Foreign News: Right in the Pink

On any night last week at half a dozen or more busy street corners in London, a passer-by could stop and hear an old-fashioned soapbox speech on politics. It was a new fashion of the Conservatives, who suddenly seemed to be under the influence of a big dose of triple-strength Benzedrine. They got a lift from a Gallup poll. It showed a Tory gain and a Labor loss in public popularity in the last year; they were now neck & neck, and if an election were held this week it might be either’s neck. Moreover, the street meetings semed to be going well. Tories ran into good-natured heckling, but the bitterness many a Conservative candidate experienced in the election campaigns two years ago was missing.

Besides pounding the working people with Tory ideas, the catch-as-catch-can corner speeches had another aim: to teach young Tory hopefuls how to speak the workingman’s language.

Speaking Labor’s language had become an approved major tenet of Tory doctrine. The Conservatives had a new statement of party policy to talk about. Their platform was a pamphlet called The Industrial Charter. It was 38 close-printed pages, some major sections of which closely resembled some of the political philosophies expounded in Keep Left, the recent pamphlet of Richard Crossman, ambitious leader of Labor radicals in the House of Commons.

Different & Diffident. The language of The Industrial Charter was mostly the work of 42-year-old David McAdam Eccles, a smooth-mannered M.P. for Chippenham, an up-comer among “progressive” Conservatives. Like Grossman, Eccles is Oxford-bred. By this week some Laborites were calling him “Colonel Blimp’s Dick Crossman.” The Tory and Laborite pamphlets were more remarkable for their similarities than for their differences. They agreed, in the main, that Britain’s economy should be run according to Government plan; both cried the need of one powerful Minister to run it.

The Industrial Charter opposed Socialist nationalization in principle, but was cagily diffident when it came down to cases. It agreed that coal and the Bank of England should remain nationalized; only on iron and steel was it flatly opposed to Government ownership. On controls, the main Tory target for many months, it was surprisingly cautious: “Some controls will have to be continued until abundance overtakes scarcity.”

To old-line Conservatives such stuff was dyed deeper than pink. But the Tory progressives had strong men in their camp. Able Richard Austen Butler, as chairman of the pamphlet-writing group, not only pulled together the suggestions of Eccles and others, but sold The Industrial Charter to Winston Churchill and the Tory “shadow cabinet.” It was Butler who expounded the pamphlet’s thesis at press conferences. Observers said Butler was the man who deserved most credit for the organizational side of the Tory revival.

Young Tories, who had long sought a faith to replace Britons’ lost belief in small c conservatism (TIME, April 21), perked up in confidence. Now that there was pink in the Right, they felt right in the pink for campaigning.