusion that ‘Peterloo . . . was never desired or precipitated by the Liverpool Ministry as a bloody repres- Sive gesture for keeping down the lower orders’. If the Manchester magistrates had followed the spirit of Home Office policy there would never have been a ‘massacre’. ‘Nevertheless the Prince Regent expressed his ‘great satis- faction’ at the ‘prompt, decisive and efficient measures’ taken by the magistrates, and the Government adamantly refused any inquiry. It is in the treatment of national politics that the book is weakest. Peterloo is presented consistently as an unfortunate local mishap. The intense class feeling of those post-war years, affecting as it did the whole policy of the Govern- ment, does not emerge in Mr Read’s pages, and consequently he is able, on the basis of official documents, to absolve the Liverpool Government of responsibility, missing almost com- plciely any sense of the panic hatred of the ruling class for these radical working men. So we are given a distinctly anaemic and respectable treatment of the affair, and we are told that ‘the final comment in any study of Peterloo must be one of caution’—presumably because any exercise of sym- pathy and imagination would bias us in favour of the workers. K. R. ANDREWS An Independent Socialist Weekly invent THE NEWSLETTER Editorial Board: Michael Banda, Brian Behan, Harry Constable, Coun. Harry Finch, Peter Fryer, Coun. Price Jones, Tom Kemp, Peter Kerrigan, Brian Pearce, Cliff Slaughter LULIQUUIECQUIITILUUHITHIIMMIIN Subscription 8s. for 12 issues post free from 180 Clapham High Street, London, S.W. 4 64

[p037] LABOUR REVIEW SOME CONTENTS OF PAST ISSUES JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1957: A Letter to a Member of the Communist Party (John Daniels); The Law of Uneven and Combined Development, I (William F. Warde); John Strachey’s ‘Contemporary Capital- ism’ reviewed by Tom Mercer and Peter Reed. MARCH-APRIL 1957: The Manchester Guardian and the Suez Crisis (‘Gracchus’); Dudintsev’s ‘Not By Bread Alone’ (Leonard Hussey); The Communist Party and Democratic Centralism (John Daniels); The Chinese Communist Party and Hungary (Michael Banda); Isaac Babel’s Collected Stories reviewed by A.B. MAY-JUNE 1957: Hammersmith and After (editorial on Communist Party Congress); Problems and Pros- pects of British Capitalism, I (Tom Kemp); The Engineers’ Strike and the Labour Movement (Robert Shaw); The Coming American Revolution (William F. Warde); ‘Private Opinion’ (D. Granin); ‘The Holy Family’ by Marx and Engels, reviewed by Peter Fryer. JULY-AUGUST 1957: The New Course of the Chinese Communist Party (Michael Banda); British Com- munist History (Joseph Redman); The Inadequacies of Russian Trotskyism (R. W. Davies, with a com- ment by Leonard Hussey); ‘Russian Poetry, 1917- 1955’, trans. Jack Lindsay, reviewed by Anna Bostock. SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1957: Socialism, the H- Bomb and War (editorial); Labour and Nationaliza- tion (editorial); Lenin as Philosopher (Peter Fryer); From ‘Social-Fascism’ to ‘People’s Front’ (Joseph Redman); Marxism, Stalinism and Political Economy (Tom Kemp). NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1957: Forty Years of Soviet Russia (editorial); Radio, Science, Technique and Society (Leon Trotsky); The Case of André Marty (Joseph Redman); A Marxist Critique of Freud (John McLeish). JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1958: Labour and Leader- ship (editorial); The Dockers and Trade Union Democracy (William Hunter); The Early Years of the CPGB (Joseph Redman); Empiricist Philosophy, I (John Marshall); Leonhard’s ‘Child of the Revolu- tion’ reviewed by ‘Gracchus’.