Labour leaders did not put up serious fight¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter’s core argument is that the Labour leadership, far from mounting a serious challenge to the Tories in the 1945 general election, actively facilitated a Tory victory by failing to expose the fraudulence of the Conservative campaign. The author contends that the Labour leaders had spent five years burnishing the Churchill legend during the coalition government, thereby handing the Tories their most potent weapon: the Churchill mascot, deployed to mask the programme of big business. This is presented as a direct parallel to the use of Lloyd George after the previous war.
The chapter dissects the Tories’ electoral tactics with contemptuous precision. Churchill’s campaign is described as cynically scaremongering, using the Gestapo analogy and warnings about the abolition of enterprise to panic the middle class and small shopkeepers. The author counters this by noting that 100,000 small businessmen had already been driven out of business during the war for the benefit of the big trusts, a process that would accelerate under continued capitalism. The Tories’ late shift from promising nothing to lying promises of work, homes, and peace is dismissed as a transparent fraud.
The polemical core is a blistering denunciation of Tory hypocrisy on the question of violence. The author argues that the Tories’ claim that Labour, through Harold Laski, threatened violence is a grotesque inversion of reality. The chapter catalogues the Tories’ own record: over a century of violence against the peoples of Asia and Africa, two world wars in defence of imperial loot, the suppression of India with a political Gestapo, support for Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and the Mikado, armed intervention against the Russian Revolution, and violence against the Greek people. The most striking example is the 1912 Ulster crisis, when the Tories, having lost the election, prepared for violent civil war with Carson’s thugs rather than accept Home Rule for Ireland. The argument is that the Tories are an implacable gang who will always use violence to protect their loot and their right to exploit, and that the Labour leaders’ failure to expose this is a dereliction of duty. The chapter draws on the historical context of inter-imperialist rivalry, colonial oppression, and the betrayals of the Second International, positioning the election as a moment when the working class needed a revolutionary alternative that the Labour leaders refused to provide.