Labour and India

ALTHOUGH nobody in India really expected any good to come out of the debate on Viscount Curzon’s motion in the House of Commons, it is safe to assert that in taking up the position it did on the occasion, the Labour Government threw away what may easily prove to have been its last opportunity in regard to India. It knew as well as the rest of the world that dark clouds were thickening in the political sky and that at any moment there might be a storm resulting in its overthrow. Already within the short period it had been in office, the government had been defeated in two divisions, and about the very time when this debate was taking place in the House, an important meeting of the Liberal members of the House was being held under the presidency of the leader of the party himself and addressed by its most puissant member, which might lead to important developments any day. Even a Labour Government cannot, in a self-governing country, forever go on ignoring the results of divisions in Parliament, and there may come a day in the not-distant future when, owing to a succession of defeats on major issues, Mr Ramsay MacDonald will have no choice but to resign and either make room for Mr Asquith and go into the wilderness or make an appeal to the country. In either case, the contingency of removal from office can no longer be dismissed as remote. And if it does take place, what will be Labour’s answer to those who will put to it the question, “What have you done for India, for whose aspirations you professed such boundless sympathy in the days of your impotence, and what have you done to solve the most important of all outstanding imperial problems?”

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