Constant Reader Know Your M.P.

ANDREW ROTH has provided an invaluable reference book for speakers and writers in the socialist movement with the new edition of his ‘Business Background of Members of Parliament’ (Parliamentary Profile Services, 34 Somali Road, London, N.W.2, price 10s.). The alphabetical and classified lists of MPs, showing the directorships and other business connections of each one, are preceded by an illuminating introduction which brings out some of the patterns to be discerned. In this Parliament, it appears, there are 282 directors or ex-directors, as against 269 in the previous one—three in five Tories, nearly one in five Labour MPs and one in three Liberals.

Engineering workers -will note with interest the remarkably heavy representation of metal-processing firms. ‘Their’ MPs include such figures as Sir Peter (‘why don’t they drop the bomb on Russia now?’) Roberts, Master Cutler of Sheffield, chairman of Newton Chambers and Co. and Wellman Smith Owen Engineering, and deputy chairman of Ransomes and Rapier.

I quote a very topical passage from the introduction: ‘Companies with investments in South Africa have done for the Empire-minded Right wing of the Conservative Party what the basic industries of South Wales and the Clydeside did for the Left wing of Labour at the end of the first world war: provided a base. We have already noted that the British South African Company had Julian Amery as a director until he entered the Government and the Marquis of Salisbury after he resigned over the release of Makarios. Captain Charles Waterhouse, long the nominal leader of the “Suez rebels”, was chairman of the Rhodesia-Katanga Company and the Zambesia Exploring Company, both with extensive mimeral interests in Central Africa; he only retired from Parliament in October, 1957, to give enough time to his new post as chairman of Tanganyika Concessions.

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‘Mr. C. J. Holland-Martin, Mrs. Macmillan’s brother-inlaw and treasurer of the Conservative Party, is not widely associated with the ‘Suez rebels’, largely because he is one of the most silent men in the House of Commons. But he is chairman of the Rhodesia-Katanga Company and the Zambesia Investment Company Limited, and director of Nyasaland Railways, the Uganda Company,.the Assam and African Holdings Company and the Zambesia Exploring Company Limited.’

The Holland-Martin mentioned here is one whose death on April 5 is the cause of the forthcoming by-election at Ludlow.

British Workers and Negro Freedom In Trafalgar Square the other Sunday somebody opined to me that if we thought the British workers would ever ‘stick their necks out’ on behalf of the black masses fighting for liberation in Africa we were in for a big disappointment. Well, I wonder. My acquaintance probably knew nothing, after all, of the role played by the British workers in support of the North in the American Civil War. The Northern blockade of the Confederate States cut off supplies of cotton from Britain, causing much unemployment, and the British Government of the day, which wanted to intervene on behalf of the slaveowners, hoped that this would make intervention a popular policy. But they were rebuffed.

Karl Marx was London correspondent for New York and Vienna newspapers in those days, and his despatches reveal the profound impression made on him by the behaviour of the British workers in that crisis. When he first came here, let’s face it, he did not much like the English of any class; if by the time he died he had become quite an Anglophil, it was such episodes as this that helped to win his heart. ‘To them (the working classes of England) it was due that, despite the poisonous stimulants daily administered by a venal and reckless press, not one single public war meeting could be held in the United. Kingdom during all the period that peace trembled in the balance. . . . Even in Manchester the temper of the working classes was ‘so well understood that an isolated attempt at the ‘convocation of a war meeting was almost as soon abandoned as thought of.’

‘The obstinacy’, Marx observed in a later article, ‘with which the working class . . . breaks its silence only to raise its voice against intervention . . . is admirable. This is a new brilliant proof of the indestructible excellence of the English popular masses... .’ And he reports a great workers’ meeting in Marylebone where a resolution was passed unanimously in which the Confederate slaveowners of the Southern States were denounced as ‘the sworn enemy of the social and political rights of the working class in all countries.’

From Burglary to Slander Ex-Stalinist New-Lefter Christopher Hill manages to work in a dig at his political Enemy Number One in the course of a review of Deutscher’s ‘The Prophet Unarmed’ in the current Soviet Studies. ‘Mr. Deutscher makes extensive use of the Trotsky Archives. He nowhere in this volume discusses their reliability. . . . Since Mr. Deutscher uses them so confidently, he must be sure that they were never in the hands of, say, “vulgar Trotskyites”.’

Hill’s suggestion that the persons most likely to tamper with Trotsky’s archives would be Trotsky’s own followers is singularly impudent in view of the fact, presumably known to Hill, that these archives were the object of a burglary by agents of the Soviet political police in November, 1936. At that time the archives were deposited in the Institute of Social History in the Rue Michelet in Paris. The burglary was carried out with the most advanced technique (which convinced the French police that no local gang was responsible) and only papers belonging to Trotsky were taken, both money and other vaiiiable manuscripts being ignored. An account of the incident is given in ‘The Case of Leon Trotsky’ (1937), which is a transcript of some of the proceedings of the Dewey Commission on the Moscow Trials.

A Chance for Silence Missed Was it really necessary for Gaitskell to be in so much of a hurry to condole-with Verwoerd? Even Nehru, with the history of the Indian national struggle behind him (and present-day Indian opinion to take into account), saw fit to say he must wait for further information before making any comment. It is incidents like this that show up, as in a lightning-flash, how far some of our Labour leaders have gone in identifying themselves with ‘the Establishment’.

That Stale Smell Again Has somebody somewhere instructed the Communist Parties to resume their old-style anti-Trotskyist propaganda? After the Canadian piece I quoted recently there now comes to hand an article from the Australian ‘Tribune’ of April 6: ‘Portrait of a Trotskyist’.

It appears that a Mr. Short, said to be a former Trotskyist, is now connected with the Catholic disruptionist activity in the Australian labour movement led by Santamaria, and this is said to be ‘typical of Trotskyism the world over’. Rather a childish argument, one might think, when there are such cases as that of Douglas Hyde, British ex-Stalinist, now active for Catholic Action as a witch-hunter of both Communist Party members and Trotskyists.

But it provided the anonymous (editorial?) writer as a pretext to trot out (sorry) all the old stuff about ‘counter-revolutionary Trotskyism’, culminating even in the statement that Trotsky’s ‘followers in the Soviet Union were later, on their own confessions, convicted of treasonable crimes against the Soviet State’.

Names and dates would have been helpful here, but of course we don’t find them. When the British Communist Party gets around—if it ever does—to saying its piece along the same lines as the Canadians and Australians, shall we see greater frankness? I doubt it. Whether or not the British Communist leaders will be allowed by their members to get away with such stuff will tell us a lot.