Notes by the Way: The Housing Problem Solved Again. (1933)

The Notes by the Way Column from the December 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Housing Problem Solved Again.

The housing problem has been solved at least half a dozen times since the end of the war. At any rate, each Government in turn has confidently announced that it was in process of being solved. The present Government is relying on its own slum-clearance schemes plus the activities of private builders and the building societies. Sir Paul Latham, who is Conservative M.P. for Scarborough and a member of the London County Council, writing in the Evening Standard (October 23rd, 1933), says that the present rate of dealing with unsatisfactory housing conditions, even the increased rate which is being urged by the Act of the Ministry of Health,

will do little in the lifetime of our generation to solve the housing problem in London.

The Architects' Journal, “After an exceedingly careful and detailed investigation," states that 1,400,000 houses are needed to abolish overcrowding (quoted in Evening Standard, November 17th, 1933).

Other authoritative statements quoted by the Evening Standard (November 17th, 1933) are the following: —

On the basis of the houses condemned in Manchester there must be a million slum dwellings in the country (Sir E. Simon).

Of the million slum dwellings which are estimated to have been in existence in 1918 only 20,000, equivalent to 2%, have been demolished and replaced by new buildings. In the last 60 years only 200,000 slum dwellers have been rehoused.

There are houses which were condemned 40 years ago and are still standing and being used. 

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The Cause of War.

Mr. A. A. Baumann, who writes for the Evening Standard over the initials A. A. B., is known as an old, crusted Conservative, who often shocks a more mealy mouthed generation by his crude statement of his principles. On October 4th, 1933, he dropped a brick by a candid statement about war. He said: —

It is the lust of money, and nothing else, that provokes and protracts modem war . . . the cause of all wars is lust for money.

The late Lord Brentford, when he was plain Mr. Joynson-Hicks, was equally candid. He said: —

We conquered India as the outlet for the goods of Great Britain. We conquered India by the sword, and by the sword we should hold it (quoted by A. G. Gardiner in Daily News, October 17th, 1925).

It is interesting to notice how the Liberal Manchester Guardian managed to convey precisely the same idea as the Tory Joynson-Hicks, but without his bluntness:—

There are two chief reasons why a self-regarding England may hesitate to relax her control over India. . . . The second is that Great Britain finds in India her best market, and that she has a thousand millions of capital invested there. (Manchester Guardian, December 30th, 1929.)

A last comment on the Great War is provided by Mr. A. G. Gardiner. Writing in the Star (October 11th, 1933), he discovers that the Kaiser was really quite a democrat: —

“Even under the Kaiser there was freedom of the Press, freedom of organisation, and a freely elected Parliament. . . ."

Those who have long memories will recall that Mr. Gardiner, in 1914, was Editor of the Daily News, and in that capacity was one of those who backed up the war on the plea of guarding English civil liberties against being reduced by a victorious Germany to the state of suppression supposed to exist in that country.

Now, 15 years after the war to end Prussianism, Mr. Gardiner discovers that Hitlerism is the real evil, and that the Kaiser was not so bad after all.

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Arms and the Workers.

When Communist advocates of armed revolt were asked from what source the workers would obtain arms, dark hints were sometimes thrown out indicating that Russia would oblige. Incredible as it may seem, this has at last been partly realised, for the Russian Government has made a gift of five bombing planes to the neighbouring State, Turkey, as a little memento on the 10th anniversary of the Turkish Republic. (See Daily Herald, October 27th, 1933.)

The promise is, however, only partly fulfilled, for the planes have been given, not to the Turkish workers, but to the capitalist Government. 

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Woman in a Sack.—40 Years of Progress.

Mr. George Lansbury related recently (see Daily Herald, October 23rd) how it was he first became converted to what he calls Socialism. He was making a canvass of the Devons Road area of Bow for the voting register when the door of one house was opened by a poor woman dressed in a sack, in which three holes had been cut for head and arms.

That must be nearly 40 years ago—40 years of reforms introduced by the Liberals, Tories and Labour Party, 40 years which might have been devoted by Mr. Lansbury to working for Socialism but for the fact that he decided instead to follow the line of trying to get “something now."

Yet he admits that, touring the same district recently, he “Was horrified to see the conditions in which the people are still living."

Even the sack is not entirely gone, for two weeks later the Daily Herald published a letter in which a correspondent, who signed himself “ Disillusioned," said that he had just seen “ The huddled form of a woman, covered by a dirty piece of sacking," sleeping out on a seat near Buckingham Palace.

The writer was disillusioned about the “peace" which has followed the war. He could, with equal justification, have been disillusioned about the 40 years spent in vain trying to patch up the evils of capitalism bit by bit. The Rev. William Dick, of Trinity Church, Poplar, says that there are, to his knowledge, hundreds of families in the East End hungry—“They have absolutely no food in the house." He claims that in Poplar alone (where there has long been a Labour Council) “40,000 people are living on the poverty line or are in actual want " (Daily Herald, November 3rd, 1933).

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How Reforms Divide the Workers.

Of all the political errors which have hampered the growth of Socialism there is hardly any so ill-founded as the idea that the way to unite the workers is to get together a list of non-Socialist demands, relating to so-called practical, every-day questions. The truth is that each such demand provokes opposition among one section of the workers while eliciting approval from another.

The Daily Herald (November 4th) provides an example. Mr. Alfred Barnes, Labour ex-M.P. for East Ham South, speaking at Enfield on November 3rd, said: —

“. . . a few years ago the Tories asserted that Socialism meant the bureaucratic State—industry being directed from Whitehall by well-paid officials, and initiative disappearing.

“That was just what they were doing themselves—Electricity Commissioners, London Transport Board, Milk and Bacon Boards. . . .

“All these represented the regulation of industry from Whitehall by well-paid officials in a desperate effort to bolster up capitalism.”

Now quite apart from Mr. Barnes' criticism of these Boards as being an effort to bolster up capitalism, there is the important point that while one body of workers inside the Labour Party accept his view, another body of workers inside the Labour Party are actively pressing for the multiplication of such boards. Indeed, it was Mr. Herbert Morrison who, as Minister of Transport in the Labour Government, introduced the London Passenger Transport Bill.

By one of those curious coincidences that sometimes happen even in the most judiciously sub-edited Labour papers, Mr. Barnes' speech attacking Mr. Herbert Morrison’s London Passenger Transport Board was published in the Daily Herald immediately below the report of a speech by Mr. Morrison.

Edgar Hardcastle