“It is seized with the lust for power. The appetite has grown with the eating, and it will not be content until its grasping hands are laid on every section of the industrial and trading life of the nation.”That’s how Ivor Thomas described the British Labour Party in his 1951 book, “The Socialist Tragedy.” For six years (1942-47), he was a Member of Britain’s House of Commons—representing the very same Labour Party! Prime Minister Clement Attlee even appointed him Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Civil Aviation and, later, Under-Secretary for the Colonies. But when Thomas expressed disillusion with socialism in late 1947, Attlee sacked him. Thomas then switched to the Conservative Party.
Ivor Thomas was a man of wisdom who “grew” in office, by which I mean he allowed sound principles to eventually take priority over party allegiance. His transformation from naïve socialist to an eloquent devotee of freedom and free enterprise didn’t take very long. As his understanding of economics improved, he viewed with alarm the Labour government’s penchant for the nationalization of industry in the late 1940s. When Attlee moved to seize the steel industry, Thomas realized that Labour was on a course to trash British economic liberty.
An incumbent MP jumping from one party to another is not unheard of in British history. Winston Churchill was a Conservative in 1900 until he became a Liberal in 1904, until he switched back to the Conservatives in 1925. For Ivor Thomas, jettisoning Labour was the outward manifestation of an inner, philosophical awakening. He had discovered that socialism is a deceit that promises progress and delivers disaster.
In a television broadcast explaining his change of parties, Thomas opined:
“Today it is clear that between communism and socialism, there is no difference. Both lead to a condition of affairs in which the State counts for everything and the individual for nothing … It is impossible to build up a healthy society on class envy and class hatred.”You can watch that broadcast here:
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FSCs1V7YKo&feature=emb_logo[/embed]
Thomas’s 1951 book, “The Socialist Tragedy,” caught the attention of the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), Leonard Read, who published a short extract of it as a FEE pamphlet titled “The Positive Approach to Personal Rights.”
I recently acquired a copy of that book and devoured it. Thomas had clearly learned a lot about socialism, in part because he experienced it up close and at the hands of the very government of which he was a part. Though I don’t know it for sure, I’m betting he read F. A. Hayek’s 1944 classic, “The Road to Serfdom,” too.
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