Plank, Plank, Plank

In a mighty hall full of puzzled heads supported by tired spines, the British Labor Party's new electoral platform was pegged together and tinkered with, at Birmingham, last week, until it contained the bewildering total of 65 major planks and nobody seemed to know how many planklettes.

Party Leader James Ramsay MacDonald exulted: "We have laid a broad foundation upon which the Party can stand, not merely during the election of next year, but through all the years to come until the aims of Socialism are fully achieved in Great Britain!"

The platform promises that the Party, if returned to power, will gradually nationalize the coal, transport, power and life insurance businesses and establish minimum wage scales for all earners. Swiftest action is promised to repeal: 1) the Trades Union Act (making a "Coercive" or General Strike illegal); 2) the Trades Disputes Act (restraining unions from making extraordinary levies on their members) ; and 3) the Eight Hour Mines Act (under which British miners now delve an hour a day longer than in 1925.

Cried keynoter and Chairman of the Congress George Lansbury (a onetime Red now faded Pink and increasingly potent, among Laborites) : "Socialism is now British Labor's only goal. We raise that banner aloft and we shall keep it flying until Great Britain's resources are owned and used in the service of all the people!"

Reformed Red Lansbury explained to correspondents en passant that he now fervently regrets having once churlishly refused a cigar offered him by the late King Edward VII. "It was very impolite and silly of me," he added contritely, "although I have the excuse that I did not then and do not now smoke, or approve of smoking."

The platform is ambiguous as to whether the Party favors a "protective tariff," called "Safeguarding" in England. However Leader MacDonald, a staunch Free Trader, warned that even if some form of protection should have to be adopted he would by no means favor a tariff ("safeguarding") but instead would place an absolute embargo on too-cheap, too-competitive foreign goods.

The major resolution passed by the Congress was a thoroughgoing 2,000-word affair savagely flaying the Conservative Government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin for concluding their "secret" naval agreement with France (TIME, Aug. 13).

In a speech of sapient logic and tart sarcasm Mr. MacDonald set forth Labor's view of the new Anglo-British "gentlemen's agreement" thus: "You can have either diplomacy with a cat well hidden in the bag and kept from mewing, or you can have a cat out of the bag and open to the inspection of everybody. This was not quite secret diplomacy, because Sir Austen Chamberlain (British Foreign Secretary) mewed and the newspapers mewed and are still mewing.

"The tragic factor is that Sir Austen has surrendered the independence of British diplomacy by tying us up with France. The history of 1906 to 1914 is being re written. It is not good for France or Eng land to re-establish any sort of alliance. It would be better to stand shoulder to shoulder, openly, with all the nations of Europe."

The Congress, pushing Leader MacDonald's theory to its logical conclusion soon formally resolved that if returned to power the Party will restore diplomatic relations between Great Britain and Soviet Russia. Lastly the Congress voted that all Communists shall be rigorously excluded from the Party.

Thus British Labor now stands for a broad, fraternal pacifism, embracing all nations; and for a strict exclusion from its doctrines of all tenets more advanced than those of Socialism.

A comic incident of the week was the inexplicable leaking out of an old, secret Scotland Yard "Report on the Activities of James Ramsay MacDonald from 1916 to 1921." In the expert opinion of detectives who prepared the report, "Mr. MacDonald is a Constitutional Socialist and by no means a Bolshevist."

Aside from platform pegging, the Con ference notably concerned itself, last week, with a placid, woolly-whiskered oldster called "Ben," and with another "Ben," whose mien is hard-bitten and acidulous.

Old "Ben" Turner received the rousing cheer to which he was entitled as retiring Chairman of the General Council of the British Trade Union Congress. Hard-bitten "Ben" Tillett was then elected Chairman.

His Grace the Duke of Northumberland has good reason to remember that Benjamin ("Ben") Tillett once said: "So Percy* don't approve of the dole,/- don't he? Why his dole for doing nothing is -L-20,000 ($97,200) a week!"

"Ben" Tillett, originally a bricklayer, progressed through shoemaking and sailoring to become General Secretary of the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Workers' Union, from its inception in 1887 until 1922. Latterly, as a Member of Parliament and lecturer, he has twice toured the Empire, and repeatedly visited the U. S. and Soviet Russia. The title of his favorite lecture, Christ and Labor! might be called the slogan wherewith hard-bitten "Ben" Tillett has sold himself to pious toilers' everywhere.

New Tales in Old Clubs

As they drifted back from bagging grouse in Scotland, London clubmen heard three new tales, current last week in four old clubs:

The Garrick Club, since 1831 a mecca for footlight folk, burbled with chuckles at an anecdote from the tongue of sprightly Lady Peel ("Beatrice Lillie").

"On my last tour of the States," said she, "they seemed more impressed by my title in Detroit than anywhere else. When I walked onto the stage and bowed in the usual way, what d'you suppose happened?--the whole audience rose and bowed back. Jolly polite of the Middle Westerners, what?"

The Carlton Club (founded a year later than the Garrick, but centuries older in Conservatism) seethed with indignation, last week, over the unseemly marriage of the young Earl of Bective to Lady Clarke of Rupertswood, in Brompton Oratory.

"Actually!" stormed one Carlton Club peer to another, "Actually, I saw them with my very eyes, chattering like two tomtits!"

Lord Bective and his bride, in short, had left the altar not in customary reverent silence but chattering and chortling gaily to one another.

he affair was aggravated when certain Clubbers told that they had seen the bride sway slightly, as she emerged from her limousine to enter the Oratory, only to be steadied by a Bobbie--a policeman!**

Shocked Britons of the Carlton ended by dismissing the wedding as rather an "Irish Bull," since the bridegroom's father, the Marquess of Headfort, is a Senator of the Irish Free State.

Nihon-Jin-Kwai, the 46-year-old club of the Japanese gentlemen of London, rustled with Oriental mirth, when a member returned from Cork, with a tale.

A relative of the member, Mr. Tsuneo Yamamoto, had been present at Blarney Castle, last week, when the petty Sultan of Muscat (Arabia) visited the Blarney Stone and emplanted a most peculiar kiss. Mr. Yamamoto was in a position to reveal that the Sultan of Muscat gingerly placed in contact with the Blarney Stone only the tip of his cane and then cautiously kissed the stick's big gold handle.

Thus all danger of too potent emanation from the magic stone into the Sultan of Muscat was cleverly avoided.*

Boodle's Club, anciently founded in 1762 (thus antedating the hoary Carlton by 70 years) was a typical retreat, where robust clubmen discussed over whiskey and Schweppe's, last week, the climax of the famed "Taxicab Case" of Miss Helen Adele.

Public sympathy has rallied strongly to the young woman--so poor that she Lad no home except the taxi cabs parked overnight in a garage--and so unfortunate as to have been falsely charged with improper conduct by two constables.

Regrettably the case developed into a contest between lying witnesses.

Stormed Mr. Justice Humphreys, in his charge to the jury: "Perjury and foul perjury has been committed in this court. . . . Your duty is to say whether you are satisfied whether the perjury is on the side of these two constables. If so you ought to convict them. . . . I am not referring to the fact that the wretched girl is either a prostitute or something near it. That is beside the point."

Soon the jury found for Miss Adele; and Mr. Justice Humphreys was obliged to sentence the constables to 18 months imprisonment for "conspiracy to prefer a false charge."

That is to say, the Jury absolved Miss Adele of any specific misconduct, although the Judge had trespassed the bounds of legal propriety to accuse her in general.

*The Duke's excessively ancestral surname.

/-Slang for the State's allowance for the unemployed.

**Next morning's illustrated newspapers supplied photographic confirmation.

*Cut deep into the stone is the name "Cormac McCarthy" and the date "A.D. 1446." But legend says it was in 1602 that Cormac McCarthy agreed to surrender Blarney Castle to the English and then put off doing so again and again until the situation changed and he was allowed to keep his castle.

Cormac's skill in "blarneying" or "putting-off" the English lent to his stone its potent reputation.