Word: lasky
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Without waiting for Prime Minister Attlee to return from Potsdam, Professor Harold J. Laski, Labor Party chairman, rushed into an arresting description of the Labor Government's aims. First the Bank of England will be nationalized (see BUSINESS). Then the Labor Government will tackle coal, power, steel and transport. Said Laski: "You can't plan economically without control of the central bank. A government which is not responsible for the operation of credit is not master in his own house...
...Cried Laski: "We've placed the people in power. . . . It's part of a world revolution ... the Fourth Estate, the common people, have opened the barriers which shut them out. . . . This is a day indeed to echo the famous sentence: 'We have nothing to lose but our chains and a world...
...Harold? Who was the man, who at the moment when British socialism had scarcely begun its momentous job, broadcast views so sure to disturb moderate Britons? To some, slim, aloof Professor Laski is just an "inoffensive scholar" (19 books and innumerable articles). To some, he is socialism's No. 1 intellectual soapboxer. To others, in his own words, he is a combination Guy Fawkes and Trotsky, a "reincarnation of Palmer, the Poisoner...
Officially, Laski is chairman of the Labor Party's National Executive Committee (a rotating position). He has been close to Prime Minister "Clem" Attlee (whom Laski considers too conservative), has prestige with Labor's rank & file (who are proud of their "posh" professor), has even greater influence on Britain's leftist intellectuals. But many Labor Party members dislike Laski for his "intellectual snobbishness," his impatience with trade-union "bread & butter questions" of today, his preoccupation with the Marxist power problems of tomorrow...
What the Sirens Sang. Harold Joseph Laski was born (1893) in drab, industrial Manchester, but not to drabness: he was the son of a well-to-do Jewish merchant. As a youth, he was enchanted by those sirens of British socialism, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who were warbling their Fabian lays over the bleaching bones of Karl Marx. At Oxford, Laski joined the Fabian Society, campaigned for woman suffrage, was a brilliant student in his spare time. When World War I came, Laski disapproved, but tried to enlist. He was turned down because of a weak heart. He went...