Donovan Pedelty
Prometheus Press, Builth Wells, Powys, £13.50
This is a fascinating book. As the Labour Party approaches its 100th birthday, Donovan Pedelty critically assesses the extent to which it has realised its aim. In a detailed and well-argued account, he shows that whereas Labour always espoused equality, nevertheless the gulf between rich and poor grows wider and wider. Similarly, Labour has proclaimed the right to work; yet has done nothing to curb unemployment. Far from achieving its ideal, socialism, like the Cheshire cat’s face, vanishes further and further from view.
Donovan Pedelty is an anarchist. He has produced the first in-depth analysis of Labourism from this viewpoint. Herein lies both the value of his work and his fatal flaw. Strange to say, whereas an IWW pamphlet contained a touching dedication to ‘our constant companions of the intelligence services’, Donovan Pedelty writes as if these political Peeping Toms of the State did not even exist.
By accident, a letter I wrote more than 30 years ago, to what is now termed the Labour History Review, sparked off a controversy on the authorities’ attitude to anarchism. My piece had merely referred, in general terms, to the official convention, observed for the past 120 years, not to place secret documents in the Public Records Office. Unbeknown to me, the then well-known author Raymond Postgate nursed abiding anger against official obstructionism. He was writing a book on politics around the end of the 19th century. He wanted to deal with the Greenwich explosion, used as the basis for Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, as well as the trials of the anarchists at Walsall and elsewhere. However, Harold Wilson’s administration did not want the repressive actions of a bygone age subjected to critical scrutiny: supposedly ‘progressive’ modern Labourism wished to keep the veil of secrecy over State excesses that occurred in less enlightened Victorian times.
None other than the chief law officer himself sought to justify governmental conduct in the Labour History Review. Gerald Gardiner, then the Lord Chancellor, came from a somewhat unorthodox background. A pacifist and member of the Peace Pledge Union, he resigned from the executive of the National Council for Civil Liberties because, after the German invasion of Russia, the CP-dominated NCCL no longer performed its supposed function. With no respect for his position, Raymond Postgate laid into the Lord Chancellor, with whom he had been at university, addressing him merely as ‘Dear Gardiner’. Demolishing the sophistries used to conceal governmental secrecy, he argued that what officialdom wanted was to protect was the underhand, sometimes illegal, methods often used to obtain convictions in political trials.
I would have thought Donovan Pedelty would have mentioned such cases as that of anarchist Donald Rooum, charged in the 1960s with carrying a brick on a demonstration. But Rooum knew that had he possessed a brick, particles of it would adhere to the inside of his pocket. Before leaving the police station, he arranged for his solicitor to have the coat forensically examined. Once his innocence had been proved and compensation secured, it turned out that the same policeman had obtained convictions by falsely accusing 16 others of the same offence.
The policeman – no relation of mine – was Detective Sergeant Harold Chalenor. His autobiography has recently been published. Perhaps not surprisingly, he conveniently suffers from amnesia about 17 cases involving missing bricks. While Chalenor was not charged with perjury, the Metropolitan Police was nevertheless forced to dismiss him. Yet the sack proved to be of no financial disadvantage: the authorities arranged for him to have a sideways move, working for one of the Met’s suppliers. Interestingly, just like the policeman who fatally smashed the skull of London teacher Blair Peach at a demonstration, Harold Chalenor had previously belonged to the military’s blood-and-guts brigade, earning the sobriquet of ‘Tankie’ Chalenor.
Donovan Pedelty also fails to deal with the trial in 1945 of the four editors of the anarchist journal War Commentary who were found guilty of conduct liable to damage army recruitment. But since they were sentenced only a fortnight prior to the end of the Second World War, when surely the problem facing the authorities was not getting people into the armed forces but of getting them out, it raises the suspicion that the government may have had an ulterior motive.
The distinguished historian Jasper Ridley tells me that he came across a secret warning by Russian foreign minister Molotov to London. Apparently, as the war drew to a close, the Kremlin believed that there might easily be a rerun of what happened at the end of the Spanish Civil War. In Stalinist eyes, anarchists and Trotskyists had sought to capitalise on the demoralisation and discontent on the anti-fascist side, thereby sabotaging the struggle against Franco. Both the War Commentary trial and the trial of the four Trotskyists at Newcastle a few months before could well have been officially sponsored fishing trips. In 1945 the British establishment feared widespread unrest and these might well have been the focus of discontent.
In my opinion, matters such as these should have been considered by Donovan Pedelty; but this does not detract from the main thrust of his valuable book.