GREAT BRITAIN: Grit & Tintacks

In trying not to displease anybody very much, Prime Minister Attlee seemed to have pleased almost nobody. After he revealed his proposals for cutting down government expense (TIME, Oct. 31), almost every section of the British press heaped on him a storm of abuse.

The Daily Mail dusted off a costume quote: “The country should say to [the government] as Cromwell said to the Long Parliament: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. In the name of God, Go!'” The Times: “Mr. Attlee has to ask himself whether the resolve to remain in office can now be upheld. It is scarcely conceivable that the galloping consumption of the nation’s wealth and strength can be more than momentarily checked by the government’s proposals.” The Nottingham Journal: “Mr. Attlee scatters a handful of grit and tintacks over the path we ought not to be on.”

Moments of Glee. Opening debate in the House of Commons, Sir Stafford Cripps made yet another of his austerity speeches. “We can draw no more,” he said gloomily, “from our already attenuated reserves.” Dollar imports of food and tobacco would be cut still further—in fact, Sir Stafford made it clear that dollar imports would be cut almost down to the indispensable bone of raw materials for British factories. Cripps also called for a stoppage of loans and credits to other countries, and a check on the “unrequited exports” which Britain has been shipping to the Dominions in order to pay off sterling balances (war debts).

The Laborites enjoyed a few moments of high glee when conservative, ruddy-jowled Sir John Anderson said that he did not want to see the sort of events that followed World War I. Since Winston Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the time Sir John referred to, Labor members hooted and Churchill glowered at his shirt front. Herbert Morrison taunted both of them, and for a while Churchill and Anderson were popping up & down like marionettes to answer him.

Then Churchill got in his innings with a blistering 40-minute attack in which he said: “There was the old Gladstonian expression, ‘Let the money fructify in the pockets of the people.’ That is regarded [by the government] as a monstrous device of a decadent capitalist system.”

When the issue came to a vote, the government won by 353 votes to 222 in a party lineup. The vote against the government was the largest in four years.

Over the Fence? Attlee stuck doggedly to his decision not to hold an election this year. A straw poll recently conducted by Labor’s Transport House had indicated that if the election were held now, Labor would get a majority of not more than 40 seats in the House of Commons. This margin is too thin to withstand severe crises, Laborites think. They believe that by next spring they will be either over the fence or crumpled up in front of it. Said one: “we’re determined to have a damned good shot at getting out of this mess.”