Socialist Party Policy: No "Patching Up" (1939)

From the Monday, July 31st issue of the Manchester Guardian

The Manchester branch of the Socialist Party of Great Britain concluded yesterday a two months' special campaign in Manchester and district with meetings in the afternoon and evening in Stevenson Square and Platt Fields, which were addressed by Mr. Clifford Groves, prospective candidate for the party for East Ham North and the first Parliamentary candidate the party has put forward, and Mr. Tony Turner (London). Mr. A. Mertons (Manchester) was the chairman.

Addressing a large crowd in Stevenson Square in the afternoon, Mr. Groves said the Socialist Party of Great Britain had been accused of being merely armchair philosophers because they did not support a policy, as did the Labour party, of working for immediate partial reforms to ameliorate existing conditions. They maintained, as they had done since they first entered the political field as a party in 1904, that the only hope for the working class, the only hope for the abolition of poverty, hunger, and unemployment and the other evils of working-class life, lay in the abolition of the capitalist system of society—that no patching up, no messing about with futile "reform," could materially improve the conditions of the working class. The problems of that class sprang not from any particular form of government but from the economic basis of the system under which we lived.

He contended that if there was war we would not be fighting for democracy, though the people might be deluded into thinking we were. The most belligerent party in this country to-day was the Labour party, and next came that small snapping whippet known as the Communist party. Such was the attitude at this time of those so-called parties of the working class.