TOPICS OF THE DAY
AN AGREED POLICY FOR LABOUR.
IF Labour is wise it will adopt an Agreed Policy. It will choose for its immediate programme measures which involve the greatest amount of agreement and the least amount of conflict. In suggesting this we are asking Labour not to give up any of its principles or to lower its flag, but merely to recognize facts and to shape its course accordingly. It can ensure the absence of successful opposition to a Labour Government only by choosing a Parliamentary policy which will not bring it into conflict • with the masters of all parties and Cabinets--the majority of the representatives of the people.
There is a good deal to be said for an Agreed Policy, not merely as strategy but on its merits. It is a commonplace of politics that the one thing in regard to which you cannot secure Parliamentary action is a subject upon which there is a general agreement. Such questions seldom awaken interest, in the breasts of Cabinet Ministers, and never in those of Whips. The reason is plain. Governments are usually Majority Governments, and are also faced with a very short time in which to pass their Bills. In the circumstances it is natural to obey the law of "Now or Never " and to give preference to measures which can be passed then but might prove unpassable later. The agreed Bills, it is argued, can be passed at any time.
A Government without a party majority behind it clamouring for legislative blood is, therefore, just the Government to take up and treat agreed subjects. This does not mean adopting other people's principles. All the Labour Cabinet will be expected to say is, " Give us a chance to try our plan in this admitted ease for action—a plan which we shall make as little contro- versial as we can, provided always that it is possible to do so without relinquishing essential aims."
In the matter of Foreign Policy there should be little chance of Labour raising hostility. British policy, in face of the attempt to dissolve German unity by encouraging Separatist revolutions, in regard to Repara- tions, and in regard to Allied Debts, is essentially an Agreed Policy. We doubt if M. Poineare's method of obtaining that security for France, and that peace and prosperity for Europe, which we all desire, has a hundred wholehearted advocates in the present House of Com- mons. The policy of recognizing the Russian Govern- ment in name—in fact it is already recognized—and so apening up the greatest of the markets now virtually closed to our trade, whether in selling or buying, is also an Agreed Policy. No one greatly loves the Soviet here —certainly not Mr. MacDonald, Mr. Snowden, Mr. Henderson, Mr. Thomas or Mr. Clynes—or thinks it an ideal form of minority tyranny ; but no one who under- stands the situation wants to cut off our trade to spite somebody else's oppressors. Our forefathers rightly condemned the criminal coup &glut of Napoleon the Third, but they very wisely sanctioned Palmerston's sound, if somewhat precipitate, recognition of the man of blood, destiny and bombast. Recognition does not involve approval. It only means an acknowledgment that nations must manage their own internal affairs for themselves.
In home affairs the first item of an Agreed Policy would clearly be provision against unemployment. Every- one wants to see the unemployed living by their own work and not upon doles. And there is a further general -agreement. Everybody who understands modern -condi- tions knows- that. there is a very .great. deal to. be done to make Great Britain a fit place to live in. The amount. of cleaning up, of tidying up, and of opening up jungles.
of bricks and mortar and labyrinths of inadequate lanes, byways, bottle-necks, blind corners and crooked alleys that is urgently required is almost beyond computation. And all this road improvement and development is work that can easily and fitly be done by the unemployed, and done, if it is well planned and executed, not only without loss, but with actual economic advantage. Next comes housing. The inadequacy and costliness of the houses of the labouring classes, and also of the smaller middle-class families, both in town and country, is an unspeakable evil. Then there is what may be called the " leading case " in agreed subjects. We all admit that smoke abatement is essential to the happiness, cleanness and health of the nation, but we have hitherto. all agreed to do nothing about it, except talk. If while cleaning the vault of heaven, a Labour Ministry can also give us the boon of cheap electric power, we shall be twice blest.
A form of work well adapted to the . unemployed is land-reclamation—reclamation either from the sea or from boggy river valleys. What the Dutch, or Dutch- inspired, engineers did in the Fens can be done again. A hundred years ago the imagination of the British people was greatly struck when it was proposed to reclaim the Wash. Why should not that great work be done now ? Some land which has already been reclaimed at Holkham, in Norfolk, is an illustration of what might be achieved. In all the enterprises of land-. reclaiming and road-making the chief factor is the application of human physical power to the spade, and this is not in any important sense skilled work. We know well enough what can be said to the contrary, but all the objections which used to be raised were overruled once and for all by the work of untrained men in trench-making during the War. In dealing with exceptional unemployment such as there is now, the Government should always remember to be bold as well as generous. Nothing is more important than to keep men in good condition physically and to save them from the demoralization which now threatens to ruin industrial England. Merely to keep men alive is not enough. In this matter the Labour Government would surely have a policy after their own hearts.
We cannot to-day deal with anything like the whole list of agreed subjects, but two more require an immediate comment. There can be no sort of doubt that the country as a whole would .like to see the• problems connected with currency, legal tender, the supply of credit, the influ- ence of foreign exchange on trade, and the possibility of stabilizing prices thrashed out by experts .before a Commission or Committee such as that asked for by Mr. Darling, the able and distinguished banker, iu. a notable letter to this week's Spectatdr. Such a Commis- sion would be educative in a high degree, and might quite conceivably give us real help and guidance in the labyrinth of economics. As we show on another page, there is just now an appalling lack of clear thinking ... - among those whom we accept as guides.
It is, we suppose, too much to ask that the Labour Party should take up what we are convinced is now. an agreed matter in Constitutional Reform, that is, the Referendum. If the Labour Party could consent to entrust the people with a Veto, they would, we are sure, have an immediate reward. Nothing would so surely win them confidence as so plain and practical a proof that they are not revolutionaries, but are willing to acknowledge the right of the majority to give the final word on all the great issues of statecraft.
J. al\ j.,QE
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