My reason for this view is the quite simple one that I do not trust the executive power to act wisely in the presence of any threat, nor assumed threat, to public order.
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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Every state contains innumerable and stupid men who see in unconventional thought the imminent destruction of social peace.
If you think of men like Lord Eldon, like Sir William Joynson-Hicks, like Attorney-General Palmer, you will realize how natural it is for them to believe that the proper place for Thoreau or Tolstoy, for William Morris or Mr Bernard Shaw…
I am unable to take that view; and I am therefore anxious that they should not be able to make it prevail without finding that there are barriers in their path.
When the safety of a state is threatened it is bound to take, and is justified in taking, all action to end the crisis.
You cannot say that trade unions ought not to concern themselves with foreign policy since this is intimately bound up with economic policy which, in turn, is the chief factor in the determination of the conditions of employment.
You cannot exclude any part of the economic realm from the trade union sphere.
A trade union, moreover, is a living body; and no law has ever been successful in coping with the growth of living things by legal promulgations upon the fact of growth.
Many matters are regarded today as normally and naturally within the sphere of the trade unions which a generation ago, even a decade ago, most men would have insisted were in nowise their concern.
A generation ago, this would have been dismissed as “an insolent interference with the rights of management”; today it is obvious that upon no other terms can the function of the trade union be fulfilled.
In 1914 the unions would never have deemed it their business to concern themselves with the bank rate and credit policy; today they realize that these matters lie at the heart of their problems.
Such a discussion of the relation of trade unionism to the state, illustrates, I think, the general problem of the approach to freedom of association in the political sphere.
I have denied the right of the state to control the internal life of such bodies; and I have sought to show the limits of liberty where that life has ramifications outside their membership.
Whenever, for example, it has interfered with the claims of churches to lead their own life, conflict has been the inevitable outcome.
For in any meeting of church and state, the latter will assert its paramountcy; and a church has no alternative but to deny that assertion.
For this reason I believe that any attempt at partnership between them is bound to result in injury to freedom somewhere.
Such a church, quite obviously, is the mere creature of the state; it sacrifices its spiritual birthright for a material mess of pottage.
I cannot avoid the conclusion that in this historic realm only the American principle of complete separation and non-interference can produce freedom.
Unless state and church pursue an independent path, liberty is sacrificed; for either fusion or partnership will, in fact, involve a conflict for supremacy.
Obviously the quality of liberty depends very largely upon the powers we give the state in this realm.
It must demand that changes in its organization be the outcome of peaceful persuasion and not the consequence of violent assault.
A state must, therefore, assume that its duty to maintain peace and security lies at the very root of its existence.
The liberty which associations enjoy must therefore be set in the context that they cannot have a liberty to overthrow the state.
We must, I think, begin with the principle that a government is not entitled to suppress associations the beliefs of which alone are subversive of the established order.
For, otherwise, persecution will be built, not on fact, but on suspicion that facts may one day emerge, not on overt acts, but on principles of faith which are in truth only dangerous when they are expressed in practice.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
