Labour Election Campaign Quotations

By Iain Roberts | Sun 21st February 2010 - 11:39 am

A few quotes from Labour’s Campaign Quotations book from the 1951 General Election.

Back in the days before the Internet (yes, young people, it didn’t always exist), Labour published this 300 page book of quotes from friend and foe to help its eager activists.

Socialism is a system of national co-operation. It is based upon the principle of co-operation, as opposed to the principle of competition. It is based on the principle of collectivism as opposed to the principle of individualism. It is union as against disunion, order as against anarchy. It means each for all and all for each, as against the present cruel and wasteful system of “every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost”.

No attribution given.

After a while the private producers will disappear, not because there will be any law against individualist production, but because it will not pay. No one will care to face the worries, the harrassment, the anxieties of individual struggling for livelihood, when ease, freedom and security can be enjoyed in the communal service.

Annie Besant, ‘Fabian Essays’

[The Tory Party is] the Party of the rich against the poor; of the classes and their dependents against the masses; of the lucky, the wealthy, the happy, and the strong, against the left-out and shut-out millions of the weak and poor.

Winston Churchill, 30th January 1909 (at the time, Churchill was in the Liberal Party).

Towns all over Britain are having to order bigger school desks – because children are now so ‘beefy’ that existing desks are too small.

Seven-year-olds in many cases now need a desk as big as that made for eight-year-olds before the war.

Daily Mirror, 13 October 1950

Have you ever been really hungry – so hungry that you could sit in a cold grey room and keep on drinking water because water at least helps to stop the pain…If you are hungry as that it is impossible to think of anything else…then come with me to one of the 18 Daily Sketch soup kitchen scattered over London. Watch the patient queue lining up, old women, young men, boys and girls, all of them in really urgent need.

Beverley Nicholls, Daily Sketch, 9 February 1938.

There is a lot of crime among young people today, and it is due to the present Government. Because taxation today makes us all have to work so much harder, we are too tired to help the young people. Also, we have no longer the time to make friends with the youngsters.

Miss H. Toller, member of Women’s Advisory Council of Conservative Associations, 7th May 1950.

Asked if the Conservative Party could guarantee to keep the social services at their present level, Mr Law replied “Of course I cannot guarantee it. All I say is that we will do our best to keep them at their present level.

Richard Law, Tory front bench MP at Haltemprice, 23 September 1949.

It’s worth noting that the almost complete absence of references to the Liberals in the 300 pages reflects how irrelevant the party was in that period – compare and contrast to the attempts by Brown and Cameron to woo the Lib Dems this time round.

5 Comments

MatGB 21st Feb '10 - 10:18pm

It’s worth noting that the almost complete absence of references to the Liberals in the 300 pages reflects how irrelevant the party was in that period

Not really, it shows that Labour dropped the ball in the 55 seats where the Conservatives didn’t run a candidate and urged their supporters to back a National Liberal candidate. OK, combining their votes with the other Liberals still only just gets 5%, but they weren’t irrelevent in the areas where there was no Tory candidate…

Like the Churchill quote though, might have to remember that one…
CTerry 22nd Feb '10 - 1:32pm

MatGB, by that time the National Liberal Party had turned into nothing more than a mere appendage to the Conservatives. National Liberal MPs were no more ‘liberal’ than their Conservative counterparts, voted with the Conservatives and eventually merged into the Conservatives. The idea that somehow the National Liberal and Liberal Parties formed some sort of ‘Liberal bloc’ is simply untrue, and even at the local level the National Liberals were seen as essentially being Tories.
Tom Papworth 22nd Feb '10 - 3:08pm

The naivety of the first two quotes makes me smile. Remember when socialists thought socialism was an inevitable aspect of human progress? It’s kind of sweet, really.

Of course, capitalism is also a system of cooperation, but unlike socialism it is one where cooperation is voluntary rather than coerced. It is fascinating, in fact, that people always focus on the competitive aspects of capitalism and not its collaborative, coordinating aspects. Yet it enables people who have never met and who know nothing about one another to work together in harmony. Rather than “order as against anarchy”, it is spontaneous order rather than enforced order: not Leviathan but the market.
Jock 22nd Feb '10 - 5:56pm

The Churchill one is indeed interesting, and clearly used for his attack on Tories rather than endorsement of anything Socialist. Here he is in 1908 during the Dundee by-election on Socialism versus Liberalism:

I want to-night to speak about these cross-currents; and let me first say a word about Socialism. There are a great many Socialists whose characters and whose views I have much respect for—men some of whom I know well, and whose friendship I enjoy. A good many of those gentlemen who have delightful, rosy views of a noble and brilliant future for the world, are so remote from hard facts of daily life and of ordinary politics that I am not very sure that they will bring any useful or effective influence to bear upon the immediate course of events. To the revolutionary Socialist, whether dreamer or politician, I do not appeal as the Liberal candidate for Dundee. I recognise that they are perfectly right in voting against me and voting against the Liberals, because Liberalism is not Socialism, and never will be. There is a great gulf fixed. It is not only a gulf of method, it is a gulf of principle. There are many steps we have to take which our Socialist [155]opponents or friends, whichever they like to call themselves, will have to take with us; but there are immense differences of principle and of political philosophy between our views and their views.

Liberalism has its own history and its own tradition. Socialism has its own formulas and aims. Socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests; Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely, by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. Socialism assails the pre-eminence of the individual; Liberalism seeks, and shall seek more in the future, to build up a minimum standard for the mass. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capital; Liberalism attacks monopoly.
Jock 22nd Feb '10 - 6:07pm

And Tom, there was a short series of three or four fifteen minutes slots at quarter to nine in the evening on Radio Four a few weeks ago, in which one party spokesperson each week was asked to explain their party’s political ideology. Sadly I only heard the Labour one, which was by Liam Byrne (oh yes, good “Socialist” there as former doyen of a state outsourcing company!). Anyway, he tried to explain that the Labour movement was rooted in the idea that humanity can achieve more working together than as individuals and so on without a hint of irony that that was what a truly free market does.

The more I learn about the Individualist Anarchists in the c19th USA the worse state socialism appears to me. That these anarchists and their marxist opponents shared many of the same desires for humanity yet the latter could not see, or deliberately ignored, the fact that what they were proposing was totalitarian.

See, Benjamin R Tucker’s “State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, And Wherein They Differ for an excellent and accessible exposition that all liberals should read before they start assuming and then criticising the aims of those of us who want to reduce or eradicate the State as some kind of neo-Thatcherite Tory entryists.