Sir Richard Stafford Cripps: A Socialist Speaks for the British Empire

I

EXPELLED from the British Labor Party less than three years ago for demanding a united front with the British Communists, today Lord Privy Seal and spokesman in the House of Commons for the Churchill Government — that is the astonishing record of Sir Richard Stafford Cripps. Not in many years has there been so sudden a change in the fortunes of a British public man, and it is the more remarkable because it has not been due to any alteration of his opinions or his left-wing sympathies. He is still a straight-out Socialist; he still believes in working with Communists, both at home and abroad. He is still a violent critic of conservatives and reactionaries. He is still the man to whom Viscount Wolmer, now also a member of the Cabinet, referred when he rose in his seat in the House of Commons and said: ‘ I would not have risen but for the speech of the honorable and learned Member for East Bristol, which I venture to say would be regarded as wholly mischievous if we did not know the honorable and learned Member is wholly irresponsible.’ It is the same Cripps who on November 9, 1938, refused to answer an interruption by Lady Astor, saying: ‘People do not fancy their country, as do the noble Lady and her set — [Interruption]. I apologize and withdraw the word and substitute gang. They do not fancy the future of their country, like the gang of the noble Lady, as being a junior partner in a Fascist international, ruling the common people of all countries by methods that have heretofore been reserved by their gang for native and colonial territory — methods of brutality and exploitation and the denial of freedom.’

It cannot have reassured the Astors and the Wolmers that Stafford Cripps began his career as the official Government leader of the House on February 25 by laying ruthless hands upon the sacred institution of British sport, announcing that dog racing and boxing exhibitions would be stopped as ‘completely out of accord with the solid and serious intention of this country to achieve victory.’ There must, he said, be thereafter no ‘business as usual’ and no ‘pleasure as usual.’ Worse, he denounced the ‘small and selfish minority of people who appear to regard their personal interests in a manner not consonant with the totality of effort which is required if we are to come through the present difficulties with success.’ He added: ‘Such an attitude spreads a sense of frustration and disappointment, and must be dealt with ruthlessly wherever and whenever it occurs.’ If this were not enough to send cold chills down the spines of those whose chief desire is to see England come out of this war with its social and class privileges untouched, Cripps blamed the ‘Colonel Blimp mentality’ of certain reactionary military and governmental administrators for their share in England’s loss of a part of her colonial empire. Promising an early governmental statement of a new policy toward India, Cripps made the sensational assertion that England’s lost lands can only be regained, and the rest of the Empire saved, ‘on condition that we hold it in the interest of the world and of the people who live in those parts.’ This spells so great a revolution in British imperial policy as to make this official utterance a milestone in the history of the Empire and in the progress of this war — if this promise is lived up to.

How is it that Winston Churchill, whom the Indians have considered their most dangerous antagonist in England, who has been usually regarded as an imperialist and a Conservative, brought himself to the appointment of this radical as his personal representative in dealing with Parliament when this radical has been one of the Prime Minister’s severest critics? The answer lies in Cripps’s admittedly great ability, perhaps in the fact that it was known that he had resigned as Ambassador to Moscow with the avowed intention of becoming the leader of the Opposition, to attack Mr. Churchill’s conduct of the war, and in the fact that the Prime Minister found himself compelled to reorganize his Cabinet and to jettison a number of his associates. At first he declined to yield, but the force of public opinion, the outspoken criticisms of the press and of many of his Conservative supporters, finally convinced him that he must give assurances to Liberals and to Labor that thereafter the conduct of the war would include, besides a recognition of the necessity of far-reaching social and democratic reforms at home, a different attitude in foreign policy. It was generally sensed that there were too many survivors of the Chamberlain régime in the inner Cabinet circle, too many members of ‘the Old Guard.’ The Cripps appointment plainly offered the quickest answer to these criticisms.

To the ultraconservatives in England, Cripps seems to be not only reckless and irresponsible, but that worst of offenders, a traitor to his class, for he was born to wealth and high social position. From his remarkable and distinguished father, the first Baron Parmoor, he inherited the tradition of public service. More than that, he owes it to his father and their devoted friendship that he is not today a conservative and entirely conventional barrister. As Cripps himself has said, ‘Brought up in a traditionally Conservative, middle-class family, seldom meeting any one other than Conservatives, I accepted the environment quite naturally.’ It was the First World War that shook father and son out of their Conservative complacency. Stafford went to the front at once and spent the first eleven months driving a medical-supplies lorry for the Red Cross from Boulogne to the front, until he was called by the Government to become first assistant superintendent and then superintendent of a great explosives factory. For this unusual man began life as a chemist, studying under the great Sir William Ramsay at University College, London, where he invented a device for measuring densities of gases and liquids. In the explosives factory he worked until he was completely broken down, in 1916, and compelled to rest and recuperate for the duration of the struggle.

It was during this period of unemployment, Cripps says, that he had the time to reëxamine his faiths. No churchman, but like his father devoutly religious, he found it impossible to reconcile his Christianity with aspects of that war. The metamorphosis of his father was the more remarkable because Lord Parmoor had served many years in Parliament as a Conservative and had held a number of important lay offices of the Church of England. Yet he was so horrified by the injustices of the war, the denial of liberty of conscience in all countries and the rise of intense nationalism everywhere, that he became convinced some new outlook upon life was needed if civilization was to be saved. It is said that Lord Parmoor was the only distinguished convert whom Ramsay MacDonald won for the Labor Party, and through him his son. Certain it is that Parmoor became Lord President of the Council in MacDonald’s first Labor Government, and Labor Leader of the House of Lords. The first member of that House to offer a resolution for the League of Nations, Lord Parmoor stood — even during the war — for moderate peace terms and a wise justice in dealing with the beaten enemy, associating himself with Lord Lansdowne’s highly unpopular demand for what was denounced as a negotiated peace. He was also among the first to defend and aid the British conscientious objectors and to insist upon their right to refuse military service.

Stafford Cripps was well started on his meteoric legal career, to which he turned after his abandonment of chemistry, when the World War came. That he is one of the two most brilliant King’s Counsel and probably the highest paid trial barrister in London is generally admitted; his annual income from the law has variously been put at from $150,000 to $200,000. But here, too, he has felt the force of the maxim noblesse oblige. He has given much of his time to unpaid service for the Labor Party, for various causes, for labor unions and for individuals whose cases appealed to his sympathies or involved an important principle. Not until he was forty years of age did he decide to join the Labor Party, which speedily recognized his great talents by making him Solicitor General in the second Labor Government of Ramsay MacDonald. Eight months after Cripps took this office, MacDonald abandoned the Labor Party in favor of a National Government. In the ensuing election the Labor Party suffered an overwhelming defeat; Stafford Cripps, Clement Attlee, and George Lansbury were the only three Ministers who survived the landslide against their party.

II

But Cripps has always been something of a stormy petrel, as is almost inevitably the case when an able man has strong convictions, is often deeply stirred emotionally, and is without personal ambition to bridle his tongue. He has been charged with being inconsistent as well as reckless and irresponsible, but no one has ever accused him of cowardice or compromising. He has always stood well to the left and has been charged with wishing to abolish the British monarchy because he once said that in the ideal England to come a king would be superfluous. He has always favored the abolition of the House of Lords, and he has insisted that, if Labor regains control of the Government, it must do what Ramsay MacDonald failed to do: radically socialize the country. He has demanded rapid and effective action in such an event by means of an emergency powers bill to be put through the House of Lords by the creation of enough Labor peers to constitute a majority. There would be no temporizing and no gradual changes. He is very clear in his mind that the democracies must speed up their processes and make their governments more responsive to the popular will, yet more efficient, if they are to compete with the dictatorships. He followed the New Deal developments in this country with the greatest care, but held and still holds the view that the Roosevelt experiment was bound to fail ‘unless the President was prepared to assume the economic power in the state and utilize it to terminate the chaotic injustices of capitalism by reorganizing the industrial life of the country upon a socialist basis.’ He always thinks of himself as a revolutionary Socialist.

This has naturally led him from the beginning to sympathize very strongly with Russia’s experiment in Communism, which he felt as far back as 1934 ‘had met with a very considerable degree of success.’ He was always a sharp critic of the Chamberlain and Churchill attitude toward Russia, and strongly in favor of a close alliance, and not merely because of the international dangers and difficulties. It must be admitted that here his judgment has not been as clear as in other matters, for when the Hitler-Stalin treaty was announced he mistakenly declared that: ‘A pact of non-aggression between Russia and Germany will be a great reinforcement for peace in Eastern Europe. At the same time it is a lie to suggest that it leaves Germany a free hand against Poland or anyone else.’ It was because of his tolerance of the British Communists that he so ardently championed the idea of a ‘united front’ which led to his expulsion from the Labor Party. He felt that there was no hope of turning out the Conservative Government unless the Labor Party, the Independent Labor Party, the Liberals, and the Communists were willing to forget their differences and stand together for the ousting of the capitalist government. He explained that he advocated a united front only because of the abnormal times. Save for these, he would ‘not desire to encourage the party to any combination with other non-socialist elements in normal times.'

The Labor Party not only disagreed with him; it bitterly resented Cripps’s drafting and widely circulating an able memorandum in support of the unity proposal. The whole Labor movement felt a deep antagonism to the Communist Party and looked with suspicion on anyone who suggested even a temporary alliance. The Labor Party did not share Cripps’s profound belief that, if the National Government continued in office, war was inevitable. What had happened in Spain had deeply shaken him. When King George was visiting the United States, Cripps said in Commons that he trusted the Government was not sending him ‘as the representative of a country that has been responsible not only for the encouragement of the Fascist victory in Spain, but also for the starvation and brutal murder of the Spanish people.’ Beneath that was his sincere belief, as expressed in an article in Foreign Affairs, that ‘capitalism inevitably drifts toward war: economic nationalism is the precursor of economic rivalries which are the root cause of war. In times of difficulty the war spirit of capitalism goes with its fears, and it finds too great solace in the argument that the manufacture of munitions creates employment.’

In 1935 he had resigned from the National Executive Committee of the Labor Party, because curiously, and rather inexplicably, he did not agree with the party’s support of sanctions against Italy. Later he rejoined the National Executive. But the party could not stomach his fight for a united front, which Hugh Dalton sneeringly described as a ‘rich man’s toy,’ and on January 25, 1939, Cripps, G. R. Strauss, Aneurin Bevan (now Cripps’s parliamentary secretary), and two others were expelled from the party. This was in spite of the warning of Lord Beaverbrook’s antiLabor Express that ‘the Socialist Party will be blowing its brains out if it expels Sir Stafford.’ Although Cripps later applied for reinstatement, the coming of the war and his appointment to Moscow have prevented any action; he is today a Minister without a party.

III

When the war came Sir Stafford Cripps immediately retired from the bar and offered his technical services to the Government. They were not accepted. On the night of November 30, 1939, the writer of this article discovered on the deck of a Channel steamer an immense pile of dress-suit cases, bags, hat and dispatch boxes, and golf clubs, all stamped with the same initials — a pile that seemed doubly formidable in wartime. I soon discovered that Stafford Cripps was beginning his trip around the world, which had some important consequences. It took him to India, where he met Gandhi and his friend of schoolboy days, Nehru. Naturally his reception by them was of the warmest — Gandhi even excused him from sitting on the floor and let him make use of a little stool! They well knew how often he had spoken for self-government for India. By the end of the year Cripps had composed a draft constitution giving Dominion status to India, after having talked with leaders of every shade of opinion. He rightly insisted that the crux of the whole situation is whether the British Government will acknowledge the right of India to determine its own form of government and constitution. On his return to England he demanded to know why 250,000,000 Hindus should be denied self-government because 80,000,000 Moslems are afraid of it or suggest an impossible division of the country, and he protested vigorously against the Anglo-Indian Government’s making it a criminal offense to speak against the recruiting of Indians for service in the British Army.

On October 26, 1939, before leaving England, he had pointed out in the House of Commons that the war and the avowed objectives of the British Government in declaring war had ‘made the treatment of India a test question in the eyes of the world, as well as of many people in this country and India itself.’ The Government, he said, had declared itself against all forms of aggression and for ‘a better international system. . . . On the basis of right and justice and principle, I should have thought nobody could deny that India today is fully entitled to self-government. What answer have we to give now to that demand, admitting as the GovernorGeneral fully admits, the competence of the Indians to govern themselves, unless it be that our selfish desire to continue the exploitation of India as part of our Imperial monopoly is to override our conceptions of right and justice?’ These are momentous words to recall in view of the fact that the speaker is now in a key position in which to demand that justice be done, especially since Chiang Kai-shek has just made his plea to Churchill to draw India enthusiastically into the war by changing his Government’s policy and granting a new and freer status to the Indian people.

Before these words can reach the readers of this magazine Cripps will surely have spoken again. He has made definite constructive suggestions as to what should happen in India. He has sought a legislative assembly for it, with a government formed by the majority parties in that assembly, that government to be appointed by the Viceroy as his executive council. There is where the lawyer comes in; he not only argues, he suggests remedies and he has vision. Again and again he has said that the opposition to the National Government offered ‘a policy of hope and peace and freedom, based upon a determination to bring about economic justice for all people of all classes’ and upon the basis of that to build an international society of law, order, and justice in place of violence and cruelty and the methods of international gangsterism. Judging by his past record Cripps will not stay long in the Cabinet if he finds that he cannot make important contributions to a new order. Since he has frequently criticized the Government for not being more specific in its war aims and not giving concrete specifications, one may be sure that he will use all his influence with Mr. Churchill and his fellow Ministers to supplement the Atlantic Charter, which has fallen so flat on both sides of that ocean.

IV

What of Cripps’s mission to Russia? He went to Moscow, by appointment of Mr. Churchill, believing that Russia and England would eventually come together. Indeed a reporter testifies that Cripps predicted in the winter of 19401941 that Russia would be at war with Germany before the end of June. Hitler paid him the compliment of charging him with part of the responsibility for the break between the two countries, but the truth is that Cripps was not popular in Moscow. It is a curious fact that the Bolsheviks are not enthusiastic about liberal left-wingers. They like either convinced Communists like themselves or out-and-out conservative reactionaries. Stalin would not receive Cripps as a special delegate from Churchill, so the latter had to appoint him Ambassador. The British made a bad blunder in the fateful summer of 1939 by sending a third-string Foreign Office official and a rear admiral to Moscow to negotiate the hoped-for treaty instead of sending their Foreign Secretary and Chief of Staff. Not a Russian official went to the station to say good-bye to Cripps when he left Moscow on his return to England, but, as the London New Statesman and Nation has pointed out, Cripps came back with the prestige of having represented his country ‘in one of the few capitals where, after many failures, British policy may be said to have succeeded. . . . He held on without disaster through two extremely difficult years.’ It noted also that his absence during this time prevented anybody’s blaming him ‘for any of our various types of disaster during the last three years.’

Mention has been made of Cripps as one with a popular following. That is true. He draws enormous audiences and yet he is in no sense a spellbinder. As an orator he lacks those rare qualities which so distinguish the utterances of Roosevelt and Churchill. He does not thrill his audiences or appeal to their emotions. On the platform he is the sincere and earnest advocate, logical, clear-cut, thoughtful, and often convincing — plainly a man who believes in his own cause, whose unselfish honesty cannot be questioned. He makes his auditors think, and, as stated, he offers them programs, procedures, and remedies. The working people of England know that he has never stooped to conquer, that he has never played the demagogue or sought to rouse the rabble. They are ready to forgive him errors of judgment; and they do not mind if, like most reformers, his judgments are at times colored by his ardent desires. They respect him, too, because he always appears just what he is — an English gentleman of finest breeding and culture, who is totally without condescension in his advocacy of their cause.

That he has a delightful and winning personality and appearance this writer can personally testify. The memory of a long, but not long enough, day of conversation from the French coast to the border of Switzerland, interrupted by some hours in Paris, will always remain, if only because of a lasting astonishment at the extraordinary variety of Cripps’s knowledge of men and affairs the world over. What will high office and the exercise of great power do to him? Will he, like so many another liberal, grow conservative and reactionary? Will he, like Ramsay MacDonald, finally betray those whose political briefs he has taken ? There is solid ground for the belief that he will not. For his is the lawyer’s mind and training; there is something far stronger and tougher in his fibre than in MacDonald’s. One feels, rightly or wrongly, that he will be aware of the dangers that confront him. Then he is Parmoor’s son and, what is more, a nephew of his mother’s sister, Beatrice Webb, who, with her husband Sidney Webb, has rendered such immeasurable service to the social progress and evolution of England. Months ago it seemed plain, if only by a process of elimination, that Cripps is England’s coming man. It is quite within the range of possibility that he will yet be an English Prime Minister — perhaps after Winston Churchill has seen the coming of victory. Today? Well, there is a rebel in the British Government.