Cabinet Totters

Cabinet Totters

Like a mouse squeaking at an elephant, Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley last week gave Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald his worst scare of the year, caused the unstably balanced Labor Cabinet to wobble, totter.

To put the nub of the matter bluntly, Mr. MacDonald and Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden have been driven by overpowering political forces--perhaps by British public opinion itself--almost to abandon their first love: Socialism.

Sir Oswald Mosley, M. P. and his rich wife, also an M. P., are bright, ambitious young people, not over scrupulous. They are frankly out to grab the Prime Ministry for Sir Oswald when he is ten years older (he is now 33). At election times they are busy baby-kissers. And all the time they are busy spending where it will do the most political good the income from millions left to Lady Mosley by her grandfather, the late Chicago department store tycoon, Levi Zeigler Leiter. Last week Sir Oswald saw and fairly snapped up a chance to seize leadership of the disaffected, "pure Socialist" left wing of the Labor Party.

Rising in the House of Commons with an injured air, Snapper Oswald said that he had just felt obliged "as a Socialist" to resign his (minor) Cabinet post: Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He could no longer stomach the Government's "muddling methods" in dealing with Britain's great problem of the day: unemployment.

The House knew, continued Sir Oswald (surprising some of his listeners), the House must surely know that he had been called to advise the Government about unemployment relief. He had drafted a thoroughly Socialist plan--"the Mosley memorandum"--but, at a meeting presided over by Mr. Snowden, the Cabinet had turned this down. As dramatically as possible Sir Oswald proclaimed that this proved that Scot MacDonald would never adopt the true, the right, the Socialist course, the course which the Labor Party (technically Socialist) had a right to demand. Therefore, he had resigned. Whatever the future might hold he and the true Socialists of the party would stand together on giving 25 shillings a week to all workers over 60, raising the school age by a year, a state fund to help industry, a central board to buy food and raw material not obtainable in England.

"Private Party." As sometimes happens, the mouse's squeak stampeded the elephants. Mr. MacDonald was reported to have offered Sir Oswald the Ministry of Mines to shut him up, but he and Lady Mosley only opened wider.

The future lay largely in a debate posted for the following week, on the politically relevant, but imperially trivial matter of reducing Mr. J. H. Thomas' salary. But the question made Premier MacDonald queazy. Two former premiers were to heckle him--Conservative Stanley Baldwin leading the attack, Liberal David Lloyd George reverberating behind, and ambitious Sir Oswald Hooting in consonance.

Shrewd, the Mosley outburst struck responsive chords in the Labor Party rank and file. At least 50 thoroughly Socialist M. P.'s began to talk as though they would support Sir Oswald. He prepared a motion (practically a vote of censure against Messrs. MacDonald and Snowden) for submission to a "private Party meeting" of all Labor M. P.'s. There was talk-- and not loose talk either--that the Government's slim majority in the House of Commons had been whittled down to the snapping point.

Leaders Quarrel. What made the mouse-squeak truly terrifying to Elephant MacDonald was a quarrel he had had earlier in the week with David Lloyd George. The bantamweight Liberal leader controls the greater part of a batch of votes on which the life of the Cabinet depends.* He demanded that Mr. MacDonald put through a bill giving the Liberal Party representation in parliament proportional to the number of Liberal votes at the next election./- Scot MacDonald said no to the Welshman. Mr. Lloyd George threatened his worst. At just this moment the mouse squeaked.

Still greater is the paradox that Labor derived 289 M. P.'s from 8,331,480 ballots whereas a slightly larger number of Conservative ballots (8,591,052) returned a slightly smaller number of Conservative M. P.'s (260).

Such results are due to the fact that a Labor M. P. may win his seat by 10,000 votes against a Liberal with 6,000 and a Conservative with 9,000. In this case the 15,000 votes cast for other candidates than the man who won with 10,000 are simply wasted. In efficient Germany, on the contrary, each "surplus vote'' is totalled up to the credit of the party for which it is cast. Then if the German Socialist Party, for example, has several million such votes to its credit, the party chiefs are allowed to name and send to the Reichstag a number of deputies proportional to this surplus. Thus, in a German election, "every vote counts."**

House Master Henderson. At the meeting of 239 Labor M. P.'s to debate Sir Oswald's motion against leaders MacDonald and Snowden, they were defended by jovial "Uncle Arthur" Henderson, Foreign Minister and a tolerably good Socialist.

Spitfire speeches by Sir Oswald and his followers made "Uncle Arthur" glower for once. Jumping into the fray he threatened, in the Prime Minister's name, that the Cabinet would resign if the party censured Mr. MacDonald. Potent, this threat sobered many of the malcontents. Several begged Sir Oswald to withdraw his motion. White-lipped, encouraged by Lady Mosley's confident smile, he stood his ground, demanded a vote.

Whatever the Bright Young Couple expected, they were snowed under 210 to 29.

But the 29 is a startling figure. Heretofore 15 has been the maximum number of Labor rebel votes cast against Mr. MacDonald. Mouse Mosley's squeak nearly doubled, last week, the intraparty opposition to Scot MacDonald. If the Prime Minister and Mr. Lloyd George had continued their quarrel, the 29 votes would have been enough to more than wreck the Cabinet, but rumors flew that the Liberal leader--changeable as a weathercock-- had veered around again to Mr. MacDonald's aid, possibly seduced by some secret political trade unrevealed last week.

* Lately several Liberal M. P.'s have refused to vote as ordered by Leader Lloyd George.

/- Plain as a pikestaff is the fact that Britain's electoral system should some soon day be revised. Only 58 Liberal M. P.'s were returned at the last election by 5,257,536 Liberal votes. But the two larger parties, Labor and Conservative each obtained more than four times more M. P.'s than the Liberals, though they each received less than twice as many votes as were cast for Liberal candidates.

** Just before the last British election Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley were in Berlin, where they lavishly entertained the late, great Foreign Minister Stresemann and his vivacious wife. After talking with them, Frau Stresemann, who knows little (and does not claim to know anything) of British politics, confided to a German friend that she 'quite hoped" dear Lady Mosley's husband was going to be made Prime Minister then and there instead of plebian Mr. MacDonald.

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