THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW
ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER
VOL. 169 No. 5047
LONDON JANUARY 30th, 1937
SIXPENCE
PRINCIPAL
THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK . . . 145
THE LABOUR PARTY AND COMMUNISM ; THE DOCKYARD DISM ISSALS ; GERMANY AND ITALY ON THE VOLUNTEER QUESTION ; M . BLUM’S OVERTURE ; THE PO PE AND GERMANY ; RUSSIAN CONFESSIONS ; THE DISTRESSED AREAS AGAIN : A CASE FOR LARGESCALE THINKING THE ARCHBISHOP OF YORK AND SPAIN 147 ARTHUR HUNGERFORD POLLEN .. 150 THE CONDEMNATION OF ANGLICAN
ORDERS ( I I ) ......................................................151 By the Rev. E. C. MESSENGER, Ph.D. THE ANGLICAN AND RUMANIAN
ORTHODOX RELATIONS
By Dom BEDE W INSLOW , O.S.B.
154
CONTENTS
THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE JESUITS
IN SPAIN ................................... .. 156 ROME LETTER ....................... . . 157 DUBLIN LETTER ....................... . . 158 THE CHURCH ABROAD . . 160 BOOKS OF THE WEEK . . 162
FICTION CHRONICLE, by GRAHAM GREEN ; THE FLOWERING OF NEW ENGLAND : CATHOLIC SOCIAL ACTION ; SEVEN HEIRS APPARENT THE REUNION MOVEMENT IN THE
CHURCH OF ENGLAND......................... 168 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR . . 168
THE W O R L D W EEK BY W EEK The Labour Party and Communism
It is obvious that the present highly anomalous position of Sir Stafford Cripps cannot endure. He receives the Labour Party Whip as a Labour M.P., while the Socialist League, which he directs, has been expelled as a body by the Labour Party. The Socialist League, a creation of the last few years, has now linked itself with the Communist Party of Great Britain and with the T.L.P. The Labour Party knows better than anyone else that the Communists only seek to build common fronts in order to destroy their enemies from inside. The Communist requests for affiliation with the Labour Party are merely “ Trojan horse” tactics, and reformist parties like the British Labour Party remain in Communists’ eyes the most dangerous, because delusively plausible, of all rival organizations.
The Labour Party publishes a useful pamphlet called the Communist Solar System (2d.), which gives a list of the various organizations by which “ Communism in disguise” pursues the tactics of the United Front. The Labour Party gives in that pamphlet “ a list of political parties or organizations ancillary or subsidiary to the Communist Party :
The League Against Imperialism ; the International Labour Defence; the Minority Movement; the Workers’ International Relief; the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement; the Friends of the Soviet Union ; the Anti-War Movement; the European Workers’ Anti-Fascist Congress (British Delegation Committee) ; the Relief Committee for Victims of German Fascism (German Relief Committee). The League against Imperialism has an auxiliary, the Meerut Prisoners’ Release Committee. Members of any of these organizations are ineligible for membership of the Labour Party.
Communist tactics today substitute the word Socialism for the much less popular term Communism, and this increases confusion, because Conservative papers like to label the official Labour Party as Socialist, and the word now always requires further definition. A man may call himself a Socialist and be anything from the most reasonable and responsible supporter of the Labour Party to the most fanatical Communist. The wide currency of the term today makes it very easy for those who have a motive to misrepresent Papal condemnations of the Continental Socialism of the last century. It is the same with the word Liberal when used in Spain, where its general connotation includes a note of militant anti-Catholicism very different from the atmosphere of the Reform Club. The Dockyard Dismissals
Men who work in Government dockyards must expect exceptional discipline, because of the highly confidential character of much of the work they do. The Opposition were accordingly on ill-chosen ground when they sought to beat the drums of Magna Charta and awaken jealousy for the citizen’s just rights because the Government has summarily dismissed, without giving reasons, a number of individuals whom it could no longer employ with confidence. It is a good indication of the distance we have travelled since the unsensational security of Victorian England that Sir Samuel Hoare could speak gravely of the activities of a superior organization directing sabotage in British dockyards. These expressions used to belong to such writers of exciting mystery stories as Mr. Oppenheim. The Government’s duty is a two-fold one : it has to maintain the defences of the country, and it has to protect its soldiers and sailors against death or injury through vital and deliberate defects in the machinery provided for them. Mr. Baldwin explained that the Government could not reveal how it learned of subversive activities without compromising its sources, and the cry that the men now dismissed should have been heard in their own defence was one to which the Government could not listen. It is good that these matters should be brought up in Parliament, but not pressed home to embarrass the defence Services.
