GREAT BRITAIN: The Issue

Clement Attlee is going to fire some of his ministers. For both it would be a painful business. For him, it would mean the first break in the group of old friends and party comrades with whom he shared Labor’s triumph in 1945. For them, it would be the moment when they must go to the King, give up their seals of office, and forgo the honors, the chauffeurs and cars, the £5,000 a year, the sense of power and position which most ministers, being human, come to consider theirs forever. Most of the ministers probably did not yet know just which heads would roll. Last week Prime Minister Attlee was apparently still making up his mind.

Many people found it hard to believe that the decision lay with this small, insignificant and, in some respects, inadequate man. Would not the giants of his party, Ernest Bevin, Sir Stafford Cripps, Herbert Morrison, Hugh Dalton, or Aneurin Bevan, fight it out among them and then tell Attlee what to do? They were having their fights, and the outcome would in part determine what Attlee decided. But individually or collectively, they could not tell him what to do. Clement Attlee embodies all the little virtues of little Englishmen. Their power is his power. Moreover, Attlee is not insignificant and ineffective in all things.

Strength Through Smallness. Within his own party, he is a formidable figure who knows all there is to know about party management. This know-how is crucial in the Labor Party, which is an insecure amalgam of two parties—the trade unionists, who have the votes, and the theoretical socialists, who supply the agitation. Clement Attlee’s strength is his neutral smallness. All the big men around him belong to one side or the other. Attlee belongs to both and to neither.

A few weeks ago there was a chance that Attlee might have to yield the leadership to a bigger Laborite. He and his Government had lost prestige at home and abroad. But now Attlee is over the worst of his qualms. He is banking on the Cripps production and export program, Dalton’s emergency dollar measures, and the coming ministerial changes to restore British and world confidence.

Whom would Prime Minister Attlee decide to fire? The guesses filling the British press were not worth the paper wasted on them. Many of the changes, when they came, would not mean much to Americans. But what mattered, and would matter more & more as the U.S. stake in Britain increased, was the continuing battle of ideas behind these changes and others that would certainly follow before British socialism had run its course. At the moment, most of those engaged in this battle regarded it as nothing more than a fight for individual and factional advantage. This was an illusion. The real battle was for liberty.

The Beautiful & the Damned. It was a battle between two very different kinds of socialists. Just to mix things up even more, it also involved Tories who do not know (or admit) that they are socialists, a lot of people who merely pretend to be socialists, and a staggering number of Britons who imagine that British socialism is divinely different from all other socialism. But for Americans, it is a fair simplification to say that the battle is between good socialists and bad socialists.

Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin are (in American terms) good socialists. They are libertarians. They believe in the personal liberties; in free elections contested by free parties for a free Parliament; in the right to earn money and own property (but not to accumulate large amounts of either); in a free press, and so on.

Aneurin Bevan, the present Minister of Health, is (in American terms) a bad socialist. It might be libelous to say that he is a totalitarian. But it is accurate to say that the totalitarians in the British Labor Party look to him as their leader. Just now they pretend to believe in all the personal liberties, but they do not. They believe in a one-party state. The ones who really know where they are headed, and are honest about it, admit that they would like to abolish Parliament as it now functions. They have no use for free elections, or a free press, although they currently thrive upon these institutions. Most of them are anti-Communist in domestic affairs, anti-American in world affairs. Herbert Morrison, Sir Stafford Cripps and Hugh Dalton stand (or wobble) somewhere between the extremes; they might wind up anywhere.

Bevin v. Bevan. Bevin probably would never hold office in a Government headed by Aneurin Bevan; at any rate, he would not hold it long. But Cripps might; Dalton probably would if he could. The Attlee-Bevin socialists far outnumber the Bevan socialists and control the Labor Party and Government.

Ernest Bevin is the biggest and most powerful figure in the party. His silly, remarks about U.S. gold have cost him some prestige, and his warmest admirers find faults in him as a Foreign Secretary, but his party power is greater now than it has ever been.

Aneurin Bevan recently suffered a defeat when the Cabinet decided that immediate nationalization of steel was less important than the production of more steel, and he will remain a minister (if Mr. Attlee permits) only by swallowing a lot of his fierce Welsh pride. But he cannot be ignored. The favorite saying of his followers is that he will be “the next Prime Minister but one.” They may be right. He consistently commands no more than 50 Labor M.P.s. But, generally speaking, the Bevan boys are smarter than the Attlee-Bevin boys; they are also more ruthless, and they know exactly what they will do with power if they ever get it. The outstanding characteristic of Attlee and his followers so far has been that they do not know what to do with the power they have. Unless they soon repair this defect, the chances are that, after an Ernest Bevin interregnum, Britain will end up under Aneurin Bevan and his totalitarians. To Americans, the sad wonder is that the Attlee-Bevin socialists cannot see that they are only too likely to be the preparers of totalitarian socialism.