The Press Tuesday, March 4, 1924. Three Views of Labour.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18013, 4 March 1924, Page 6

The Press Tuesday, March 4, 1924. Three Views of Labour.

Tho time is no doubt approaching when Mr Bamsay Mac Donald will have to Beek refuge from his friends —and we do not mean the friends of his own party. But in the meantime he is bearing up wonderfully under the solemn praise of "The Times," the equally solemn and not equally restrained praise of the "Observer," the approval of the "Spectator," and the picturesque but jealous metaphors of Mr Lloyd George. We have spoken already of tho goodwill of "The Times," und need not say anything further now; but the other tributes are quite as interesting. Mr Lloyd George, for example, in our cables to-day treats the Prime Minister both as an airman turned ploughman and as a tenor who has cracked suddenly into a baritone. We should not liko to call it a generous description, or say that tho purpose of it is to help, but the effect of it is to focua attention on the rapidity with which Labour has adapted itself to the necessities of practical politics. And so with Mr Garvin's "Observer" article summarised in our cables yesterday. Mr Garvin's purpose was, ostensibly, to examine the "plight of "the old Parties," but his examination led him into a comparison from which Mr Mac Donald emerged as "a fine "national figure"—tho first figure, indeed, "on personal merits," in the country. It iB characteristic both of the honesty, and of the lack of humour of Mr Garvin —a man with an almost noble faculty for changing his mind} and confessing to the change—that Labour should seem to him to have changed party politics "profoundly "and for ever." To those who do not know Mr Garvin well enough to love and laugh at him it may sound a little strange that all Mr Mac Donald has to do to be "remembered as a very great "man" is to avoid antagonising either of the two parties which can turn him out; but the fact remains that the Prime Minister has received both a glowing and an influential tribute. And when we turn to the "Spectator" we find the editor-proprietor, in a signed article, declaring that if Labour will adopt an "Agreed Policy," a programme involving the greatest amount of agreement and the least amount of conflict, it will prove "just the Govem"mont" to pas 3 all those measures which everyone agrees should be passed. The "Spectator's" argument is that tho one subject in regard to which legislation is invariably deferred is the subject on which there is a general agreement. A majority Government, recognising that majorities do not continue for ever, legislates on the "Now or Never" principle: it gives preference, not to those' Bills most widely demanded, but to those which can be passed now and may be unpassable later. And so, the "Spectator" argues, Mr Mac Donald, who has no majority, and cannot therefore assert his party's preferences, is the very man to clear up all those general questions on which, though the whole nation is agreed about them, Parliamentary action has been so long delayed. Included in this "Agreed Policy" the ,T Spectator" finds such questions as our relations with France and Germany, the recognition of Russia, provision against unemployment, expert investigations of the problems of currency, credit and the stabilising of prices, and "even "what we are convinced is now an "agreed matter in Constitutional Ee- " form—the It is interesting to find that for the handling of all of these Mr Strachey regards Mr Mac Donald as the man of the hour. The only other estimate of Mr MacDonald quite as remarkable as this is his own—"the claim, so strange in a Socialist, made at the Welsh National Banquet, that it is "variety of individuality alone which can save the " world."