Clifford Allen, 1st Baron Allen of Hurtwood

Reginald Clifford Allen, 1st Baron Allen of Hurtwood (9 May 1889 – 3 March 1939), known as Clifford Allen, was a British politician, leading member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and prominent pacifist.

Quotes

• He believed that Christianity stood for the bettering of their fellow men, and the raising of their condition. Were not these the very tenets of Socialism?
  • Press report of 17 March 1911 of his address to the Cambridge Fabian Society, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Plough My Own Furrow: The Story of Lord Allen of Hurtwood as told through his own writings and correspondence (1965), p. 20

• The object of the Socialist movement is not material but spiritual; it lies in the discovery of methods of reducing to a minimum the attention of man to the material things of life in order that he may have more time to develop personality and make what use he will of a splendid leisure.
  • Article in Labour Leader reprinted in Public Opinion (20 February 1914), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Plough My Own Furrow: The Story of Lord Allen of Hurtwood as told through his own writings and correspondence (1965), p. 23

• Germany has said that British democracy is degenerate. Well, I for one was never more proud of British democracy than when Professor Freud, that great scientist, aged and infirm, became an exile from his country and was welcomed within our shores. There was taken to him as an invalid the register of the Royal Society in order that he might inscribe his name therein, an act which I believe has never been carried through in this country except for members of our Royal Family; and thus degenerate democracy linked an exiled and distinguished Jewish scientist with members of our own Royal Family. That seemed to me a cause of pride, and not a sign of degeneracy.
  • Speech in the House of Lords (27 July 1938)

Quotes about Allen

• Growing foreign perils were perceived and promptly and fully reported, first to London and then to ministers. Some permanent officials, such as Crowe in his time and later Vansittart, struggled hard to convince governments of the need for a strong foreign policy, and to puncture the prevailing euphoria with a bodkin of realism. They failed. They failed because there was another, competing influence on politicians, a more congenial and therefore in the end a more effective influence: a constellation of moralising internationalist cliques, each with its ideas-peddlers, its contact-men in high places, and its tame press. These busy romantics – from Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) and Lord Robert Cecil on the Right, through liberals like Smuts and Gilbert Murray in the middle to Kingsley Martin and Clifford Allen on the Left – not only believed, admirably enough, that morality rather than power ought to govern relations between states but acted as though it did... The internationalists successfully imposed on governments their pretension to speak for the inarticulate and unsounded body of the British nation; that is, to represent public opinion at large.
  • Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (1972), pp. 239-240