GREAT BRITAIN: Enter the Technocrats

The guard was being changed at Buckingham Palace last week as Prime Minister Attlee drove through the wrought-iron gates. Attlee had come to tell the King, in an hour’s audience, what members of Labor’s Old Guard he was firing, what new recruits he was bringing into his Cabinet, in the biggest reshuffle since the Socialists came to power in 1945.

The shift showed that the trade unionists had lost and the technocrats had won. Sir Stafford Cripps, who has just eclipsed Herbert Morrison as the No. 1 economic wizard, will have men of the “manager” rather than the “leader” type around him. Apparently, Attlee had decided that Britain’s workers would remain politically loyal to the Labor Party even if some of their own men were removed from key spots.

Manny Goes to War. No surprise was the main victim, Emanuel Shinwell, the bungling Fuel & Power Minister who last year gambled on a “green winter” and spectacularly lost. Since then most Britons have had less than no use for “Manny” Shinwell, but the Communists and the coal miners still love him. The Communist secretary of the Mineworkers’ Union, Arthur Horner, tried to prevent his removal. Said “li’l Arthur,” darkly: “I hope that some men who are popular with the miners and workers will not be sacrificed to please the Tories and Big Business.” But when he saw that Attlee’s hand was not to be stayed, Horner knuckled under: “We will work with Mr. Gaitskell [Shinwell’s successor] as we have done with Mr. Shinwell.”

Shinwell is chairman of the Labor Party, however, and Attlee did not leave him out in the cold entirely. He was made Secretary of State for War, which is not a Cabinet job and where high-level strategy and policy decisions will be made over his head. The red-tabbed generals are sure to dislike Manny, but last week this crack was going the rounds: “When he was at the Ministry of Fuel & Power, we had no fuel or power; now that he’s at the War Office perhaps we’ll have no war.”

Youth & Ability. The sort of Government technicians which Economic Boss Cripps wants and which Attlee is giving him is exemplified by three of the new men under Cripps. They are youngish men of education and proved ability, whose political views are secondary. One is Hugh Gaitskell, 41, the new Minister of Fuel & Power, a Winchester-Oxford product, a coolly effective parliamentarian who as Shinwell’s subordinate made a better showing than his chief.

Another is Harold Wilson, 31, the youngest President the Board of Trade has ever had.* A star student at Oxford and later a don, he is an expert on coal and a master statistician. The third is George Russell Strauss, 46, the new Supply Minister, who made his mark as the Transport Ministry’s parliamentary secretary by brilliant work on the transport nationalization bill.

Surveying the situation last week, the New Statesman & Nation aptly summed up: “The new Government, though much more ‘intellectual’ than its predecessor, is slightly to the right of it and psychologically considerably more remote from the labor movement. The country will probably be ruled more efficiently this winter than last; but there is a danger that the working class may come to think of this Government not as ‘us’ but as ‘them.'”

* William Ewart Gladstone got the job at 33, Winston Churchill at 34.