Grayson was first and foremost a socialist, but his socialism went far beyond the politics of the official Labour movement. As a result he met with rebuff from the official movement, and hence his 1907 election victory was a massive surprise to them, based as it was on an enormous groundswell of participation and activity by working class women and men in the Colne Valley. Grayson had to do this as he lacked any sort of political organisation, beyond the most reduimentary. In fact, as Groves repeatedly points out, this was a limitation for Grayson personally and for the movement. During a national tour, under attack from the right of the Labour movement, Grayson one remarked, "I don't want to lead. I only want a group of men that will place first things first and stake their reputation on the issue." He was stung by those "timid socialists who share their parliamentary seats with captialists".
The occasion of this tour was the aftermath of Grayson's most famous parliamentary experience when he was expelled from Parliament for refusing to follow the business of the day. Grayson wanted to highlight the appalling conditions of the unemployed. More particuarly he could not comprehend that Parliament would not prioritise this, and that Labour went along with it. He was shunned by the official politicians, but his rebelliousness made him even more attractive to working people, who attended his meetings in their thousands everywhere. As Groves explains:
That was the first thing that went wrong. The way he was shut out from the Labour ranks, and the way they met his honest attack and open criticism with lies, slanders, evasions and trickeries; with the evil weapons that men would shrink horrified from using in their private lives but that seem to be an integral part of political struggle. He never quite believed that fellow socialists would behave in that way and, like a tiny pinprick, it jabbed at his idealism more and more pointedly as the fight grew in intensity. He had set out to fight the capitalists - he found himself fighting socialists; worse still he found socialist leaders joining with the enemy to destroy him.
Grayson's lack of political organisation meant that he threw himself into an enormous round of meetings, speeches and activity. It nearly broke him, and increasingly he turned to drink to cope. Here reality began to match the slander, and increasingly he found himself struggling. Every longstanding socialist knows the pressure of ongoing activity. Even Grayson's supporters understood it. The socialist journalist Robert Blatchford remarked that "We have a socialist MP but no socialist party". With such a party Grayson would have had support and political direction, as well as a body to discipline him and provide guidance. In its absence he was a one man band dedicated to overthrowing capitalism but not really understanding why.
Grayson did eventually help found the British Socialist Party, but this was hamstrung at birth by the sectarianism of large chunks of its membership. It is notable that the speeches reported by Groves by Grayson rarely seem to refer to actual struggle or give guidance to the movement. They are focused on electing other socialists and abstract propaganda. Neither of these is necessarily a band thing, but it really meant that Grayson offered nothing to workers who wanted to fight, other than inspiring speeches. As Groves says:
A one-man party cannot recruit. Propaganda without practical implementation is like faith without works - sterile. As the deep-rooted discontent became more and more expressed, as strife gew in the country, the workers requied from the socialists not just affirmation of faith but leadership in directing action to right the social wrongs.
Grayson could "win the crowds to a fighting socialist faith, but could show them no party likely to lead a way to socialism". Grayson's lack of politics was firmly exposed by World War One. Despite his radicalism, like most other parliamentary socialists across Europe he supported the war, being wounded on the Western Front and then touring to encourage others to fight. In this he followed the path of many better supported radicals in socialist parties, but nonetheless it was a tragedy. Grayson ended up recruiting workers to fight for a machine that was slaughtering other workers in the interests of British capital.
In 1920 Grayson disappeared. It wasn't immediately noticed that he was gone, as he was estranged from many and led a nomadic life. Groves avoids too much speculation, limiting himself to reporting on the most likely events. It is possible that he was killed because he was about to expose the corruption around a cash for peerages scandal. Later authors' have other ideas. In fact, in this regard Groves' book is somewhat wanting. In preparing his own biography of Victor Grayson more recently, Harry Taylor has written this article on Reg Groves giving an expert opinion and noting some strange absences and ommissions from Groves' work.
At his best Victor Grayson demonstrated that British workers' are not immune to the idea of radical socialist ideas. But his life is more a lesson in how not to fight for socialism. Nonetheless, while Reg Groves' book gives us some tactical lessons, it also offers activists an excellent overview of the early Labour Party at the turn of the 20th century. There's much here to learn from.
Related Reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment