GREAT BRITAIN: Poor Performance

Winston Churchill’s cabinet employed everything but billboard posters to ballyhoo the show in advance. “We are going to have a two days’ debate,” announced the Prime Minister, “at which very grave and far-reaching matters affecting every branch of our national life . . .” will be discussed. The cabinet met for several days in emergency session; newsmen collected hint after hint that the Conservatives, after nine unhappy months back in power, had at last hammered out a tough and effective economic policy for Great Britain.

Last week the performance so portentously touted and so expectantly awaited opened in the House of Commons. In the last few days before summer adjournment, M.P.s clambered into their seats remembering Churchill’s recent warning that Britain’s economy reposed on “a treacherous trap door” (TIME, June 23).

Butler Up. First on stage was that rising star of British politics, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Richard A. (“Rab”) Butler. “A difficult time is not a time of crisis but a time of opportunity,” said he with his usual pallid impassivity. “And it is in this spirit that I shall tell the House of . .. . the radical approach we must make to the much longer and harder task of restoring once more our economic strength.”

M.P.s leaned forward to hear the “radical” proposals that would haul Britain from the quicksands of near-bankruptcy. But they heard none. Instead, Butler dryly recited the twice-told tale of how the Tories have somewhat staunched the drain on gold and dollar reserves—a story of more austerity and cuts in imports, a slight boost in coal production, and an end to cheap credit. Now, continued Butler, Britain’s $13 billion rearmament program, begun so bravely in early 1951 by the Socialists (with full Tory support), will assume under the Tories “a new pattern.” Defense production would be cut somewhat to allow more manufacture of dollar-earning export items.

Bevan Up. That brought rambunctious Rebel Aneurin Bevan, that old advocate of fewer arms, to his feet demanding to know just how much rearmament would be cut. “I am not poaching upon the ground which my right honorable friend, the Prime Minister, is to cover at length tomorrow,” retorted Butler. To the joy of the critics on the Opposition benches and the dismay of the performer’s friends on the government benches, it became clear that Rab Butler had really nothing new to say. The Laborites jeered and badgered him with questions plump and juicy as an overripe tomato. But this time, brickbats came also from the government’s side of the House.

Backbencher Up. “I beg the government,” said bouncy Backbencher Robert Boothby, who is a Tory star on TV political panels, “to stop talking about alerts and alarms and grave situations and trap doors and new presentations; and then, when the markets of the world have been shaken and everybody is in a state of tension and the House of Commons is assembled for a great economic debate . . . nothing very much happens. Send for us when you really have got something to say . . .”

Churchill Up. Dejectedly Rab Butler slumped offstage, embarrassed by his first pronounced failure in nine months on the boards of Parliament. Disillusioned but still expectant, the House reserved its final judgment until the second act, when the star, author and director of the show, the 20th-century Garrick of politics, would himself take the stage. Surely Winston Churchill had saved for himself something more exciting. “This afternoon,” suggested the London News Chronicle, “the Prime Minister must justify [his previous] words—or clothe himself in the mantle of King Lear:

‘I will do such things

What they are yet, I know not;

But they shall be

The terrors of the earth.'”

Garrick seemed old and tired when he entered, and the waiting Laborites figuratively fondled fresh sacks of old vegetables. Nye Bevan came in with a shabby brown briefcase, and was greeted by Tory protests that the bag violated an old

House rule.* “The ammunition contained in this case,” said Bevan with a smile, “is not deadly to their persons, but to their future prospects.” Good-naturedly he let it be taken away after salvaging his notes.

“I thought the Chancellor’s speech yesterday was somewhat ill-treated . . .” Churchill began. “I have helped him all I could.” The Laborites pounced on him with jeers and questions about Butler’s speech and demands of “Answer! Answer!” (pronounced onsah, onsah).

“I will not answer a question if I do not choose,” snapped Churchill. On the “new pattern” of rearmament, Churchill spoke words that were almost a steal from the lines spouted for months by Nye Bevan: “The defense programs must be kept within the limits of our economic strength.” Machinery, automobiles, armaments and other metal-using industries would have to be given a higher priority for export goods, and defense production would have to suffer. Well, how much?

Churchill Down. Leaning partly on security, the P.M. said in essence that the government’s stretchout of the original three-year defense program would amount to a cut of between a quarter and a third in original goals. Many of the armaments now scheduled would still be made, but for export to overseas customers rather than for Britain’s own defense buildup. “Armaments,” he explained, “are, in these uneasy days, bestsellers.”

Churchill’s supporters could hardly believe that this was all their leader had to say. His famous oratorical power showed only in faint flashes, usually when he flicked at the critics (“Standing so smiling and carefree at the dispatch box, as if [they] had no responsibility for the shocking and shameful state to which our finances were reduced during [their] tenure . . .”) or sniped like a Falstaffian schoolmaster at his hecklers.

Stoutly he stood on his early cries of alarm. “Tragic indeed,” concluded Winston Churchill, “is the spectacle of the might, majesty, dominion and power of the once magnificent and still considerable British Empire having to worry and wonder how we can pay our monthly bills . . . I am tortured by this thought . . .”

This time the rhetoric did not rouse. From the Opposition side came a roar: “Resign! Resign!” On that bitter note Winston Churchill sat down—heavily, and a little tragically. Although the Conservatives loyally voted to uphold the government, inside the party and even inside the cabinet, criticism of Churchill swelled and pressure increased to replace the aged (77) lion with someone else. No one, however, was quite ready to step forward.

Even the Laborites felt oddly sorry—a sentiment that could only seem vinegary to the man at whom it was directed. Said

Nye Bevan, in whom charity finds a slippery roost: “He has really been seized at this late hour with the seriousness of Britain’s economic situation . . . His difficulty is that he is trying to ignite a lot of wet flannel all around him.”

* A throwback to the days when Irish members were considered quite capable of smuggling a bomb or two on to the floor.