Pasture Politics

A new series of government posters sprouted last week on British hoardings, on the walls of blitzed buildings and behind the bars of village pubs. The series portrayed "Our National Heritage" with pictures of historical heroes--always bracketed with a companion picture of Winston Churchill. Political observers saw a certain significance: a newly glamorized Conservative Party digging in at the sources of political power.

The new Toryism asks Britons to entrust their future, as they had entrusted their great past, to individualism and private enterprise. Last week Tory Oliver Lyttelton, onetime metals magnate and now Minister of Production, told the Aldershot Conservative Assn.: "The great periods of our history were nearly always associated with an outstanding individual and not with a political system. We think of Queen Elizabeth, and Sir Francis Drake, or Marlborough, Pitt and Nelson and of the Duke of Wellington; and it is on the ability to keep alive the spirit of adventure and to inject into public opinion new, fanciful and unorthodox ideas that the vigor of national life depends. Nothing could be more ghastly than a uniform cowlike public opinion which is left willing to browse on artificially fertilized fields and chew the cud of common pasture. . . ."

Tails Up. The Tories had something, and they knew it. Their tails were up, and they were romping all around the pasture. They had the bulk of Britain's private wealth. They controlled virtually all civilian war industries and Government boards. They had the ablest men in public life, ran the smoothest party organization. Now Winston Churchill could take a hero's modest bow for the victories in North Africa, and his Party shared the political rewards.

If errors and ineptitudes had been fatal, the Conservative Party would have died in 1939 and 1940. But the Tories survived and thrived. Early in 1942, when Socialist Sir Stafford Cripps emerged as the white hope of a new deal, the Tories took him into the Government and then swallowed him up. Now Sir Stafford was useful to them. Last week, as Minister of Aircraft Production, he took the slings and arrows for the Government's seizure of inefficient Short Brothers, Ltd. (Sunderland flying boats, Stirling bombers).

This arbitrary proceeding raised a rumpus in Britain, but the Government's reasons were sound, and the Tories turned the incident to their political advantage. In effect, the Government demonstrated that it was placing national interest above that of private enterprise, took the sting from recent indications that Tory M.P.s were not interested in social reforms.

Heads Down. The Labor Party is in humdrum contrast. It has only a few able men, a lukewarm, badly battered Socialist program. Labor's representation in the House consists mostly of ultraconservative unionists, of the type which long ago inspired the crack, "Commons is Labor's House of Lords."

When the war began, Labor joined the Liberals and Tories in a coalition Government. Now the Party is thoroughly enmeshed in the coalition web. Apparently, the Laborites are afraid to test their voting strength by ending the political truce which has left Britain without a general election since 1935.

Labor Party leaders look forward with little pleasure to a crucial Whitsuntide yearly conference (the second week in June). There is bound to be a squabble over the latest application of the Commu nist Party to affiliate, another over whether Labor's Government ministers should obey the War Cabinet or the Party's executive committee. Most appalling is the certainty of a fight to break the electoral truce. On that issue Politician Churchill has Labor groggy.

More than a broad vision of postwar plans had been included in Churchill's recent speech on world federation (TIME, March 29). Implied in that speech was a clear warning that Labor must maintain the truce until the armistice or be expelled from the Government, and thereafter must remain under Tory domination or challenge Churchill's war prestige at the polls.

Last week Churchill rubbed in his ad vantage when he told Parliament: "All those who are resolute to see the war through to a victorious conclusion should avail themselves of every occasion to mark disapproval of the truce breakers."

Rebels Up. The left-wing Independent Labor Party and the social-minded, anticapitalistic Common Wealth group are outside the three-party coalition, and in recent by-elections they have shown surprising strength even in onetime Tory strongholds. But Churchill and his Tories are not fazed. Last week Churchill adroitly commented that the rebels were clearing "no man's land" before the Laborites and Tories "set about each other again."

The independents are doing more than that; they are putting both major parties on the spot. Their theme is that Labor's leaders are stupid, that the Tories are intent on subtly sabotaging postwar reform. Their strength is in the blitz-born vows of the people for a "new and better England."

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