1941 Committee

No one, least of all the average Briton, questions that a British victory in World War II would mean a very "new order" in the British Empire and quite possibly in the world. Herbert George Wells & Co., Clarence ("Union Now") Streit, Winston Churchill, Lord Halifax and the Anglican Church have all had their say about Britain's war and peace aims. Last week in London, when Britain's most apparent war aim was to keep from getting licked, another group spoke up.

In a press-released "commentary" a self-appointed brain trust of liberal intellectuals, calling themselves the 1941 Committee, handed out stinging criticism to the British Government, suggested a broad program of war and peace aims. Signed by Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells, Kingsley Martin, veteran editor of the liberal New Statesman, and J. B. Priestley, the "commentary" suggested that Britain must "win the peace" as well as the war, should start right away. Excerpts:

"The recently announced Government scheme for the concentration of industry s an example of a now-familiar process. . . A scheme is improvised which drives out the small men, secures the position of the big monopolists and temporarily at least of the large trade unions, while providing no safeguards for the mass workers. ... No attempt has been made to link this scheme . . . with any national wage system or to fit it into a general economic plan for the community.

"When big industrial magnates are drawn from their private firms to take over departments of State, the interests of these firms are not necessarily subordinated to the interests of the nation.

"The press is largely in the hands of a few monopolists and tends to go with the Government and with the big advertisers.

"In the absence of an organized opposition, in the conditions of the party truce and with no real elections taking place, the danger is that Parliament ceases to be representative . . . and democratic life dies. It is perhaps worth remembering that such developments were among the main causes of the fall of France.

"[Mr. Churchill's] leadership must now be backed up by adequate policies. Comprehensive, coherent, imaginative measures are needed."

As a starter toward "winning the war and winning the peace" the Committee suggested a sweeping but somewhat vague program: 1) organizing all opposition to the Nazis and Fascists; 2) open declaration of Britain's war and peace aims; 3) giving a concrete demonstration of what Britain is fighting for by starting to rebuild her social system at once.

No cluster of gentle and disregardable nuts is the 1941 committee. Chairman Priestley, before the war a writer of folksy reveries like The Good Companions, has turned into a national oracle. No less than 40% of Britain's 14,000,000 radio listeners give him ear when he discusses each Sunday night the problems before the Empire.

The Committee first got together last year as a dinner-discussion group in a Soho restaurant. Last December rich Publisher Edward George Warris Hulton (Picture Post, Lilliput, Housewife) became interested, invited the same group and others to do their talking in his ritzy dining room. Present headquarters is a house on a Blitzed Mayfair street, whose chief furnishing is a round table on which Author Priestley likes to squat, puff his corncob pipe, pontificate.

Byword of the 1941 Committee: "The people must be worthy of victory; the peace must be worthy of the people."

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