London

on the World Today

HIGHT over the site of the “Festival of Britain” there is balanced a great silvered cigar-shaped marker known as the Skylon, and thereby hangs a topical quip. The magically suspended object is called the Labor Government’s most appropriate monument, because it has no visible means of support.

The ebb tide of Labor’s popularity has come relatively suddenly. A Gallup poll at the beginning of last winter recorded 46 per cent of the voters sampled as favoring Labor, compared with 44 per cent for Mr. Churchill’s Tories. That meant roughly that there had been no substantial change since the general elections. At the end of winter the same poll gave Labor 38 per cent against the Tories’ 51 per cent, a very radical change indeed.

In the search for the sources of this rapid decline, most commentators have settled on inflation; for prices began moving upward perceptibly at about the same time that the political sentiment recorded by the polls shifted strongly against Labor. They have continued to move as if in inverse and causal ratio to Labor’s popular stock.

Inflation is of course now a world-wide phenomenon because the general competition to buy raw materials for rearmament forces everyone’s prices up; so the question may arise, why should the consequences be more severe in Britain than elsewhere? The answer lies in the brittle rigidity of British controls and the tightness of the Labor economy.

As an example of how tight controls in Britain have been, during the world’s last, big bout with inflation — from 1945 to 1947 — British food prices rose only 2 per cent compared with a rise of 30 per cent, in American prices in that period.

But this was done largely by severely testing the trade unions’ loyalty to the Labor Government and inducing them to forgo the wage demands that give momentum to a price spiral. Thus the sudden rise of prices this winter due to soaring raw material costs hit here in Britain an organized Labor near to bursting with postponed and pent-up wage demands.

By midwinter, demands for wage increases became irrepressible. Where union leaders attempted to restrain their rank and file they lost control. At one point over 100,000 workers scattered in various key industries were out on illegal strikes. The Government and its wage tribunals had to yield and to junk the amazingly long-lived policy of “wage freeze.”

By the end of winter, raises had been granted that amounted to an additional 330 million dollars a year on the national wage bill, and the amount is still rising. An indication of the early effects of this on prices is the Economist index of wholesale prices: for a four-week period in January and February it showed a rise of 7 points in Britain compared with a rise of only 2 points in a similar index in roughly the same period in the U.S.

A reputable American reporter recently wrote that “daily soaring prices have all but wrecked Britain’s tightly controlled economy.” That may be an exaggeration, but it is true that no end to the spiral is in sight; indeed it appears to be gaining in momentum, and thus far the Government has indicated no effective plans for halting it.

The Tories’ cold war

Labor politicians are as frank in admitting as Conservatives are in asserting that an election now would bring Labor down. British politicians, however, are aware that no political trend can be trusted beyond the weekend. That is why Mr. Attlee holds on to office desperately in the hope of a change in the winds while Mr. Churchill battles desperately to bring him down quickly in fear of it.

On the economic front, the mood of resignation with which conservative businessmen accepted Labor controls and nationalization measures for five years has gone. Hitherto some of them have even joined Labor’s governing boards for socialized industries. But recently when the steel industry was taken over by the Government, the ex-owners and managers not only refused to serve but put pressure on other businessmen not to accept positions on the board. For the first few months of steel nationalization at least, they have succeeded in withholding from the new governing board the services of a great many technical experts the Government had counted on using.

But it has not been on the political front that the Tories’ new mood has been expressed most spectacularly. With disarming frankness, the Conservative M.P. Robert Boothby recently stated in a public speech the tactics his party had adopted in regard to the Government: —

“We shall harry the life out of them. We will make them sit up day and night and grind away until they get absolutely hysterical and say, ‘We can’t stand any more.’ The only way to get rid of them fairly quickly is to try and wear them out. This is what we are going to do for the next two or three months. Division [roll-call vote] after division, and we can do it in squads.”

Specifically, the Tory campaign has consisted of two practices: first, the calling of snap surprise votes on any issue that presents itself, in order to force all Labor M.P.s to be at all times in the chamber or within running distance of it; and second, the institution of “prayers,” which are Opposition requests for the annulment of routine administrative orders and can be debated endlessly.

The repeated calling of snap votes has given the Cabinet some severe scares. On three occasions in the winter, Labor was caught with its majority down and was defeated by the Tories, and once it suffered a tie and was saved only by the casting vote of the speaker of the House. Mercifully for the Government, all were on minor questions not obliging its resignation.

However, it was the long “prayer” debates into the small hours of every morning that hurt most. The dories have not sought to keep debates going all night, but only until after the buses stop running; the theory being that since more Tories have automobiles than do Laborites, missing the last bus would mean not getting home at all for the unfortunate Government supporters.

The system has hit Labor where it counts: among its leaders. For some 50-odd of Labor’s members have not only legislative duties in the House all evening but also executive duties as ministers and junior ministers all day. In addition to many lesser victims of Churchill’s parliamentary cold war, Prime Minister Attlee himself has had to be hospitalized for periods with a duodenal ulcer; and exhaustion was also a contributory factor to Ernest Bovin’s having to yield the Foreign Office to his fitter colleague, Herbert Morrison. Finally, even the speaker of the House succumbed to sickness due largely to exhaustion.

There have been signs that Mr. Churchill may have overreached himself with these tactics and offended that sixth sense which is so finely developed among Britons — the sense of decorum. A recent Gallup poll, registering a fall in the Tories’ popular lead over Labor from 14 points to 12 points, was widely interpreted as a kind of public reprimand, and Churchill thereupon agreed, in an exchange of letters with the Labor leadership, to open “truce talks” on the institution of prayers. The practice of surprise snap votes, however, goes on.

The left-wingers

As if the frontal attack by the Tories were not enough, Mr. Attlee suffers further harassment from the rear by his own back-bench leftwingers. The score or more of resolute left-wing M.P.s have of course always been there. But now that Labor has a majority of only seven seats in the House and is being subjected to a procession of snap votes, the “Keep Left ” group, as it is called, from a pamphlet its members once published, possesses the power of life and death over the Government.

Moreover, changed world circumstances since the Korean war broke out are giving the Keep Lefters a popular base they have not had before. The essentials of their credo — that a big rearmament program is not entirely necessary, that the burdens of rearmament financing are not being distributed equitably among the classes, and that Britain is knuckling under too readily to America on too many questions — are proving increasingly attractive to sections of the population caught in the pinch of rising prices.

Finally, a factor that may be in their favor — though it is still too early to make hard and fast judgments — has been the replacement of Ernest Bevin in the Foreign Office by Herbert Morrison. Morrison stands on the far right of Labor politics, as Bevin did; but Morrison is above all a politician, sensitive to the shifting forces that make friends and influence people, where Bevin was not.

Bevin’s first entry into politics came in his middle sixties during the war; he had spent most of his adult life as a union organizer, head of the world’s biggest union — the British Transport and General Workers — in a virtually irremovable position, and was therefore in the custom of ignoring trends of political sentiment and respecting the advice of permanent officials, a practice he carried with him into the Foreign Office in 1945.

Though Morrison is expected to undertake no fundamental changes of foreign policy, many think he may be more respectful of the growing billow on the left. Indeed, Morrison’s first speech as foreign minister was cheered from the left as being more “reasonable" than anything Bevin had uttered for years.

After a long period of enfeeblement, the left group made known to Attlee (and in fact discovered to its own surprise) its potentialities last autumn in spectacular fashion. The day President Truman was erroneously reported in London as having expressed readiness to use the atom bomb in Korea, the Keep Lefters organized a letter to Attlee demanding his intervention. In two hours that evening more than 100 members of Parliament had signed the letter. It was largely this that catapulted Attlee to Washington for his personal conference with Truman.

On another occasion last winter, the group gave Attlee a reminder of the might of their marginal position. They broke the ranks and carried 32 votes against the Labor Government. Fortunately for the Cabinet, the Tories chose not to take part; but had they done so. Labor would have been out. Since then, Attlee has not been able to ignore the left group in his policies, and this may have been largely responsible for the repeated disagreements with America over policy in Korea and in Asia generally.

The Attlee Government had another narrow escape at the end of April, when Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Labor, and Harold Wilson, President of the Board of Trade, resigned in protest over the amount budgeted for rearmament. The Tories forced Attlee’s hand at once with a “prayer” to annul a Government order raising transport charges, and Labor squeaked by with it vote of 297 to 293.

Too many Americans

The Keep Left group has been charged with being the source of the wave — fairly gentle but none the less deserving of special notice — of antiAmerican feeling now current in London. But it would be more accurate to say that a trend of mild anti-Americanism exists and that this group is the leading exploiter of it, though both the orthodox Laborites and Mr. Churchill’s Conservatives have not been above drawing a little domestic political capital from it on occasion.

The real source of the wave has been simply the way things have happened lately. For one thing, the formal end of Marshall aid — of dependence on America — was announced. In speeches to constituents Labor politicians now almost invariably place high among their party achievements the fact that “we got rid of” Marshall aid. Charitable American observers here consider it may be simply a reflex impulse of a rather proud people to twist the eagle’s tail feathers for a spell after such an event.

Secondly, people here feel America has been unduly callous toward British sensitivities in claiming the higher appointments of the Atlantic Defense organization. After one American had been made supreme commander of the Atlantic armies and another (William Herod) chief of its Defense Production Board, it was held a supremely unkind cut that a third American should be named head of the Western world’s naval forces in the Atlantic.

When this appointment was made known it caused a rare storm in the House of Commons, Churchill riding it against Labor for all it was worth. His thunder was echoed in the press throughout the land, and so aloof a figure as the Archbishop of Canterbury made a public appeal that the appointment should be reconsidered. Some weeks later, editorialists won some consolation, and claimed a corroboration of their prejudices against American admirals, when the OxfordCambridge boat race had to be rerun because the Oxford craft humiliatingly sank at the start; for the first time in history, the Oxford crew was piloted by an American coxswain.

But probably the chief source of the wave has been the course of American policy in Korea. This factor first became operative with the Truman atom-bomb report referred to earlier. The corrected version of the President’s statement came too late to remove the impression created in London that America was making vital decisions binding on Britain without consulting her. Professor Arnold Toynbee’s apothegm, “No annihilation without Representation,” was taken over by the left-wing periodicals as a national rallying cry.

Before the suspicions aroused by that incident had died down, General MacArthur’s series of pronunciamentos, left unrepudiated by any correctives from the State Department, gave them new and more vigorous life. All this explains the Labor Government’s relief when General MacArthur was removed.

There have been signs that both big political parties may try to turn antiAmericanism to use in the coming election campaign. This spring, when a long international tariff conference was being wound up in Torquay, the Tories staged a mass rally near the conference hall to blast the Labor negotiators for allegedly having “sold out" to America and cut British imperial preference tariffs. Next morning, the official Labor paper, Daily Herald, which is generally prudent almost to a fault in its comments on things American, carried in triumphant denial the front-page bannerline, “Labor Britain Stands Up to America.”

For Americans, however, it is wise to keep this wave of hostility in its proper proportions. Like all things else it is relative; and the par stock of the U.S. to which it must be related now stands so high (as a result of the wartime alliance and Marshall aid, which Britons resent only on the surface) that the present slight deviation from it should not be taken overseriously. There is virtually no questioning of the fundamental necessity of the alliance; and individual to individual, the British are as polite and warm to us as they have ever been.