Роберт Блэтчфорд: Социалист-кампайнер және журналист өмірі мен қызметі

English socialist campaigner and journalist

Robert Peel Glanville Blatchford (17 March 1851 – 17 December 1943) was an English socialist campaigner, journalist, and author in the United Kingdom. He was also noted as a prominent atheist, nationalist and opponent of eugenics. In the early 1920s, after the death of his wife, he turned towards spiritualism.

Blatchford was born 17 March 1851 in Maidstone, Kent. His parents, John Glanville Blatchford, a strolling comedian, and Georgina Louisa Corri (maiden; 1821–1890), an actress – named him after the Conservative Prime Minister Robert Peel who died the year before. His great grandfather, by way of his mother, Domenico Corri (1746–1825), was an Italian musician and publisher who, in the late 18th century, moved from Rome to Edinburgh to teach music. By 1892 Blatchford had removed himself from the candidature in Bradford East and began siding with the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) against the Fabians' policy of "permeation." The joining of The Clarion and SDF resulted in the formation in 1892 of the Manchester Independent Labour Party, which soon devised the Manchester Fourth Clause. By 1893 Blatchford was the leader of his own clique within the newly founded national Independent Labour Party, the Clarionettes, whose extraordinary dynamism was expressed in its numerous choral societies, Clarion cycling clubs, Socialist Scouts, and glee clubs. Central to the Clarion movement were the Clarion cycling clubs, whose members, frequently accompanied by the "Clarion Van", travelled the country distributing socialist literature and holding mass meetings. Robert Tressell's socialist novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists contains a detailed account based on a meeting organised by the Clarion scouts. The Clarion movement also supported many industrial disputes at this time, including the three year lockout of the slateworkers of the Penrhyn slate quarry in North Wales. The Clarion collected £1,500 to support the people of Bethesda. There was a revolt in the county federation created by the ILP in 1894, as Blatchford urged the formation of a united socialist party. In the same year he resigned from the editorship of The Clarion due to ill health and developed depression. He started to edit it again in 1896. He supported the Boer War, which lost him support from some sections of the labour movement. Blatchford denounced his "cosmopolitan friends, who are so cosmopolitan that they can admire every country but their own, and love all men except Englishmen". He criticised the "smug, self righteous prigs" in the labour movement who, while "despising military glory, are yet so eloquent over the marksmanship and courage of the Boers". Responding to claims from the right wing press that he wanted to ‘turn people against their country’, he retorted that he wanted ‘to make people so fond of their country that they shall desire to possess it’. After the war Blatchford continued to agitate for a united socialist party and supported the London Progressive Party. He was critical of the Labour Party, which was founded in 1900, for what he perceived as its complete subservience to Liberalism, especially in its Cobdenite internationalist views on foreign policy. Blatchford said of himself and his colleagues at The Clarion: "We were out for Socialism and nothing but Socialism, and we were Britons first and Socialists next." Blatchford criticised free trade from an economic nationalist perspective. Free trade had made it impossible for Britain to feed herself and had destroyed British agriculture. This was especially serious in wartime because Britain could be starved into submission due to the dependence for her food on foreign nations. Blatchford said he did not believe in tariff reform as applied by Conservatives, but that a socialist government would find it a necessary instrument. A further development in Blatchford's thinking cost him further readers, when he began denouncing organised religion in such works as God and My Neighbour (1903) and Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog (1905). Again, to antagonise the ILP, the Clarion raised funds for Victor Grayson, whom the ILP had declined to support. He justified his attacks as being because Labour was too close to the Liberals.

A series of articles on socialism in The Clarion were published in book form in 1893 as Merrie England. The first edition sold 30,000 copies. The year after, a pocket sized edition was published, which sold 25,000 copies. A penny edition was published in 1894, with 250,000 copies being ordered before publication and within a year 750,000 copies had been despatched across the English speaking world. In Britain and America, the book sold over two million copies. In the opinion of Robert Ensor, the book "helped to make socialism really well known in England for the first time It was Blatchford's highest flight as a propagandist; he never surpassed it, and through it mainly he left his mark upon history". The book was translated into Welsh, Hebrew, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and German. William Thomas Stead picked the book as the Review of Reviews book of the month and called Blatchford "the poor man's Plato". Dr Horton the Congregationalist minister compared Blatchford to Isaiah, Amos and Micah and said that "if Jesus Christ were a man on earth today, He would read the book not only with interest but with approval, and He would say to any officious disciples who took exception to parts of it, “Forbid him not; he that is not against Me is for Me"." Blatchford was a vegetarian and in Merrie England he mentioned the economic, health and humanitarian benefits of a vegetarian diet.

On 4 August 1914, Blatchford wrote to his friend Alexander Thompson: "I shall write today a cautious article counselling peace and suggesting that Sir E. Grey should ask Russia and Germany to suspend hostilities pending a friendly mediation by America, England and Italy, or any one of those powers. But I do not think really that European peace is possible until Germany has been defeated and humiliated. And I realise the great possibility that we shall be at war with Germany before the Clarion comes out. And I hope we are". The Clarion Movement was split when Blatchford swung his paper in support of the British participation in the First World War. The circulation for The Clarion fell by 10,000 in a week but when in September 1914 Blatchford wrote a page of The Weekly Dispatch every Sunday its circulation rose by 50,000. In his first article for that paper, Blatchford correctly predicted that the German Army would not reach Paris and of General Joffre's flank along the Marne. When a soldier wrote to him, claiming his opinions would not be accepted by the Army but those of Philip Snowden and Ramsay MacDonald would, Blatchford replied: "I am sorry. I cannot help it. You want peace. But you cannot have peace without victory The struggle with Germany will not end with the present war, and we may some day have to fight Germany single handed". In 1915, Blatchford formed the National Democratic and Labour Party (NDP) as a splinter from the right wing of the British Socialist Party and for the 1918 General Election, the NDP stood in eighteen constituencies and returned nine Members of Parliament with 156,834 votes. It thereby became the first party formed by a right wing split from the Labour Party in Britain to win seats in Parliament at a general election. Blatchford's wife died in 1921, and later he took an interest in Spiritualism. In 1923 he wrote in response to claims in the press that he had been converted away from socialism by reading Henry Ford's autobiography:

I have never been converted from Socialism. But careful observation of the facts of for the last twelve years or so has convinced me that Socialism will not work, and a study of Mr. Ford's methods has provided what seems to me as good a substitute as we may hope in this imperfect world. Socialism as I knew it in past years was an excellent, almost a perfect, theory The golden rule will not work in international politics, because the nations are not good enough to live up to it. Real Socialism strongly resembles real Christianity. It is a counsel of perfection and cannot be adopted and adhered to by our imperfect humanity. There is nothing the matter with Socialism, but the people are neither wise enough nor good enough to make it a success. Socialism implies the self abnegation of the individual for the good of the community. When the first Labour government, led by Ramsay MacDonald, took office in 1924, Blatchford responded to Thompson's enthusiasm: "I don't like their policy and I don't trust them. They are in no sense Socialists. At present they are Liberals and we shall have a blend of Liberal shibboleths and communist insanity". When Sir Edward Hulton sold most of his newspapers to Lord Rothermere, Blatchford wrote a letter to The Morning Post:

As a protest against the attempt of the syndicated newspapers to muzzle the press and dictate to the Government, I have resigned my position on The Sunday Chronicle and The Sunday Herald the public should be helped to realise that the political judgments of the syndicated newspapers are not sincere and considered opinions of trained, independent thinkers, but the broadcast railings of one rich man in a panic over the Capital Levy. It is important that this should be said, and that the country should understand that the voice of Lord Rothermere is not the voice of public opinion. His standardised newspapers are journalistic tied houses, where proprietorial dope is sold as honest beer. Blatchford voted Conservative in 1924.</blockquote>

After Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933, Blatchford "began to smell brimstone", in the words of his biographer Laurence Thompson. Blatchford said: "The people ought to know; but who will let me say what ought to be said?" Blatchford feared that people would say: "Oh, Blatchford. He has Germany on the brain." When Winston Churchill began warning of the dangers of Nazi Germany, Blatchford remarked: "Ha! He's learning! Now watch him get it in the neck". Later on, Blatchford believed Churchill's conduct redeemed what he considered his past political errors.</blockquote>

The General Secretary of the Trade Union Congress from 1925 to 1946, Sir Walter Citrine, was influenced by Blatchford's writings. He said of Britain for the British: "I found it a cogent and reasoned argument for Socialism. It was written with a clearness and bite which were unusual". Clement Attlee also spoke of Blatchford's influence on his beliefs. A. J. P. Taylor said that Blatchford was "the greatest popular journalist since Cobbett".