THE ABSURDITY OF BRITISH POLITICS: A SHADOW ON THE WHOLE WORLD.
WHAT HAS TO BE DONE ABOUT IT?
I loathe Nationalism, and ripening experience has corroded my
Imperialism (of 1899–1900) profoundly, and perhaps incurably, but this
does not prevent my being intensely, affectionately, and profoundly
English. But by being English I do not mean pretending mystical and
impossible emotions at the first grunts of the National Anthem, or the
chance sight of that curious political compromise of the last century,
the Union Jack, which has swallowed up the real English flag of St.
George, and still, against all reason, retains the cross of St. Patrick
in its entanglement. Nor by being English do I mean repudiating the
high republicanism of my English Milton, my English Cromwell, and
my equally English George Washington. Nor again would I mix up the
English idea with a trained aversion from foreign goods and ingenious
attempts to choke the trade of other countries in favour of our home
products. Indeed, I feel a little ashamed of myself when a polite and
kindly foreign post office hands me out my letters stamped with blatant
exhortations to “Buy British Goods.” Yet all the same I maintain that
I am a scion, however unworthy, of a very great race, and heir to an
unapproachable tradition of candid speech and generous act.
My people, the English, have created mighty nations, lived valiantly
for freedom and fair play through many sturdy generations, and
fertilized the whole world with their adventurous dead.
I hold most firmly that we English--who make up perhaps a third of
the United States population and an eighth of that of the British
Empire--are a people necessary to mankind, that there are certain
calls and occasions when either “God’s Englishman”--as our Milton had
it--must play his part, or the occasion fail.
It is our boast that we say what we think without fear or favour
and that we are not easily driven in flocks or cowed by difficulties
or defeated--even by defeat. And believing these things, I hold it
as my right and duty as a common Englishman to watch the steps of my
own people wherever they are found, in Britain or America, in India
or Africa or Australia, and to speak as plainly as I can when they
seem to be falling away from the quality that has won us our place in
history and the respect of mankind. I had rather assert my right to
repudiate the shooting at Amritsar and cry “Stop!” to the justice of
Massachusetts when it grows harsh and unfair to such friendless men as
Sacco and Vanzetti than reap all the material successes that life can
offer me. In that way I can a little discharge the obligation I am put
under when I am counted among Englishmen.
Never have we been a theatrical people; there are few heroic gestures
in our story and little rhetoric; we have never pretended to be a
breed of supermen, and our drama, fiction, and common speech abound in
self-derision. The British common soldier breaks into literature in the
persons of Falstaff and Bardolph and Nym, and the foreigner has always
been given fair play and a welcome among us--up to 1917, at any rate.
Our dearest boast was the prestige of “the word of an Englishman,” and
it is our claim that we would rather be trusted than exalted among the
peoples of the earth. Whatever the diplomatic situation may have been,
the great mass of the English folk in the New World, as in the Old,
believed that they were fighting aggressive monarchist militarism in
the Great War and preparing the way for a peace without uniforms. They
hated Germany more for her goose step than for her fleet. The seed of
that rather wilted but still living plant, the League of Nations, was
sown by the practical liberalism of the English mind on both sides of
the Atlantic, and could never have existed but for the faith of the
English in reasonable dealing. The faith of our people launched that
experiment, and to them alone can the world look for the mental courage
to face its disappointments and accumulate and organize the resolution
needed for the next thrust and experiment in the same direction.
Liberalism of thought and restrained steadfastness in act has been the
contribution of the English people to human affairs during the past
two centuries. None of us claims any preposterous superiorities over
other peoples; and most of us can admit inferiorities without a qualm.
The French are certainly more direct and clear-headed than we are,
and the Germans more thorough. We lack the animation of the Levantine
and the mental richness of the Slav. We have a curiously atmospheric
quality in our thought; we are not rapid with our problems, and we are
apt to muddle about with perplexities and betray a lack of haste and
zeal which exasperates observers. At the present time, and indeed since
1917, we have been making a bad showing. It is time we woke up to what
we are not doing. A time may come when we shall discover that the world
has not waited for the English.
For ten years the English--and by English I mean equally the
English-speaking, English-thinking people of the United States and of
the British Empire, for I cannot separate them in these matters--have
on the whole been disposed towards some settlement of the world’s
affairs that would ensure permanent peace. I do not believe that there
would have been even a League of Nations without the initiative of the
English on both sides of the Atlantic, and I believe that the welcome
and acquiescence of the other nations of the world in that project was
due to their belief “in the word of the Englishmen,” to their belief
that the great section of mankind we English constitute and control
would see the vast promises of President Wilson through to a working
reality. They thought that there was that much moral force in the
world, and that the English-speaking masses embodied it and meant it.
I believe enough in the quality of my own people to be persuaded they
were right. I believe that on November 11, 1918, the world was within
sight of a broad, permanent settlement of its political affairs that
would have ended war, that the war to end war had been fought and won,
that the will to end war was sufficiently abundant to have carried that
settlement through, and that it was the organization of that will that
was wanting and failed. The will to end war was caught and baffled in
a net of political and diplomatic evil habits. And particularly it was
the will to end war in the United States and the British Empire which
should naturally have been the backbone will of peace organization,
that was ineffective and that was diffused and dispersed and defeated.
The failure of the will for peace in America to make itself effective
has been discussed very thoroughly, and the broad facts are history;
the disposition of President Wilson to make world peace the monopoly
of the Democratic Party and the consequent estrangement of the
Republican majority; his obsession by the idea of the sovereignty of
“nationalities” and his incapacity to think out what he meant by a
nationality; his diplomatic incompetence and intellectual and moral
seclusion have been set out plainly in a huge literature of criticism,
and so have the disgusts, resentments, and fitfulness of the American
people as it realized that its will for peace was thwarted, and sought
to shift the blame from its own political institutions.
Now, as always, there is a manifest majority of voters in Great Britain
on the left side in public affairs; the spirit of the British peoples
is now, as it has been generally for a century, liberal, compromising,
tolerant, and anxious for a fair deal between nation and nation; and
yet at the present time the British Government is not simply aloof like
the American from world direction, it is the leading force making for
reaction. The present British Government is, in fact, doing its best
to revive the rôle of the defeated Hohenzollern Imperialism, and if it
can hold the Empire in its present course it will certainly steer the
British people towards a fate that may repeat the German experience.
And this it is able to do in spite of the national temperament and
the high traditions of the English, because of the incapacity and
shortsightedness of the politicians who have contrived to impose
themselves upon the main masses of liberal thought.
That is the most momentous fact in world affairs at the present time.
The paralysis of English liberalism carries with it the paralysis of
progress throughout the world.
The elemental necessity before that moiety of the English people which
forms the nucleus of the British Empire, if it is to go on playing
its proper part in the shaping of human destiny, is to get rid of Mr.
Baldwin’s Government and all its works as speedily as possible. It has
to do this for its own sake and for the sake of the world’s future.
It has to shake itself clear of this imperialist militarism which is
alien to its nature. It is an obligation. But when the English people
turns to the Liberal and Labour politicians who should be translating
its manifest will into achieved fact, it finds a crew of active and
ingenious second-rate and third-rate men engaged in petty feuds and
divided into two bitterly contentious camps, without a shadow of
principle to distinguish them.
It is extraordinary how hard it is to separate Liberal from Labour
Party men except by the fact that they are separated. Of many of these
people I, who live fairly close to it all, do not know the party
associations from day to day. Of So-and-so or So-and-so I asked: “Has
he gone over or has he come back?”--it is so little a question of
quality and so much of postal address. There seem to be rather more
lawyers in the Liberal Party and many more glorified trade-union
officials in the Labour Party, but a man like Commander Kenworthy,
for example, can go from one party to the other or back again with as
little change of nature as a performing sea lion hopping to and fro
through a hoop. In power the Labour politicians have shown themselves
mild snobs, socially ignorant rather than virtuous, and pathetically
anxious to assure the world that there is no danger of “Socialism in
our time.” They are Liberals in red ties who have to cater for the
earnestness of the young supporter. On the Liberal side, wary, alert
figures like Sir John Simon and Sir Herbert Samuel dodge and posture
about with a manifest effort to look like the sort of commanding,
attractive, and inspiring personalities English masses are supposed
to trust and adore--these two are the more prominent of a whole host
of commonplace careerists of no personal significance at all--and Mr.
Lloyd George tries an infinitude of poses to catch the unifying spirit
as it flits uncertain through the dither. Mr. Lloyd George might very
well catch the unifying spirit if only the unifying spirit could be
sure that it had caught him. But there is no outstanding figure at all
to hold and reassure both factions. There might be in Philip Snowden
were he physically a stronger man.
That is the situation. One by-election follows another. Each time the
Government vote shrinks to a smaller proportion of the total; sometimes
a Liberal scrapes in (and oh! the joy of Mr. Masterman), sometimes a
Labour man, and sometimes the Conservative keeps his seat with close
upon two-thirds of the poll against him. But in a general election the
mutual animosities of these wrangling factions rise to a malice that
prefers a Government victory to the success of the kindred competitor.
It is just as likely that the next election will leave the existing
Government in power, a possibility fraught with disaster to the whole
world, as that either of these Opposition gangs will scramble to a
greater total than the Tories.
Now to the great mass of English people these party feuds and
bickerings between Liberal and Labour are a matter of entire
insignificance. Nobody believes that the Labour Party has the courage
or capacity to carry through any extensive socializing operations,
nor that a Liberal Government would carry out a policy very different
from that of a Labour Government. But either a Liberal or a Labour
Government would release educational progress, check armament, relieve
the world from the fear of adventures against Russia and China
sustained more or less furtively by Britain, break the ugly association
with Mussolini, show a living regard for free speech and private
freedom, and reassure the forces of peace and civilization in France,
Germany, Poland, and Hungary.
Either would do. The general desire is for one or the other, and the
question which the politicians pose is Which? Both the Liberals and
the Labour Party tricksters have in turn cheated the country out of
proportional representation, which would have relieved us of much of
this present difficulty. It is too late to go into that issue now.
The primary concern of intelligent Englishmen now is to get rid of
this Baldwin-Junker Ministry, which is as unpalatable to intelligent
financial and business men, with some understanding of the necessary
cosmopolitanism of modern economic life, as it is to the main mass of
liberal-minded labour.
How is this to be done?
It seems to me that the occasion would be best met by the formation of
a series of new local political organizations, beside, and independent
of, the local official Liberal and Labour Parties.
What is needed is a block of voters who will vote primarily against
the Government and only secondarily for either Liberal or Labour. The
sensible thing seems to be a vote in each constituency for whichever
of these two political parties secured the largest vote against the
Conservatives at the preceding contest, irrespective of all their
bletherings against each other. One would vote Liberal here or one
would vote Labour there in order not to waste one’s vote. In that way
the Government could be reduced to a minority, and probably a small
minority in the House of Commons, and, whatever else happened, there
would be an arrest of the threatened “Hohenzollernization” of British
policy and the British Empire.
I do not know what supplies of non-partisan political energy are
available in Great Britain at the present time. Certain newspapers--the
“Express” group and Mr. Garvin’s “Sunday Observer,” for example--seem
to care about as much for party loyalty as I do, and are probably at
bottom quite of my mind about stopping the reactionary drift; they are
conducted by men of imagination with a sense of the greatness of our
people; others are mere party organs, in which not merely the leading
articles but the arrangements and display of news are calculated to
favour one or other of the contending parties. But even among the
readers of these biassed newspapers there must be a growing multitude
impatient with the extraordinary way in which Great Britain at present
belies itself and endangers the outlook of mankind. It needs but a
crystallizing touch to give that impatience a form and a direction.
We want a “Wake Up, England!” movement in Great Britain, and not merely
in Great Britain, but for all the English throughout the earth. We
want a mood and form of politics that will save our destinies from our
politicians while there are still great things to be saved.
_7 August, 1927._