Paddington To The Fore (1930)

Party News from the September 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

Paddington is a borough of contrasts and paradoxes where social extremes can be seen rather more sharply defined than in many places. Monuments of pomp and power range themselves alongside of squalor and filth, and the insolence of wealth jostles disease and penury in the streets. The sooty air and polluted canals, the dingy piles of dwellings, the belching chimneys and the endless rushing to and fro of the melancholy “hands” would serve as the scene of some imagined Hades. Here devoutness goes hand in hand with hypocrisy and charity with brutality. It is the class conflict operating within the social system. The unemployed and the employed, harassed and ill-fed, alike can look forward to nothing better than an old age in which their lives become still more limited.

This is the black outlook of Paddington’s wage-earners.

The Paddington Branch of the S.P.G.B. has opened a campaign of propaganda to tell these too-patient fellow victims of capitalism that there is no earthly or heavenly remedy for their social ills except in Socialism, search the universe where they will.

We invite those who wish to learn more about Socialism to come to the meetings advertised elsewhere in this issue. We invite sympathisers to consider joining the branch and giving us their assistance in spreading our message. We are already having good results, and with more help we shall better them.

Ben Carthurs