Coffee Cure

The House "Kitchen Committee" was back from France with orders for postwar wines and promises of better food. The sacrosanct smoking room had a new carpet, its lackeys new black uniforms with green lapel pipings. A new room was open where M.P.s--who sometimes have had to dictate to secretaries on hall benches--could transact their business. Even the mace, symbol of authority, had been regilded.

Thus, amid new comforts, Britain's M.P.s, tanned and bright-eyed from a two-month recess, last week rolled up their sleeves for the fagend of the 1946 parliamentary session.

But the new comforts had solved neither Labor nor Tory problems. Energetic House Leader Herbert Morrison had his hands full with once-shy Labor left-wingers who had learned procedural ropes, were now ready to take the spotlight. They wasted no time in embarrassing one of their own ministers. When slim, tense Fred Bellenger made his first utterance in the House as War Minister, they pounced on him with "shocked surprise" at the two-year sentences for mutiny passed on 243 paratroopers in Malaya. Because of "intolerable" living conditions, the men, all privates, had refused to stand parade. One young paratrooper requested a divorce because "I am a criminal now." His sparky 20-year-old wife promptly wrote back "No, no, no, I love you too much," presented the Government with a 35,000-signature petition protesting the sentences. Later the sentences were invalidated.

The Morrison Shift. The Tories looked wan and depressed. After the echoes of senior Party Leader Winston Churchill's voice had died away at their Blackpool conference (TIME, Oct. 14), little solid matter was left. With Conservative Party policy only a. vague outline, the Tories could do little but peck pettishly at Herbert Morrison for using a Government automobile on a vacation trip.

Against Labor's new rotation shift system, the Tories (outnumbered 394 to 190) could put up nothing but strong black coffee and sheer physical stamina.

Labor had split its forces into three groups, all of which would remain on the floor until 10 p.m. After that hour, two groups would remain to ensure a working majority, while the third group retired to rest for next day's late session.

At week's end, Parliament was hip-deep in a session in which Prime Minister Clement Attlee's Labor Government would try to complete nationalization already started (steel, civil aviation, health, etc.), reveal its long-term measures for permanent socialization.

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