GREAT BRITAIN: Fundamental Quarrels

Opposition Leader Winston Churchill last week gave the Tory party the slogan for which it had been fumbling: “The People v. the Socialists.”

To the Conservatives’ Central Council he made the issue splendidly plain. Socialism now was not a radical specter with which to frighten commonsensical Britons at election time; it must be presented now as a bureaucratic barrier between Britons and the better life they wanted.

In tenebrous tones Churchill surveyed the Spartan boundaries of Labor’s promised land. “All enterprise, all initiative is baffled and fettered. The queues are longer, the faces are longer, the shelves are barer, the shops are emptier. . . . Whole spheres of beneficial activity are frozen rigid and numb because this Government had to prove their Socialist orthodoxy.”

Here & there throughout the speech was a scattering of Churchillian invective: “morbid and reactionary Socialists,” “hagridden by Socialist doctrinaries,” “bitter, cast-iron Socialist dogmas,” “the gloomy vultures of nationalization,” “the heavy-footed State.”

But in his summing up he rose to heights where no living orator can follow him: “I foresee with sorrow but without fear that in the next few years we shall come to fundamental quarrels in this country. It seems impossible to escape the fact that events are moving and will move towards the issue: ‘The People v. the Socialists.'”