G.B.S. Talks on Home Politics

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 810, 2 November 1929, Page 30

G.B.S. Talks on Home Politics

NOTES ON LAST ELECTION LABOUR’S FUTURE I Mr. Bernard Shaw entertained and ! delighted the Independent Labour ; Party Summer School at Digswell Park, Welwyn, in England, recently, with a long and vivacious discourse !on Labour politics. His title was I -Random reflections ou the Last General Election,” but he wandered over 1 a very wide field of discussion. He i spoke for an hour and three-quarters j (or, reckoning answers to questions, for two hours) with unflagging speed and liveliness, says the “Manchester Guardian Weekly.” Mr. Shaw, who claimed that, like Marx and Morris, he was a bourgeois Socialist, said:

”1 have remained a fairly strong Socialist, and I am 73. You have not the slightest guarantee that I may not become a rabid Conservative when t am 75. I remember a Scot, compared to whom Mr. Maxton is one of the mildest Fabians. When he was a young man he was considered so intransigent that it was thought impossible that he could ever get into Parliament. He was a sincere and convinced enemy of the existing state of society. His name was Ramsay MacDonald. He felt what many of us felt when we were young, that wc were in a great movement of the people, that we had the working -classes with us, and that finally that would carry our Socialist principles to triumph. 1 think he now feels like other pioneers whom -the mass of the people do not understand; they have not got his opinions; he is up against a machine of most tremendous force and he has to carry on without a moment's hesitation or delay. He is wondering, i dare say, what instalments of Socialism it will be possible to carry out.

“In course of time Mr. Maxton will probably arrive at that position. He will be Prime Minister, and then he will not feel that he has a big movement at his back, but that he is in a very foolish and ignorant world and will have a very hard struggle to get that ignorant world, which politically does not understand anything, to move an inch forward. There is general ignorance and political imbecility. Y'ou can only get the mass of people to do things when they don’t understand them.” As an example of a Government “doing the most extraordinary -things when people knew nothing about it,” Mr. Shaw instanced the late Government's Act dealing with landed property and the abolition of primogeniture, which he called one of the most revolutionary measures ever carried. There was hardly any limit -to the number of things Mr. MacDonald might be able to do if people knew nothing about it. Why Mr. Baldwin Fell Mr. Shaw then gave reasons for the defeat of the Baldwin Government. They had quite a respectable list of things done to put before the people, but unfortunately no one knew or cared about any of them. That showed the enormous importance to a party of window-dressing. At the next election the Labour Government would be judged not by the really statesmanlike measures it had parsed, but by quite unimportant things which had impressed the public imagination. The late Government, by neglecting the window-dressing, managed to convey to the nation an impression of childishness and ignorance w r hich broke it at the election. After their triumph over the ZinQvieff Letter—“the mere fact that that letter Carried the election shows you what the British voter is like”—the Conservative Government was for the moment drunk with it. As examples of its folly Mr. Shaw instanced the threat to cut off the water supply fi-om Egypt after the murder of Sir Lee Stack which, he said, left on the public mind the impression that “these people are babies,” and the “gross burglary of the Russian Embassy.” They would not have thought of going to the French Embassy and breaking open the safe, yet what France had done to us would have justified, if not burglary, yet a strong remonstrance at least. Having borrowed a considerable sum of money from us and others for carrying on the war they deliberately repudiated 80 per cent, of their debt. “It is called repudiation when the Russians do that, but when French do it they call it stabilisation.’’ The late Government owed its fail to the fact that it left the impression that it was childish and incompetent. To these examples Mr. Shaw added the action of the Government in preventing the broadcasting of his own speech at his seventieth birthday dinner. Mr. Shaw next turned to a brisk attack on the Communist Party, “the Ultra-Conservative Party,” he called it. That party represented bourgeois Socialism at its most bourgeois, for the bourgeois always picked up ideas from reading books—usually books out of date. "Parasitic Labour” The Communist Party was full of the old insurrectionary literature of IS4S. The class-war business was extraordinarily misleading. The idea that the workers, being many, should rise and destroy the exploiters, who were few, ignored the actual facts of society as it was, for (as Mr. Shaw snowed at length) a large part ot labour is “parasitic upon the big incomes.” “They don’t see that what they have to fight is the parasitism of perhaps more than half of the working class.”

The confrontation of working class with the proprietary class was impossible, and the result of attempting to act upon such a conception of society would be utter disaster. The working class was not revolutionary: it was the discontented idealistic middle class which was and always had been revolutionary. “The innocence of Karl Marx is still all over the Communist Party, and it is in complete conflict with the common sense of the people. It has also foolishly taken Russian money, not having the sense to know that an English body must not be in the pay of a foreign State, whether Socialist or otherwise. Consequently they forfeited their deposits.” “The extinction of the Liberals.” Mr. Shaw proceeded, 'is more ap-

parent than real. We must admit the Liberals came off very unfairly when you compare their representation with the votes. To some extent they were victims of our electoral system. Nevertheless the Liberals were not very inspiring, because they were made up half of Conservatives and half of Liberals, who were only half-convinced Socialists. “There is only one rule that must be followed in political windowdressing. Whether you are Liberal, Conservative or Socialist, you must go the whole hog. Reluctant Conservatives and Socialists have no chance. The Liberals are in a state of general reluctance. The fault of Liberals, even in the days of Gladstone, when they did some remarkable things, was that they were rather ashamed of it. They were always trying to explain that they were not really Liberals, but good Conservatives. *‘l think you will find there will be this element in Ihe Labour Party also. Liberals were always rather foolish in that way. When fou do a thing for good or evil then plank yourselves upon it and get the credit for it. To do a thing and then try to conceal it and half-apologise for it is the beginning of the end.”