London

on the World Today

CLEMENT ATTLEE’S progress in the esteem of the British voting public this summer is an example of how incalculable political trends can be. By all considerations that Seem important his stock with the public should have fallen disastrously, for no other Western government has suffered so many serious setbacks this season as his.

At the end of April his fiery Minister for Labor, Aneurin Bevan, resigned from the cabinet hurling over his shoulder dire predictions of economic disaster because of the Government’s arms policy. In early summer the Iranian oil crisis broke around the cabinet’s head, threatening the extinction of Britain’s single richest foreign investment and her whole position and prestige in the Near East.

About the same time, Guy F. Burgess and Donald D. MacLean of the Foreign Office shamed the Government’s security precautions by disappearing. Finally, by the end of summer, many of the rebel Bevan’s rueful forecasts appeared to be becoming fact with prices mounting and the nation’s earnings on its all-important foreign trade account taking the biggest drop in any quarter-year in British peacetime history.

Yet the public opinion polls record that the long fall in Labor’s popular support through last winter and spring was reversed in the summer months. As the people’s choice for the prime ministership, Attlee is shown leading by far the nearest Conservative (who was strangely not Churchill but Anthony Eden), with 57 per cenl of the sampled opinion. Labor leaders have begun talking with some confidence once more of calling new elections in the autumn with a hope of returning to power with a safer majority.

Hindsight is discovering a horde of reasons for this curious case of success amid failure. The most convincing of them relate strictly to British domestic politics. For one thing, the resignation of Bevan is discovered to have been a source of strength to Attlee and not, as was predicted at the time, a source of party division and weakness. For, since Bevan has chosen to remain with the party though opposing the cabinet, it has meant no loss of working-class votes for Attlee’s party as a whole. But Bevan with his acrid class-conscious outlook is anathema to the British middle classes, and his riddance from the governing circle of Labor is thought to have brought many hitherto doubting middle-class voters to Attlee’s support.

Attlee’s patient calmness

A second domestic explanation is rather more subtle. During the long months of Labor’s declining support, the public came to regard Churchill’s party in a new light. The Tories were looked on not casually as simply His Majesty’s Opposition, but more searchingly and critically as the potential source of an early new administration for the nation: and in that light their attraction has begun to diminish, causing an automatic enhancement of Labor’s prestige.

Tory parliamentary tactics of keeping the House sitting into the night and calling snap votes on trivial issues have given some voters an impression of frivolity. The failure of the Tories to suggest any positive alternative solutions to the nation’s problems has smacked of irresponsibility.

Most damaging of all, however, many Conservatives in Parliament gave the impression of losing their heads in the strain of the Iranian oil dispute and proposed sending troops into Iran to make a show of force. The action would clearly have been disastrous: it would have risked having Britain stamped as an aggressor by the UN and might have provoked conflict with Russia.

By contrast, Attlee’s patient calmness, exhibited both in Korea and Iran, has been reassuring to Britons whose dread of world wars is fresher than their longing for the old imperial grandeur. Many people feel that Attlee, by exercising this same restraining influence on America in regard to Korea, deserves much credit for the coming about of the truce talks in Kaesong.

Something to cheer about

Another set of reasons given for the signs of Labor’s political recovery belongs to the realm of purely psychological windfalls. For example, the victory of the English fighter, Randy Turpin, over America’s Sugar Ray Robinson, bringing Britain the world’s middleweight. championship for the first time since Bob Fitzsimmons won against Jack Dempsey in 1891, suffused a glow of pride over this island that has been remarkable. It struck a greater blow at the “decline and fall” complex which has so pained British life since the war than perhaps any big political event.

People with no earthly interest in boxing felt the lift. “I am not sure I know what it means,” said a kind old English lady who heard the decision listening to the radio, “but it is so wonderful to hear Britain has won something!” There is no doubt that this event had a soothing effect on the general disgruntlement and thereby became a political factor in favor of the government in power.

In this same psychological category the fact of a pretty good summer as regards the weather — always a tremendous influence on British political sentiments — and the success of the Festival of Britain deserve special mention. Conceived by the former newspaper editor, Gerald Barry (now fittingly rewarded with the title Sir Gerald Barry), and scoffed at by many for its expensiveness before the opening, the Festival is turning out to be a stroke of genius.

It has two purposes. First, selfcongratulation: to give evidence against the “decline and fall” complex by a handsome exhibition of British industries, arts, and general prowess on the South Bank fairgrounds across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament. And second, relaxation: to have a rather lavish expcnse-be-damned celebration after six years of austere war and six more years of austere peace.

This second purpose is served at the Battersea Park “Fun Fair” and in local festivities and pageants in several hundred towns and villages throughout the country. The colorful Battersea Park structures are proving so successful that Parliament is considering keeping them as a permanent part of London’s life.

Not the least prideful of the summer’s display of Britain’s best features is the uncommonly star-studded theatrical season: John Gielgud, fresh from American success in a Christopher Fry play, in The Winter’s Tale; Sir Ralph Richardson in Chekhov’s Three Sisters; Charles Laughton, Charles Boyer, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke in plain dress reading from Man and Superman; Michael Redgrave doing the whole cycle of Shakespeare’s historical plays at Stratford; and, to top all. Sir Laurence Olivier and his wife Vivien Leigh playing Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra on alternate nights.

The only blot on a nearly perfect season has been the failure of Alee Guinness’s Hamlet after little over a month’s run. Mr. Guinness jarred his first-night audience by a more austere stage setting and a more mature and less romantic Dane than London audiences have become accustomed to. It deserves to be said, however, that after the first shock, audiences grew warmer to this different Hamlet and the play would no doubt have come through the season successfully had not Guinness agreed to relinquish the playhouse on the basis of first-night criticisms.

It has been a factor of national pride that Broadway has now asked for the Olivier productions for later in the year, and there has even been some bargaining with Guinness to try his Hamlet in New York.

Bevan’s strength

While factors of this nature seem to have canceled out the effects of the more important setbacks and given the Labor Government, a respite in its fall from popular grace, the latter remain to be faced, else the imminent change of seasons is likely to bring a resumption of the old downwards course.

Ancurin Bevan’s rebellion, for example, is not dead but only quiescent. Bevan has kept his opposition to the present rulers of the Labor Party in restraint in the House of Commons in order not to incur blame for an eventual overthrow of the party in Parliament. But when the party takes holiday from the Commons in October and holds its annual convention, his assault on the present leaders is to be resumed, and it may become formidable.

There have been two indices recently of his strength. In a House of Commons vole in which the Tories gate notice they would not take part and I here was therefore no danger of the Government being overthrown, Bevan induced thirty members to abstain from supporting the cabinet and influenced many of another fifty to stay away from the chamber as a demonstration against the cabinet. In a party that depends on four or five votes to keep a majority over the Tories in the House, the virtual abstention of eighty in favor of Bevan was a considerable demonstration.

The second was a vote taken among leaders of the Trades Union Congress on the issue of Bevanism. Of 8 million organized workers in Britain, the leaders of 2 millions voted for the Bevan standpoint. It would appear from these results — before Bevan has made any campaign to attract support — that though the rebel has little early hope of winning control of the party, he can cause Attlee great trouble.

Unplanned rearmament

The essence of Bevan’s case is that the world argument with Russia is going to be decided on the social rather than the military plane — t hat Russia’s only hope of winning is to exploit Western Europe’s weak economies and the poverty of Asia. By this argument, the West is undertaking rearmament on such a scale and in such a chaotic manner that we shall grow weaker rather than stronger. Communism will grow in Western Europe because of inflation and other bad effects of rearmament. It will thrive in the backward countries because of our giving priority to arms rather than to Point Four.

Bevan is thus in favor of reducing the scale of the arms program, applying strong “socialist controls” to economy to prevent undue price rises, maintaining social welfare services, and earmarking more funds for the development of the backward countries. There are many other facets to his argument — for example, he demands that Britain show greater independence of America in matters of foreign policy — but this is the essential skeleton of it.

Aside from Bevan’s dynamic personality — a unique feature in Labor’s notoriously unglamorons hierarchy — the Welsh leader’s great asset has been a worsening economic situation, much as he himself predicted. Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Gaitskell, the main target of Bevan’s attack, shocked the House of Commons by revealing the second quarterly trade balance: Britain’s earnings of dollars and gold from foreign trade had fallen by 306 million dollars. The main cause was that the chaotic world rush for raw materials wherewith to rearm had forced prices up close to the limit of Britain’s ability to pay. An absolute shortage of some basic materials bad put British industries on short time. Both these things Bevan had predicted as a result of the Government’s “planless” rearmament policy.

The pinch on the householder

Aside from rearmament’s effect on the national exchequer, it is pinching badly the ordinary Briton’s home budget. Wages have fallen with rising prices, while profits have been permitted to rise exorbitantly (this the Government has encouraged as a means of inducing companies to reinvest and maintain the rise of general productivity).

So conservative a paper as Lord Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express was editorially shocked at its own reports that Lever Brothers, the great soap combine, had nearly doubled its profits in this year of sacrifice; that Courtauld’s, the British DuPont, had more than doubled its profits; and that Marks and Spencer, Britain’s biggest department store chain, had quintupled its earnings.

The result of course is a restiveness in organized labor and a new round of wage demands that will hasten the inflationary spiral.

This is likely to be the central issue during the winter months — hard months in this country in the best of times. Labor’s supporters are likely to forgive Mr. Attlee for refusing to brandish a sword at the Iranians or for not having carried out a witchhunt among the personnel of the Foreign Office to prevent cases like those of Burgess and MacLean. They may even overlook the cabinet’s apparent fatigue and its tendency to be all too frequently a few steps behind events. But they are unlikely to forgive planlessness of economy and maldistribution of incomes — the two cardinal sins in British Labor’s traditional scale of values.