Vote of Censure Proposed.

Part of Orders of the Day — Communist Prosecution. – in the House of Commons at on 1 December 1925.

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Photo of Mr Shapurji Saklatvala Mr Shapurji Saklatvala , Battersea North

I do not wish to offer any comment on the conduct of the Judge, but I ask the Home Secretary to take the position as it stands, and recommend the release of those seven defendants. Here are seven men against whom the judgment is that it is not necessary to lock them up for what they have done or said, but they have been sent to prison because they will not change their political views. These men have been sent to prison in anticipation of future misdemeanours, and it is not considered necessary to send them to prison for their past misdemeanours. I hope the Home Secretary will see his way to reverse the effect of such a judgment. All this has not come about without its origin. Why did the Home Secretary take the view that documents, which were legitimate and permissible in speeches during prosecutions in 1922, 1923, 1924, and early in 1925, should suddenly become dangerous documents now?

Here we have a real picture of the present Government's mentality. There has been great contention between the Government and the Opposition Benches. The Government undertook to settle certain economic problems which, by their own confessions, were adverse to working-class interests, and whether they intended it or not, they were adverse and hard, and the working classes had to settle down to work for longer hours, lower wages, and less favourable terms than they were enjoying before. Then the Government turn to the Communist agitation, and the Opposition appealed to the Government to leave the Communists alone and take no notice of them. Then the Conservative party in the country and their spokesmen here took a very exaggerated view of their powers, and they said, "No, we cannot leave them alone." In this House, in the Debate on the 6th August last, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, speaking in the Debate on the Temporary Subvention to the coal mining industry said: What is required for these forces is a policy which will procure their separate treatment in isolation from large popular pursuits, and it is a matter to which every effort should be earnestly and urgently directed. This is not the language of the man in the street, but the language of a polished politician whose heart wants to say something, although he is afraid of saying it in plain language. The Chancellor of the Exchequer said the Communists and the Third International are part and parcel of the working classes, and argued that if the Government tried to punish them the whole of the working classes would be entangled. Therefore they put forward the suggestion that the first operation should be an artful political operation, isolating members from the large body politic of the working class, and then the Government would be able to go ahead. The Chancellor of the Exchequer in the speech I have alluded to says a little later on: The decision which was taken on Thursday was taken because we had not yet abandoned that hope. If we had plunged into a struggle, allowed a stoppage of the mines, had faced a general strike on the railways, had accepted a temporary paralysis of the entire industry of the country, allowed trade to be checked, allowed social reform to be arrested, our finances to be deranged, had postponed pensions, and restored taxation—if we had taken that position then for us, and so far as this Parliament is concerned, the door would have been closed to an advance to a better state of things It may yet happen. Then the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Derby (Mr. Thomas) speaking on the temporary subvention to the coal mining industry in the same Debate said: The railwaymen would have stopped work last Friday night, not because they wanted to challenge the constitution, not because they were not as loyal as any other citizens of the community, not because that issue was involved, but because they believed they were doing as you would have done if an injustice were done to your people. You would have resented it. The railway-men feel that an injustice was done to the miners, and they were prepared to stand by them. The Chancellor of the Exchequer in another paragraph in his speech said: There is another aspect of challenge to which I know the Committee would wish me to refer. It is a challenge to our Parliamentary institutions from persons far removed from those to whom I have been referring, but it is none the less a very serious, and in some ways in a practical sense, a more dangerous aspect. There is a growing disposition among the great trade union authorities of the country to use the exceptional immunities which trade unions possess under the law, not for the purpose of ordinary trade pursuits, but in the pursuit of far-reaching political and economic aims."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 6th August, 1925; cols. 1689–90–91, Vol. 187] Here is an admission that the Government have in front of thorn within one night an upsetting of this, that and the. other.

7.0 P.M.

They found in their cool, quiet calculation that the miners and the railway-men could not he persuaded now to lead an inferior life as hitherto, and, when they found that it was the complete failure and crushing defeat of the whole programme of the Conservative party promised at the General Election. The Chancellor of the Exchequer suggested, and rightly suggested, that it might happen here, because he knows that there are limits to his power of bribing the master class by subsidies and subventions. Therefore, it is his political policy, that here are those Communists. The Labour party said they had nothing to do with it. "They are insignificant. Leave them alone." The Government adopted the view that they are a danger from the Government point of view, that they do count, that their activities are in the creating of strong trade union bodies to behave in a way in which the trade union bodies and organisations did not behave in this country before the advent of the Communist party and the minority movement. Therefore, the Government suggested that the first part should be the political and tactical isolation of this group from the larger body politic of the working classes. Then the Government will go ding dong, not with the view to finding a group here and there and giving them judicial treatment, but with the set political purpose of removing something which in their minds was the cause of bringing failure to the much vaunted Conservative programme and paralysing them for the future without any policy out of the darkness with which they were faced.

It was on this basis that these political persecutions were formulated. We were challenged by the Attorney-General at the trial, and by the Home Secretary, and by an hon. Member who has interrupted frequently. You said all the time that we were going to have our forces and were going to kill you all, and get on those benches if we could get to the ballot —that there was going to be a mutiny. There was not a trace of evidence. Not only was there no evidence, but, if the House will take my assurance, there was no existence of any military preparations in the Communist party of Great Britain at all. There was nothing in the evidence nor in our action or programme or policy. We simply go to the Army and say one morning, when all is at peace, when there is no disturbance, when the country is in a flourishing condition and a democratic Government with the wishes of the majority of the people are ruling us, "Come out from your barracks with your arms and let Mussolini be put on the throne." There was no such case made against us. There was no such practice, policy, or programme in the whole of the Communist activities. March up to the landlords and shoot them! March up to the mineowners and shoot them! And then we take possession of the mines and the lands! Nothing of the sort was ever contemplated. Nothing so stupid was ever preached; nothing so clumsy was ever suggested.

We definitely and deliberately stated— and the Home Secretary more than anybody else is the living embodiment and proof of what we said—that the possessing class lives by direct action. The mineowners do not go to a democratic Parliament and get the permission of Parliament to reduce miners' wages. The mineowners go to their own industrial organisation, the mineowners' organisation, and decide there by their own arbitrary vote that they will reduce the wages, and they give notice of reduction to the men. Then, when the men refuse to take the reduction, we Communists say, and will continue to say, because it is true and unassailable, that the master class is full of physical violence, is arming secretly and semiopenly, is drilling, is making preparations for physical violence on the working classes. That being the position, we say to the workers, Please remember that you will have to face it all, and you will have to be on the defensive. Even in spite of all that, you never found in the activities of the Communist party anything besides teaching the men, opening their eyes, and warning them to be on the defensive. You say the Communist party have got funds from Russia, Ireland, or China and got guns and issued them to the workers and said, "Shoot the masters." No, but we definitely say that the ruling class always rules the world by physical means and not by common sense; not by moral persuasion but by terrorism. The difference between the Labour party and the Communist party is that we say to the workers that when the time arrives you will refuse to take direct action and the master class, without any reference to a public democratic vote and the working classes who are in a majority of this country, will refuse to take the dictatorship of the plutocracy lying down. Then the plutocracy and the rulers will make common cause and attack you. The means of self-defence that we have suggested to the working class is not immediately to take arms but to open the eyes of tho9e who are likely to kill us and fight us and to say to them and appeal to them not to kill us and not to shoot the workers. There is nothing illegal or immoral about the programme, and as long as we live and believe so, we have a right to preach it and will continue to preach it.

I again appeal to this House to weigh up what is in the balance. It is not the personal indiscretions or the personal sense of injustice or this or that, but it is a class funk that started with the last mining crisis, the class funk described in this House by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I also think that the Communist party and the Minority Movement are urging the workers to unite together and to fight and resist in a better manner than they have hitherto been led to do. We still retain our right, in spite of imprisonment and this prosecution, to say to the working classes that we are ruled in the workshops and in the offices by bloodthirsty, unscrupulous people who have grown so accustomed to shout and dictate and always to make military preparations to enforce their will. All of them make sentimental speeches and appeal to morality and one thing and another, but in their heart of hearts they calculate in the last factor to rely upon the armed forces to force the wishes of money and self-interest down the throats of the majority of the population. We say we want to overthrow that system. We want the majority, which is the working classes, to be the dictators, and not the minority, which is the employing class.

The Home Secretary predicted that after the trial every Communist would feel ashamed of himself. I think he is quite wrong. He had much to be sorry for; he had much to redress and retract. There is nothing any honest and sincere Communist feels ashamed of. In Czechoslovakia, Germany, France and Belgium, Communist Members of Parliament are coming forward in larger and larger numbers, and even in this country, in spite of the little ornamental boards put up outside the Labour camp. How else can it be? We all mean to take possession of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and we are pledged to overthrow Capitalism. It is all nonsense to say that some belong to us and some do not. This is as much vote-catching tactics as the Home Secretary's action was in prosecuting the 12 Communists. That was his vote-catching. The right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition, immediately after the Liverpool Conference, said: "Now I feel happy. At the next Election I will get one million more votes." It was vote-catching trickery.