DIVINE RIGHT MYTH
1958The NewsletterCliff Slaughter Read the scan at ETOL (PDF) →Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.
the ideas with which the exploiters justify themselves. As Sartre says:
‘For most Europeans in Algeria, there are two complementary and inseparable truths. That they have the divine right, and that the natives are subhuman. This is a mythical interpretation of a reality, since the riches of the one are built on the poverty of the other.’
This is a book which at 10s. 6d. should be bought and passed around groups of workers. It is not ‘just another horror story’, but a damning indictment of a social system which must debase its own people in order to preserve itself intact against even the most elementary demands for human rights.
October saw the release of the Poplar councillors. They marched out singing the “Red Flag’. The Ministry of Health and the LCC conferred, and relief burdens were equalized throughout London.
John Wheatley described this as ‘a real and substantial surrender to the principles for which Poplar was contending’, and Lansbury himself said: ‘We are very proud of the crime by which we forced rich London to share the burdens of poor London.’
That was not the end of ‘Poplarism’. In 1922 the Poplar Council were warned by the (Liberal) Minister of Health to desist from paying relief at a scale higher than the miserable officially-approved one, and he actually issued an Order making this illegal.
A laughing-stock Such was the mood of the workers, however, that this Order remained a dead letter, and a laughing-stock, and. in 1924~Wheatley, ‘as Minister of “Héalth in the fifst Labour ~ Government rescinded it.
J. H. Thomas, the Right-wing trade union leader, called the Poplar councillors ‘wastrels’ for the activities that had made their borough a byword for militancy.
Lansbury replied that, while Thomas only talked about the official Labour programme of ‘Work or Maintenance’, he and his colleagues had acted to enforce it.
Opportunities of reviving the traditions of ‘Poplarism’ will doubtless present themselves to many Labour councillors in the course of the fight against the Rent Act, among other issues that will arise in the coming months.
BRIAN PEARCE