The Daily Worker

Britain Is Scared
There was a time when anybody with an idea on his chest could shoot it off in Hyde Park, London, with the assurance that a bobby would be handy to save him from the uninvited and unwelcome attentions of practical jokers and people who are not constitutionally capable of listening to new ideas.
Soap box orators might even speak disparagingly about royalty and still be immune from the prison cell or the insane asylum. Britain secured a reputation of easy going tolerance that showed up well in contrast with the repressive policy of other capitalist countries.
But those days are no more. There is a reason.
In the period of British imperial expansion, when the workers were reasonably contented and shot full of imperialist hop, the ruling class saw no cause for alarm in the oratorical outbursts of more or less confused radicals. As long as the workers had confidence in the ability of the empire to provide them with three square meals a day and a bed at night, the British capitalists slept on an easy pillow. Whatever dangers confronted them did not come from inside but from the outside.
But approximately 2,000,000 British workers are unemployed today. They have been in that condition ever since the end of the war. It is a permanent evil that cannot be remedied this side of the social revolution. British industry has suffered. Her steel output and her coal production have two powerful competitors in the American and European combinations. The British working class are fast losing faith in the ability of the pirate empire to guarantee them a satisfied stomach. They are becoming more and more rebellious.
This is the condition that forces the British government to make raids in true Palmer fashion on the radical organizations, confiscating literature, arresting revolutionary propagandists and seeking to suppress the Communist Party which offers a plan whereby the workers of Britain can free themselves from the bonds of slavery. The Communists not only show up the capitalist system but they also show the workers the way out.
The ruling class, which once boasted of its tolerance, now frantically tries to ward off the fatal blow at its existence by doing just what every ruling class all thru the course of human history has done in similar crises, i. e. by resorting to violence. This is a lesson for those pseudo-revolutionists who claim that the new order of society will be ushered in in Britain as peacefully as the dawn of a summer day.
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