GREAT BRITAIN: Not So Badly

Parliament convened last week, but with out the pomp of untroubled times. There was no royal coach, no scarlet-clad outriders for vanguard, no cheering crowds along St. James’s Park. George VI and Queen Elizabeth drove from Buckingham to the Houses of Parliament in an automobile, quickly and almost unnoticed. There were no royal robes. The King wore the blue of an admiral, the Queen wore a royal purple street ensemble. The peers were in morning coats or uniforms and peeresses were not even present.

The King, with the Queen’s hand in his, led her to the throne, and, sitting on the right hand of the throne, not putting on his crown, he intoned: “My Lords, pray be seated.” The simplicity was no mere affectation of wartime. It was symptomatic of the most crucial week Britain has experienced yet, with the Luftwaffe smashing harder than ever at the islands, with the Empire fully and desperately engaged from Nova Scotia to the Nile. Indeed, Britain’s plight was so grave that while in the U. S. dozens of agents and agencies worked for more & more aid to Britain, in London censors forbade correspondents to report just how terribly necessary that aid was.

The King was serious—and not merely with the habitual gravity of a man with a speech impediment—as he laboriously read a four-minute Speech from the Throne instructing the legislators:

“Members of the House of Commons. You will be asked to make further financial provision for the conduct of the war.

“Mv Lords and members of the House of Commons: Measures will be submitted to you for compensating those whose home or business property has, at any time since the outbreak of hostilities, been destroyed or damaged by enemy attack, and for extending insurance against the risk of such damage in all forms of movable property which are not at present protected.”

After the King the Prime Minister spoke. He was confident and proud, but grimly so. His peroration, usual repository of highest rhetoric and hope, held forth cheer only in the distant future and only if distant friends gave great help:

“We have a long road to go and I have never concealed from the nation or from the House the darker side of our dangers and burdens. But it is in adversity that the British qualities shine brightest. It is under these extraordinary tests that the character of our slowly wrought institutions reveals its latent and invincible strength. Up to the present this war has been waged between a fully armed Germany and a quarter-or half-armed British Empire. We have not done so badly.

“I look forward with confidence and hope to the time when we ourselves shall be as well armed as our antagonist, and beyond that, if need be, I look to the time when the arsenals, training grounds and science of the New World and the Empire will give us that material superiority which, added to the loyalty of constant hearts, will surely bring victory and deliverance to mankind.”

Britain’s institutions have been put to their most searching test in the past month by intensified bombings and tightened counter-blockade. Responsible editors and statesmen alike spoke out with stark frankness, and what they spoke was not altogether cheering.

> As he landed in Manhattan on his way back to Washington, British Ambassador Lord Lothian gave a pessimistic interview on the state of Britain’s finances and the need for U. S. help.

> The London Evening Standard’s Editor Frank Owen wrote: “The vital question we have to face is: are we beating the enemy at the lathe? For here, and not where the brave evzone highlanders charge the Alpini with the bayonet, is the real battle of cold steel. . . .”

> Once more pressure was put on to wring from the war crisis more social gains. Wrote the editors of New Statesman and Nation: “People are again asking: ‘Where do we go from here?’. . . You can’t ask democracy to fight for 1932 or 1937 or 1938. You can’t point to 3,000,000 unemployed, to . . . holocausts and to dismantled shipyards, and call that the democratic way of life. . . . Their function should be to use this situation in which employers themselves realize the need of far-reaching change for the benefit of the common man. . . . They have in this war a unique opportunity. Where do our leaders stand? In particular, where do the Labor leaders stand? . . . Does Mr. Bevin in fact ever meet Mr. Attlee and Mr. Greenwood to discuss the concerted measures needed in the transition to socialism during the war?”

> Minister of Labor Ernest Bevin answered personally and on behalf of other Labor leaders with a speech before the London Rotary Club: “After the last war there was a failure to recognize that it was largely, as indeed this one is, a great civil war, which must determine whether we are to be ruled from the top or must have government responsible to the people. . . . I want to give you the new motive for industry and for life. I suggest that at the end of this war, and indeed during the war, we accept social security as the main motive of all our national life.”

Next day the London Daily Herald’s Hannen Swaffer commented on the reception of these words by the brass-hat audience: “Looking round at the great gathering and its receptiveness yesterday, it was forced on me how millions of people, formerly comfortable and well fed, are now blundering towards a new conception of life and its meaning. . . . The fact that they could yesterday applaud such a speech was in itself a comment on the change now going on in men’s minds. For the implications of it were obvious.”

Britain’s slowly wrought institutions, as well as its thoughtful citizenry, were also catching it in this war.