The Catholic Church and British Labour

Extract

This is not a subject on which I would dare to dogmatise or attempt to say the last word at this stage. It would, however, be an affectation to pretend to more diffidence than I feel. Soon after I took my degree, I worked for two years in Neville Chamberlain’s Conservative Research Department; later I became a Labour City Councillor and prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Oxford. Brought up a Protestant, I was received not very long ago into the Church. I should indeed be a poor creature if the topic under discussion aroused in me no individual reactions.

The Editor of the Catholic Herald has recently computed that out of three million or so Catholics in England, 90 per cent, vote Labour. Be the figure 90 per cent or 75 per cent., as more often suggested, the fact in any case is striking. It is seldom animadverted to by those who exploit the authoritarian tendencies of a small group of gifted Catholic laymen in the service of an argument that the average British Catholic is a British (not too British) version of General Franco.

It cannot be pretended, however, that the substantia! Catholic element in the Labour vote exercises a distinctive influence on Labour principles or policy remotely proportionate to their number or to their merits as citizens. They do not vote Labour because of their Catholicism, nor yet in spite of it. For the most part poor men and women living in large towns, many of them of Irish extraction, their natural bias is towards the party of the under-dog. Individual leaders such as the late John Wheatley have done splendid work.