Political Activism
Southall's interest in radical politics may have been awakened by his uncle George Baker, whose family had a history of radicalism going back to the seventeenth century. Southall's 1885 sketch of John Bright addressing a Birmingham political meeting might be taken as an early indication of radical interest.
Southall politics were strongly influenced by the pacifism of his Quaker faith. His opposition to the tide of jingoism that surrounded the Jameson Raid in 1895 provoked him into political action, and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 caused him to switch his allegiance from the Liberal Party to the anti-war Independent Labour Party, for whose Birmingham branch he served as secretary from 1914 until 1931.
Southall's obituary in the Birmingham Post recorded that he was always "an enthusiastic supporter of that Socialism or Communism which William Morris expressed in his News from Nowhere".
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“The short lesson that comes out of long experience in political agitation is something like this: all the motive power in all of these movements is the instinct of religious feeling. All the obstruction comes from attempting to rely on anything else. Conciliation is the enemy.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)