We salute them

RIGHT-WING and ‘Left-wing’ slanderers of the upThursday have not succeeded in obscuring its true rising that broke out in Budapest two years ago last character. ‘They have fastened on the excesses that were committed, as evidence that the Hungarian events were an anti-socialist counter-revolution. There never was a revolution in history which did not have terror, hooliganism, adventurism as part of the pattern. When intolerable conditions force a human torrent on to the arena of history, muck is always mingled with the flood waters. The security policemen who were lynched were the instruments of a despotism that had warped Hungary’s development to socialism. Rdakosi’s men reaped only that which they had sown.

But the excesses were few. Workers’ councils controlled the factories and patrolled the streets. The workers were showing the revolutionary discipline, heightened consciousness and creative initiative they always show in struggle. Then came November 4. Russian tanks swept across the barricades. The grip of bureaucracy was reimposed on the Hungarian people.

Every effort the Kadar regime has made in these two years to sweeten its rule in the eyes of the world Labour movement has been nullified by such acts as the murder of Nagy and the arrest of Fekete and Merey. The honest communists of Hungary continue their defiance. On this second anniversary we salute our Hungarian comrades: the metal-workers and poets, the miners and journalists who, inside or outside Kadar’s jails, remain steadfast to their socialist principles. Within the marble halls?

- No sooner’ was Labour in power than the King thought it necessary to tell Attlee that ‘he must give the people here some confidence that the government was not going to stifle all private enterprise’. Later, he records a conversation with Herbert Morrison:

‘We discussed the whole of the Labour programme. I thought he was going too fast with the new nationalizing legislation.’

Was it within the marble halls of Buckingham Palace that Morrison first discovered the need to slow down on nationalization and to ‘consolidate’?

It is well known that successive monarchs have invested their wealth heavily in industry. The occupant of the throne, therefore, has a definite vested interest in the continuation of ‘private enterprise’.

We learn from this biography, too, that it was thanks -to George VI that we had Ernest Bevin as Labour’s Foreign Minister after 1945, instead of Hugh Dalton.

From a socialist point of view, Dalton would probably have been little improvement on Bevin. But it would scarcely have been possible for him to be worse.

The point for the Labour Party is that the monarchy can make its influence felt on behalf of the existing order of things and does not hesitate to do so.

THEY PERFUMED THE FACTORY AIR FOR THE ROYAL VISIT By G. Gale REMARKABLE preparations were made for the Queen’s visit to Leeds last week.

In one large tailoring factory she visited Hoffman presses