Not reflection of rank and file feeling¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter from Socialist Appeal (June 1943) argues that the Labour Party conference of that year did not reflect genuine rank-and-file working-class sentiment, but instead served as a platform for Labour’s capitulation to the capitalist class within the wartime coalition. The core narrative thrust is that while the mass of workers have grown increasingly critical of the government and the capitalist class—especially as the war’s end approaches and memories of broken promises after the First World War resurface—the Labour leadership remains a tool for administering bourgeois rule.
The chapter’s key claim is that Labour ministers have been assigned the “most sticky jobs” by Churchill precisely because they can impose anti-working-class measures that a Tory minister could not. This is illustrated by the speech of Alderman Luke Hogan of Liverpool, who boasted that Bevin, Morrison, and Dalton were doing tasks no Tory could carry through successfully. The author seizes on this as an unwitting confession: Labour’s role is to do the bosses’ dirty work. The evidence for the workers’ disillusionment is drawn from the ongoing struggle over the Trade Disputes Act. Despite years of negotiation by the TUC under the coalition, the capitalists have refused even to repeal this anti-union legislation, let alone make concessions on civil service affiliation. The chapter notes that even the arch-constitutionalist Sir Walter Citrine has been forced by the militancy of the postal workers to recommend “unconstitutional” action—a telling sign that concessions come only from working-class pressure, not from coalition partnership.
The historical context is the Second World War coalition government, with Labour leaders serving under Churchill. The chapter draws on the memory of the First World War, when workers were promised a better world and were betrayed after victory. The polemic is directed squarely against the Labour Party leadership and the TUC bureaucracy, who are accused of selling out the class for ministerial office. The argument is that the coalition is not a 50-50 partnership but a mechanism for the capitalists to prepare a savage post-war assault on living standards. The chapter’s title—“Not reflection of rank and file feeling”—encapsulates its central polemical thrust: the conference’s proceedings are a sham, masking the real mood of the working class.