The Red Revolutionists (1914)

From the January 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

They have got a "Socialist" Government in power at the local Parliament down Thornton Heath way. The Prime Minister is a Mr. E. S. Evans of the I.L.P. This gentleman at the last General Election spoke for the Liberal candidate, as no Labour man was running. This, as will be readily guessed, supplies the key to the position. It might be expected that the King's Speech, as presented by such a government as would be scraped together by a Socialist (!) of this type, would be in no vital principle different from one that King George himself, with Queen Mary at his elbow to keep him from losing himself in the abstract speculation as to what the contents of the ink-bottle would taste like, might draft if the business had not been taken out of his hands.

The "revolutionary" Cabinet state in their "King's Speech" that: "Widespread dissatisfaction with the working of the Insurance Act serves to show that philanthropic intentions are of less value than the careful application of scientific knowledge." Great Scot! Liberal legislation based on "philanthropic intentions"! This is what blindness to the class struggle brings one to. When the Liberals apply with quite uncanny care, more scientific knowledge than there is room for in the fat heads of these I.L.P. wights, to the task of giving the workers 4d. for 9d., the latter think they meant to give 9d. for 4d., and say that they have failed because their "hearts" were better than their "heads."

Is it out of the plenitude of their I.L.P. experience, though, that they assert that the "funds at the disposal of political organisations are a prolific source of corruption"?

Nothing more revolutionary than "nationalised production of armaments" is even hinted at in the speech and it might have been quite epoch marking in its way. The Secretary for Home Affairs, Scotland and Ireland is a Mr. T. Irving, who left the I.L.P. because it wasn't revolutionary enough. This gentleman ran for the local Council last November, and a leaflet he issued then bore the proposal that, inserted in the Speech, would have made the walls of capitalism quake. It is "Grow your own vegetables."

A. E. Jacomb