Labor Faces the Future

Britain's Labor Party met in annual convention this week. Behind it lay a record of namby-pamby compromises and do-nothing policies. Ahead was a challenge for postwar leadership from the newly glamorized Conservative party of Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden. No call for a jousting match was Labor's first vote: 2,000,243-to-274,000 against breaking the electoral truce -- thereby pledging Labor to support Conservative by-election candidates in all districts won by Conservatives in the last (1935) general election.

This challenge refused, the party turned to another of the most important items on its agenda: the election of a treasurer, who, in effect, becomes the party leader. The candidate most favored in preconvention forecasts was Churchill-admiring Minister of Home Security Herbert Morrison. His leading opponent, who showed surprising strength as delegates convened: brilliant, erratic Arthur Greenwood, former member of the War Cabinet.

Facts to be Faced. To set the convention's stage, vinegary Labor M. P. Aneurin Bevan wrote an open letter in his weekly Tribune "To Any Labor Delegate":

"The Labor Party . . . articulates through its industrial and political activities the aspirations and traditions of the ordinary people of Britain. . . . There is nothing more damaging to democratic politics than to talk big and then act small. Labor has been doing that now for many years and the result is cynical contempt among large numbers of workers."

Herbert Morrison, who has a way with words, seemed to agree with Bevan, seemed prepared to give Laborites the leadership they have so long lacked. Said he : "For us it is leadership or decay. . . . [Membership] figures show the absolute necessity for our Party, if it wishes to get its policies carried out, to gain the support of great numbers outside its own ranks. . . . This will not be done by reiterating the platitudes of the Party meeting hall. ... It is not enough to get up and thump the table and talk about the socialization of all the means of production, distribution and exchange. I have done my share of that in my time; you could always count on a cheer of some sort. But it doesn't begin to get near the real problem of how to act and when. . .

"Let this fact be faced: the other Parties are not so far behind as they were. . . . We want a policy of full employment. . . . This country, patient, reasonable, politically mature, ready to compromise though it may be, will not again be patient with the miserable spectacle of dole-fed millions eating out their hearts and wasting their lives on the street corners."

Predictable Future. These truths were equally known to Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden; and Churchill and Eden seemed equally as ready as Morrison to face them and act accordingly. The immediate home-front political trend within the United Kingdom, therefore, seemed predictable: Churchill, Eden and the Labor Party will continue their coalition government until the war is won, then Labor will either challenge Churchill's Conservatives for state power, or demand that a Laborite step up to lead a peacetime coalition government of Conservatives and Laborites.

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