London

ATLANTIC

August 1955

on the World today

THE apathy of the British electorate this year is purely relative. As against 82.6 per cent of the 35 million eligibles who voted in 1951, only 76.8 per cent voted this year — still a huge turnout by comparison with the United States, where the vole even in a presidential election usually runs under 60 per cent. Opposition Leader Attlee explained away the drop in the Labor vote by saying that a great many more people are satisfied “for the time being”; but even aside from the undoubted prosperity which always aids the ins, other developments arc evident in England these days.

One is that the Labor Party, the symbol of change, has completed a cycle of welfare statism, nationalization, and “fair shares,” and has not mapped any concrete program beyond its present resting place. Some of the most devoted Laborites confess that their party is suffering from spiritual exhaustion.

Another development concerns the Tories. While it is true that in Eden the Conservative Party has its first really conservative leader since Neville Chamberlain, most Tories have come to accept the doctrine of the welfare state, and their leaders can safely be identified as enlightened. Moreover, there is distinct pressure within the party from the younger men. Sir Anthony, at 58, is the youngest Prime Minister since Stanley Baldwin took office in 1923. His Cabinet’s average age is likewise 58, and it will be lowered by the impending retirement of Lord Woolton, 72, and the expected entry of Reginald Maudling, 38, youngest and most brilliant of the newer generation.

The new Conservative majority, 59 scats, relieves Cabinet officers from the necessity of being closely tied down to Commons sessions lest a surprise vote go against the Government, and by that measure gives the Eden team a full five years, if it desires, of more confident and more flexible operat ions than Sir Winston Churchill was able to enjoy.

Union rivalry

All through the election campaign, one vexing issue was the question of unofficial strikes. Earlier, the 26-day strike in Fleet Street had cast, a veil of obscurity about the historic occasion of Sir Winston Churchill’s resignation as Prime Minister. The newspaper strike not only deprived the public of news and opinion about the change of administration and the climacteric of the notable career, but when it ended it was on virtually the same terms as were offered at the beginning.

Three days before the election, 170,000 dock workers went on strike and the week after the election the 70,000 members of the Association of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen pulled the whistle for a national railway strike. This was compounded, at the start of the peak transatlantic tourist traffic, by a strike of seamen.

Of these strikes, only that of the seamen, although “wildcat” in nature, was within the familiar Labor objectives of better wages and working conditions.” Both the dockers’ strike and the railway strike were essentially jurisdictional disputes between rival unions. The National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers, for instance, walked out only to win away recognition, for bargaining purposes, from the omnibus Transport and General Workers’ Union, the largest in Britain. The smaller union was able to effect only a one-third tie-up, since members of the other union stayed on the job. Similarly, in the railway strike, the locomotive men, members of a craft union, were asking for the restoration of the wage differentials between them and the unskilled sections of railway labor, which had been narrowed several months before in general wage increases. But their demands for t he differentials were countered by notice from the National Union of Railwaymen, the larger industrial union, that it would seek further increases for its members, to narrow the differentials again.

This leap-frog maneuver froze the hands of the British Transport Commission, which administers the nationalized railways, because it could not arrive at an estimate of the aggregate costs entailed.

But actually the railway strike was more of a nuisance than an effective labor demonstration. The Government declared a state of emergency, in order to assume whatever powers might be necessary, but at least one fifth of the country’s rolling stock stayed in operation, for the reason that one fifth of the foot plat emen belong to the NUR and not the locomotive union, and they stayed at work. A tight scheduling of available men and machines, a strict priority system giving preference to freight over passengers, the use of other kinds of transport, and the official encouragement of hitch-hiking “at own risk” kept British Railways muddling through for the duration of the strike.

Challenge to the Goverment

Unlike the newspaper st rike of electricians, which had been officially Communist-inspired, the stevedores’ and seamen’s strikes were insurgent affairs of uncertain political ancestry. They were aimed at the parent unions; but after they began to suffer from baek-to-work movements within the rank and file, the strike leadership split, several officials resigned, and the labor situation dragged along in a stale of chaotic uncertainty.

By general agreement, the series of strikes presented no less a challenge to the Eden government than to Labor’s own house. Coming on top of Labor’s election defeat, the strikes undermined confidence in the quality of labor leadership, both political and economic, and set the stage for vigorous skirmishing at the next annual Labor Party conference in October.

Also involved in the public debate which the strikes touched off was the Government’s attitude. The Government had brought about resumption of railway service without resorting to extraordinary measures and Sir Anthony had then summoned both the Trades Union Congress and the British Employers’ Confederation to 10 Downing Street for broad discussions on a long-range program for attaining industrial peace.

Starnded tourists

But the wildcat seamen’s strike fitted into no pattern. One big passenger ship after another of the Cunard and Canadian Pacific lines was left high and dry at Liverpool or Southampton when the crews, mostly catering staff, walked off just before sailing time. Something like a dozen transatlantic crossings were canceled, some in both directions, and at least five thousand travelers, mainly tourists, had to find other transport. The loss in transatlantic fares alone was about $1.5 million and the total loss to the companies well above $5 million,

Cunard finally went to the extreme of seeking injunctions against the strike leaders and suing several for damages. The skipper of the Queen Mary, the largest of (he liners to be tied up, introduced the issue of “failure to obey orders,” which to a seafaring nation is translated as “mutiny.” Finally the striking seamen, who had been deferred from military service by virtue of their calling, suddenly found themselves confronted by immediate call-up orders.

The Commons debate on the Government’s role in this strike was restrained, as usual. But it raised both economic and constitutional points which will have to be decided. So it was evident that Sir Anthony’s most immediate task was not in the field of international but of domestic relations.

Sir Anthony “at the summit”

Foreign policy as such played no part in the election campaign, as it has played no part for a long time in parliamentary debate. The differences of opinion on renewed conversations with the Russians have not been between the Conservative and Labor parties, but within the Conservative Party, and they have been differences on procedure, not on principle, for neither side ever considered negotiations as an alternative to the program of building up Western strength through the Paris treaties.

But as Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony had opposed a meeting of chiefs of state, while Sir Winston Churchill time and time again called for a meeting “at the summit.”

The approach varied according to the natures of the two men. Sir Winston has never paid much attention to protocol, and as one of the most commanding political figures of history, he possesses sufficient stature, flair, and intuition so that he has never needed to. He felt (hat a dramatic gesture, like a top-level conference, might serve as a token of improving relations “the wish and the will,” as he put it —even if later hard-and-fast bargaining should become an arduous and prolonged process. He also, no doubt, wanted to go himself as a fitting denouement to his career.

Sir Anthony, the professional diplomat, who calls diplomacy “a plodding art,” preferred a stage-bystage arrangement in which the foreign ministers would fashion the outlines of an agreement, if any, and then call in the chiefs of state as a mark of progress already achieved. He no doubt also wanted to go himself.

The differences between the two men were publicly exhibited in parliamentary sessions, and endured for two years — until Sir Winston stepped aside and Sir Anthony became the man “at the summit.” President Eisenhower’s agreement to a top-level meeting and the three-power invitation to Moscow came just as the British election campaign got under way, and some Laborites saw that as no coincidence.

But actually there had been a change not only in Sir Anthony’s position but in the international situation as well. Beginning with their about-face in Aust ria, followed by their disarmament proposals and the lessening of tensions in the Far East, the Russians seemed to be engaged in a sincere initiative for a general discussion. It was then the Foreign Office decided that, in the changed atmosphere, it would be more productive to have a “summit meeting first, to reflect any desire for an understanding, and then move to specific issues, rather than to run the risk of tackling specific issues first and perhaps thus limit the prospects of any broader agreement.

Billy Graham in Britain

If public interest in the election was negligible, and some speakers drew pitifully sparse audiences at meetings—in one case only seven persons showed up to hear a former Cabinet aide — one figure at least attracted crowds up to 90,000 persons, He was not a political candidate, however, but the American evangelist Billy Graham, conducting his second British preaching mission. He held a series of highly successful meetings in sympathetic Glasgow and then came to London for a week in Wembley Stadium. Despite pouring rain and chill winds, he held hordes of willing listeners who preferred psalms to politics. One ecclesiastical critic in the Bevanite Tribune, in fact, raised the old Marxist slogan that “religion is the opiate of the people" and blamed “men like Billy Graham” for keeping Labor’s voters away from political rallies.

Other showmanship fared less well than Mr. Graham’s. The London theater season was in general uninspiring and, until the last few weeks, knew only two bright spots. Siobhan McKenna appeared as the best Saint Joan in many years — a French “Maid” who spoke with the thickest of Irish brogues, which she will bring to America this summer. Ruth Gordon and Sam Levene captured all other midseason honors in Thornton Wilder’s old Merchant of Yonkers, retitled The Matchmaker.

But some glory was restored to the stage by the energetic troupe of the Old Vic, who in the last quarter of the season gave both parts of Henry IV. By general agreement, these were among the best Shakespearean performances ever given anywhere, and the fire and zeal, the effectiveness, and the sheer acting ability of Paul Rogers and company were thought by many to surpass the official Shakespeare Festival at Stratford-on-Avon.

There Sir Laurence Olivier and his wife Vivien Leigh disappointed in Twelfth Night, while All’s Well That Ends Well neither endured nor ended very well. But Sir Laurence redeemed himself as Macbeth and presented the highly unconventional portrait of a conscience-ridden intellectual, a performance described as “restraint run amok.”

The Royal Opera House at Covent Garden also had its ins and outs. A 21-year-old ballerina, Svetlana Beriosova, emerged as the next best thing to the Imperial Russian Ballet, and she too will be seen in the Lnited States next fall with the Sadler’s Wells Company. A cycle of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung won plaudits as the best since before the war, with Hans Hotter, Ramon Vinay, Set Svanholm, and Margaret Harshaw, and a youthful conductor named Wilhelm Kempe, who did everything exactly the way old Richard would have wanted.

And a true Shakespeare epic is being shot by an American film company, which is in Scotland making a modern gangster version of Macbeth. This is one sample of the dialogue: in the play, Lady Macbeth tells Macbeth, “ You have displac’d the mirth, broke the good meeting, with most admir’d disorder"; in the film, Lily Macbeth says to her gangster husband Joe, “Well, you sure mess things up.”