View Halloo

Britain's general election campaign was enlivened by shouts of view halloo last week as the Tory Party, in full cry, prepared to close in on Harold J. Laski, Chairman of the Labor Party. The occasion was a remark which Laski, professor of political science and author of 19 books and countless pamphlets, chiefly on the necessity of leftism, was alleged to have made at a Labor Party rally in Newark, Nottinghamshire. To a question from the crowd, Laski was reported (by the Nottingham Guardian, and later by Lord Beaverbrook's cockalorum conservative London Daily Express) to have replied: "If we cannot get the reforms we desire, we shall not hesitate to use violence, even if it means revolution."

Labor Party leaders tore their hair. Herbert Morrison, Labor Party policy maker, denied that his Party would ever use violence. Cried Labor Party newspapers: "Another Zinoviev letter."*

Furiously. Laski served libel writs on the Nottingham Guardian and the London Daily Express.

Socialism v. the Crown. Meanwhile, the Daily Express dug up a non-actionable Laski quote--this time on the Crown. In The Labor Party and the Constitution, Professor Laski wrote: "No one can doubt that the existence of the monarchy makes the realization of socialism a peculiarly difficult adventure. . . ."

At week's end Winston Churchill also gave tongue. Funereally he warned that the situation had been "darkened and complicated" by Laski, "a new figure" who had "leaped into notoriety" and presided over "dim conclaves from below" whose purpose was to supersede the House of Commons.

Well might Laski have recalled his own words to the Labor Party conference six months ago: "[I am] an example of that dangerous species in our movement who, so far as my knowledge goes, is rarely trusted and never eulogized--the species whose professional business is criticism and thought."

*The Zinoviev letter, purportedly written to British Communists by the Chairman of the Third International, Grigory Zinoviev (purged and shot in 1936), urged them to take over the Government by force. Laborites claimed that the letter was a Tory forgery. But it helped to lose them the general election in 1924.

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