While he deprecated the ‘lamentable confusion’ the party had shown in relation to the Ethiopia crisis, Padmore had qualified praise for the ILP’s generally ‘correct theoretical approach’ to colonial questions.109 Given that ‘the heir to the October Revolution’, the British Communist Party, had ‘been swamped in a morass of opportunism’ on colonial matters, Padmore declared his faith in the ILP instead, calling on it to uphold revolutionary Marxism and maintain ‘an uncompromising and unswerving position, come what may’.110 Above all, British workers should not ‘help the capitalists to drown in blood the struggles of the colonial peoples’.111 With characteristic incaution, but with a nose for the core truths, he pronounced that most colonial peoples ‘were not concerned with the conflicting political conflicts going on in Europe. To them all whites are alike – a feeling which can hardly be otherwise when Labour and Popular Front Governments oppress and exploit them in the same way as Tory and other reactionary Capitalists.’112 For this attitude to change, European workers’ movements would have to ‘show more solidarity in deeds and not words’ with colonial aspirations to liberation. Padmore himself was drawing on resistance taking place in the colonies to make his observations, citing, for instance, the Barbados Observer, which had declared it ‘sheer impudence on the part of the British ruling class to appeal to colonial workers to help them defend their ill-gotten gains’ given the denial of ‘elementary principles of democracy … to the native masses’.113 ‘While the European scene is occupying our attention, the colonial “Fuehrers” are tightening their grip on the coloured workers in Africa and the West Indies’, Padmore announced, as the Second World War finally broke out.114 Quite simply, he noted, the British government ‘cannot claim to be fighting for “freedom and democracy” in Europe without stimulating demands for “freedom and democracy” in its own Empire’.115 He also repeatedly invoked the white European ‘indifference to the suffering of the coloured people of Asia, Africa, and other backward lands’, asking pointedly: ‘How many whites who are now living under the Nazi jackboot ever concerned themselves with the life and struggles of the coloured races?’116
Padmore’s imprint is immediately manifest in the New Leader’s first ‘Empire Special’, published ahead of May Day, 1938. Its front page lays out in pithily annotated bullet-points, ‘What the Empire Is’, from the countries and populations under its purview to the investments and profits it generates.117 ‘There is certainly much to commend from the point of view of the British Capitalist class’, the article announces acerbically. ‘Whether there is so much to commend from the point of view of the workers, the other pages of this “Empire Special” will serve to indicate.’118 It is impossible not to see Padmore’s analytical influence in every article which follows. Reginald Reynolds, laying out a litany of imperial crimes in India, familiar from his White Sahibs in India, now describes, as he had not in his book, the extent of resistance, as well as the brutal repression of it from the ‘Mutiny’ to the Amritsar massacre in 1919. Citing both Ernest Jones on the Indian revolt and Hutchinson’s comment in the wake of the Meerut Conspiracy Case that British imperialism is ‘in no respect different’ from ‘Fascist Terrorism’ in Italy, Reynolds elaborates: ‘Yet such is the system for which we are being invited to fight in the name of “Democracy”; and an attempt is actually being made to mix up the fight of the Spanish workers against Fascism with the defence of the British Empire against the rival bandits of Italy, Germany, and Japan!’119 British workers ‘will one day realise that they are used to keep their fellow-workers in slavery’. Reynolds rehearsed a point that was also made, we will recall, in the aftermath of the Indian rebellion in 1857 and Morant Bay uprising in 1865; the end of empire ‘means not only freedom for the other fellow but freedom for ourselves’. An unsigned piece lists ‘humane’ British campaigns of aerial bombing, observing: ‘Imperialist aggression is not only infamous when it is committed by Japan and the Fascist powers. It is always infamous. It is infamous when committed by the British Government.’120 The hitherto moderate Fenner Brockway posed a bold question in his article ‘Has Hitler Anything to Teach Our Ruling Class?’, before going to on to list the features of fascism practised by all empires, including the British, from racial persecution, forced labour and the suppression of worker organizations to censorship, detention without trial and even concentration camps. Noting that political democratic rights were only enjoyed by members of the conquering white race in the colonies, ‘The British Empire is not a democracy,’ Brockway declared passionately. ‘It is the most extensive dictatorship in the world.’121 Kenyatta and Padmore also contributed to the supplement, their pieces fleshing out Brockway’s more general points, detailing respectively the violent expropriation of ancestral lands in East Africa and the brutal repression of labour organization in the West Indies, another form of ‘colonial fascism’.122 In an article telling the story of the Opium Wars, a young Jon Kimche, who would later become a noted historian of the Middle East, called for opposition to Japanese aggression in China, but ended thus: ‘But don’t think that the British ruling class is any better than the Japanese ruling class. They are both Imperialist robbers. And our first duty is to overthrow the robbers in our own midst.’123
A particularly trenchant voice on colonial affairs in the New Leader was that of Arthur Ballard. A carpenter by profession and a protégé of James, Ballard wrote frequently on colonial matters, and ran a series in the New Leader called ‘In the Empire’, which he aimed partly at ‘the working-class student of Empire problems’.124 One of Ballard’s creations was a counter-exhibit to the much-hyped Empire Exhibition in Glasgow held that year, in which, as one contributor to the New Leader had it: ‘Ideal conditions are being created for enticing young men to become murderous robots on behalf of the ruling caste.’125 Ballard’s ‘Anti-Empire Exhibition’ would instead ‘show that the real owners of the Empire are not the people of Britain or of the colonies, but the big financial and commercial interests centred in London’.126 The ‘Anti-Empire Exhibition’ would also involve ‘remarkable lectures’ to packed halls on colonial conditions by the likes of Kenyatta and Padmore, to counter the main exhibition in which, as Ballard trenchantly observed, ‘All the resources of Capitalism have been used to glorify an Empire under whose flag conditions are equal to those within the Fascist countries.’127 It is unlikely that Ballard’s views were not indebted in some sense to James’s writings and to Padmore’s persistent repetition of this very point. Sarah Britton’s useful historical account of the ‘Workers’ Exhibition’, as it was also known, tells us that it sought to detail the ‘harsh conditions in the colonies and the hardships endured by colonial workers’ from their own perspective; from Australia and Ireland to India, Trinidad and China, it told the story of ‘Empire from the bottom’, as one socialist newspaper put it.128 A report in the New Leader deemed the counter-exhibition a great success, its having ‘received large-scale notice in all the Scottish papers’ and ‘a record sale of general anti-Imperialist literature’.129 Given the high levels of support for the ILP in Glasgow, the exhibition was not an isolated call from the political fringe but ‘an articulate, co-ordinated expression from a political party at the very centre of Glasgow life’.130 An unsigned piece written around this time, most likely by Ballard, praised Comrade George Padmore as ‘a great intellectual force and the voice of our negro brothers’.131 On 9 December 1938, Ballard’s review of James’s The Black Jacobins described the Haitian Revolution as ‘The Greatest Slave Revolt in History’, and posed the question: ‘What are the lessons we can learn from this story?’132 One was that ‘oppressed peoples should be ready to take advantage of the difficulties of the various Imperialist groups’, and should be assisted in their quest for self-determination by white workers, even if only ‘the revolutionary action of the masses can give freedom to the masses, whether white or coloured’.133
Unsurprisingly given these influences, reportage and opinion on the ‘colonial question’ in the New Leader was also d
istinctive in being shot through with the understanding that any concessions towards freedom and self-determination were wrested from colonial powers, in the first instance, by the actions of colonial peoples. In earlier pieces reporting on the unrest in the Caribbean, Ballard, noting that British warships had been dispatched to the West Indies, had demanded: ‘Are we in Britain going to tolerate this? Are we going to allow the demands of the workers in the West Indies to be answered with armed force?’134 Detailing the appalling conditions prevailing in the West Indian colonies, Ballard praised those workers who, not content to break stones for a pittance every day and demanding ‘land to cultivate’, had rioted only to meet with shootings and arrests.135 The West Indies ‘now occupy the centre of the stage of the anti-Imperialist struggle’.136 Ballard would note in relation to India that it was only bitter struggle by the masses that had ‘compelled the Government to grant certain political rights in the Provinces’.137 Challenging Lord Halifax’s claim that, contra Germany, British rule ‘had left trail [sic] of freedom and self-government’ behind, Ballard snapped: ‘The West Indies alone give the answer to the lie.’138 In another article he would note that methods ‘in accord with the worst Fascist traditions’ were used by the British Empire in the face of ‘agitational movements’ – that of the West African Youth League in Sierra Leone, for instance.139 Indeed, to stop Hitler’s appeal to the colonial masses, it was necessary to admit to imperial hypocrisies and to assist anticolonial struggles. Ballard’s call for assistance based on solidarity rather than benevolence – ‘We in Britain can help’ – was based on the simple argument that to let such repression pass without protest was ‘only bringing the open dictatorship of Imperialism one step nearer home’.140
Neither Ballard nor other New Leader contributors were unaware of Hitler’s cynical and self-serving use of the British Empire’s record to justify his depredations, and they were at pains to stress that Nazism had to be resisted unambiguously and strenuously; ‘the whole liberty-crushing regime of Fascism is abhorrent to us’, Brockway insisted.141 No one doubted that ‘it is the duty of the working-class movement to stop Hitler’ and to ‘give direct, large and constant assistance’ to militant anti-Fascist working-class movements in Fascist-held countries.142 The point was, rather, to hold the Empire to account as it imprisoned the likes of war veteran Uriah Butler in the West Indies ‘for the crime of attempting to obtain a little of the democratic rights which were supposed to be Britain’s aim’.143 To this end, the false binary between freedom-loving democracies with colonies and tyrannical fascism had to be put under scrutiny. Brockway argued that fascism and British imperialism both ‘trample upon liberty and embody the barbarity of racial suppression’.144 Giving the example of Sierra Leone, Ballard observed that, as resistance in the colonies gathered steam, colonial rulers had been ‘actively engaged in removing what small elements of “democracy” already existed’.145 In September 1939, the New Leader published, through the India League, the Indian National Congress’s famous declaration that it stood against both fascism and imperialism: ‘Indian sympathy is entirely on the side of democracy and freedom but she is not able to associate herself with the present war when freedom is denied to her and even the present limited freedom is taken away’.146 A few weeks later, with the war now underway, the paper carried extensive extracts from ‘an outspoken manifesto’ signed by multiple organizations from the West Indies and African colonies declaring that ‘the African Peoples’ in the British and French empires were following the Indian people in refusing to co-operate in the war: ‘What did the Negroes get out of the last war which should make them enthusiastic about the present? Nothing. Today they enjoy less democracy in their own countries than they did in 1914.’147 The manifesto itself, issued in Britain by the IASB executive and signed by Padmore, James, Kenyatta, Johnson and others, was a sharply worded response to the call for colonial subjects to contribute to the war effort:
Let Mr Chamberlain get up at Westminster and M. Daladier in the French Chamber of Deputies and issue a declaration to the world granting their colonies full democratic rights and self-government – NOW! … Already we have witnessed the shameful rejection of the legitimate demands of our Indian brothers. The struggles of the Indians, the Chinese and other oppressed peoples for freedom is also our struggle, and we pledge our support to them.148
It was endorsed by, among others, the West Africa Youth League, the Kikuyu (East African) Central Association, the TUC of Sierra Leone, the West Indian National Federation and the Abyssinian Freedom League.149
It is worth recording that such interventions were not restricted to the pages of the New Leader but given a wider airing as they percolated through to parliamentary debates via ILP MPs like John McGovern, who invoked the West Indian ‘unrest’ in the House:
I think everyone will agree that to hear these stories unfolded of the domination of race over race or class over class brings home to us the truth of the saying of the leader of what is termed the Oxford Group the other day that there is enough in the world for every man’s human needs but there is not enough for some people’s human greed. We see in this report, and in the statements of the right hon. Gentleman and of other Members of the House, that there is something radically wrong in what is termed by many speakers this great and glorious Empire of ours. The flag, and the tinsel, and the cheering of the Empire, are one thing, but when one gets down to hard economic facts, and sees the everyday life of the natives of our Colonial Empire, one finds something completely different from all these tales and stories that are told on platforms, in theatres and over the wireless.150
McGovern further noted that those in the West Indies who had sought to express suffering and demand changes
are not cheered, or applauded, or told that they deserve well of the Empire; they are clapped into prison for five, ten and twelve years because they express the human needs of men, women and children in those Colonies. Can anyone read the reports of human suffering and low standards in Jamaica, Trinidad and other parts of the Colonial Empire without a blush of shame that white men, who pretend to be the civilisers, keep their black brothers living, or existing, under such conditions?151
The conditions were shameful, but equally shaming was the fact that they had been brought to metropolitan attention not by the humanitarian British conscience that was constantly invoked in parliament, but by colonial subjects in unrest, actors who were now being punished for refusing to accept their lot. Even Arthur Creech-Jones, erstwhile colonial secretary and a Fabian socialist very much attached to the idea of Britain benignly ‘bestowing self-government’, would also note the significance of claims for humanity being asserted, rather than divined and addressed through imperial benevolence:
The truth is that until riots and disturbances occurred and we had unrest beginning to sweep from one end of our Colonial Empire to the other, very little was really being done. This burst of activity is largely due to the fact that at last the workers are demanding that something should be done. It is a sad commentary on our method of government when we have to wait for riots and disturbances to force us to do what is elementary [sic] right.152
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