The Great Hoax. (1910)

Editorial from the March 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

The “great fite” between the Lords and the Commons is over “ bar the shouting." We may be reminded that bar the shouting it was never commenced—which, of course is perfectly true. We will therefore correct ourselves and put it this way: the bottle of political pop which the Liberal politicians uncorked—after vigorous preliminary agitation to bring it up “heady"—with such ostentation a few weeks ago, has got nearly through its effervescence. It has boiled and bubbled and toiled and troubled; it has frothed and foamed and raged and spluttered and spat fire; it has looked daggers and thunder and threatened plague, pestilence and famine; it has raved of red ruin and revolution and so frightened us with forewarning of volcanic eruption and sudden death that we have forgotten all about the comet. But if it frightened us it really meant no harm: it was a quite good-natured modicum of shandy-bluff, whose nature it is to be a little boisterous while it may. Now it has given up the gas and wants nothing more 1 than a quiet corner in which it hide its relic.

Well, it has fulfilled its mission—let it die. So say those who uncorked it; so said we ere yet it was uncorked. But it was so beastly easy to prophesy in such a case that we are almost ashamed to remind our readers of the circumstance. Well, let it die ; and let its miserable undertakers of the Liberal and Labour party find oblivion for its little ditch water corpse. It has served to carry the Liberals into power; it has served to bribe a way for those emasculates of the Labour movement, those eunuchs of capitalism—Barnes, Hardie, Thorne, MacDonald and crew—a path to the vicinity of the flesh-pots of Egypt, and nothing more was required of it.

As for these Labour mumpers, some of them were inclined to set up a howl when the fraud of the “Lord’s veto" was deliberately exposed to the view of the swindled electorate. In their anxiety to preserve their countenances they yelped. But their masters’ eyes were upon them and they very soon shook off their distemper. They slept the night on it, and in the morning were foremost in finding excuses for the swindle. What else could they do? Disobey their Liberal masters and refer the case to their Liberal constituents? Not likely! They had been at some pains to solve the poverty problem— for themselves and in their own cases —and are no great believers casting their bread upon the political waters. So they turned to covering up their Liberal masters’ treachery— which, by strange coincidence, was the only way of hiding their own. It was one of those “odd jobs in the Literal workshop” it is their special function to execute with neatness and despatch.

And now we simply ask those to whom we have given warnings in abundance, to watch these leeches who are battening upon their life’s blood, and if their own eyes and ears will tell them nothing, then we may draw the blanket over ours and sleep— for they are helpless.