Conflict Between Realists, Theorists Clogs Political Recovery: Three Photographic Displays Br O. M. Gum (Editor, "North-China Daily News" 1911-1930)
This Labour Party Conference will bring prominently to the fore the acute division between the realists and the theorists which continues to clog the political recovery of Labour.
In essence it is as old a dispute as the Labour movement itself From Gironde and Mountain, to Stalinist and Trotskyite, the theorist and the realist are always at each other's throats. In Great Britain the realists, of course, are the trade unions. They have the power in both money and votes, and they mean to keep it. The recent T.U.C. conference at Norwich showed their interiors of factories showing the poetry that may lurk even in machinery. The controversy as to when ther photography can be called art, is very old and almost exhausted. I cannot see why because mechanical means are used to produce a photograph it may not as justly be called a work of art as a painting. The test surely lies in the finished result and the feeling it evokes. That the best photographs may also be a true expression of the personality of the photographer seems to be another argument for allowing him the title of artist. realism when they voted to approve the national rearmament programme, and adopted a new scheme of old age pensions which although on a vastly larger scale than the present one, would not be a free gift by the State but would require proportion ately longer contributions by workers.
The theorists range from the intellectuals in the House of Commons like Mr. Attlee and Mr. Greenwood, always trying to pretend that trade unionism does not pull all the strings, to extreme fanatics like Sir Stafford Cripps, Professor Laski and the hotch-potch of the London School of Economics, who preach the "united front" between Labour, Communism and Liberalism, and other things nicely calculated to frighten away voters.
A livelier quarrel, perhaps, will be fought over the trade union domination of the Labour Party, by the provincial labour constituencies, who have long been restive on this score. It is proposed to arrange the voting so that they may have bigger representation on the National Council. But the general belief is that the trade unions will allow nothing that threatens their power.
Genuine labouring men who rise to become Ministers of State are always better liked and respected than pink intellectuals from Balliol enjoying large incomes while preaching socialism. But there is an obvious difference between even the former and T.U.C. dictation, and the disputes sketched above do not increase the chances of Labour forming a government,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.