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F.A. Ridley

World Politics

A British Socialist View

(26 March 1949)


From Labor Action, Vol. 13 No. 16, 18 April 1949, p. 3.
Socialist Leader, London, 26 March 1949.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).


Of all the European lands subjected, via the Marshall Plan, to the hegemony of Wall Street over the capitalist world, Britain is, today, the most dependent and is, in fact, no longer an independent nation. Few people in this country, in fact, seem to realize how far British enslavement to the USA has gone. For, over and above her obligations under the plan, Which she shares with the other European debtor states, Britain is now actually an “occupied country,” a military colony of the USA, to which the British ruling class and its political instrument, the Foreign Office (using Ernest Bevin as a convenient rubber stamp), have sold out as completely as the French bourgeoisie did to Hitler in 1940.

Not only is the United Kingdom now America’s front trench in the only-too-probable event of war with Russia; but she is now actually already America’s “floating aircraft carrier” and is already occupied by the armed forces of the American Republic – even before war has broken out. And, if and when it should eventually come, America will, no doubt, fight to the last Briton!

In a recent broadcast on the BBC on the subject of the recent Stalin-Tito correspondence, the Oxford historian A.J.P. Taylor, ended by expressing the hope that Britain would become America’s “Tito” – that is, would display a similar independence toward America as Tito’s Yugoslavia is now doing toward Russia!

A courageous hope! One may remark in passing that it is a disgrace to the British socialist movement that it should be left to an academic, “non-political” historian to say it.

We hope that Britain will, indeed, soon become America’s “Tito.” The sooner a nationwide agitation for this end, and for the withdrawal of the American “occupying forces” from this country gets going, the better for everybody.


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