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."