Britons Face Government by Decree

Dorothy Thompson

Houston Chronicle/August 31, 1947

Great Britain no longer has merely a Labor government. She has a Labor dictatorship, and the course on which she is embarked is heading toward the totalitarian state. 

The reason given is the usual one: economic crisis. 

Just as under the Weimar public Chancellor Bruning started the process of governing by decree, certainly with no intention of initiating a procedure which would lead to the totalitarian state, so the “moderate” Laborites—pressed by their left—have started the same process which certainly will not stop of itself.

Few people in America realize the extent to which Anglo-Saxon liberty under law already has been undermined. 

Early in August the Labor majority passed its agricultural bill. This bill continues controls dubious even in wartime. Under it the British farmer can, if the opinion of certain monitors of the state so rules, be dispossessed of home and land though it may have been in his family’s possession for 100 years. 

The English farmer is under power of his county’s agricultural executive committee, which is a creature of the minister of agriculture with no independent authority or existence. The committees consist of farmers, millers, seed merchants (unpaid), and of paid executive officers who have the effective power. These officers consist of students from agricultural colleges who knew the theoretical aspects of farming but have little practical experience, and of farmers and other country people who prefer a bureaucratic job to farming. Every rural community knows the type—the man who becomes an insurance salesman, for instance, because he can’t make a go of his farm.

These are the inspectors who give evidence before the committees of the “inefficiency” of farmers. If their evidence is supported, such farmers may be dispossessed without compensation, disturbance, or loss of income. 

The procedure is the more unjustified because the British farm before the war was the most efficient in Europe. In 1937, for instance, the British produced £45 more net agricultural value per head than the next most efficient—the Danish. 

Everywhere in the world the independent farmer has been the bulwark of liberty. That is why all totalitarian movements must intimidate, bribe, and eventually break the peasant. The whole world knows what is happening to him “behind the iron curtain,” which is of highly transparent iron. But Britain is on the way to the same thing. And incidentally, the proportion of Britons, theoretically “engaged in agriculture,” who actually are engaged in drawing salaries to supervise the real producers, is enormous. 

No country yet has produced more food by breaking the independent farmer.

But theoreticians never learn from experience.