Steady Tide

Churchill's blockbuster, admitted London's leftist New Statesman and Nation, "was a very carefully placed bomb whose crater opened precisely between Mr. Morrison and his followers." The political future of Herbert Morrison, long the No. 2 man in Labor councils, was wounded badly, perhaps mortally. Clement Attlee had been shown up as a man who kept embarrassing secrets from many of his own political team.

But 54-year-old Nye Bevan walked out of the smoke & brimstone a bigger, more powerful man than when the battle started. He and his left-wingers, frankly anxious to jettison Britain's bipartisanship in foreign policy, had forced the Attlee leadership into battle with Churchill. When the rout came, it was Bevan who stepped into the breach.

Next day, at a doleful post-mortem meeting of Labor's executive committee, Bevan generously refrained from mentioning the debacle in Commons, gently persuaded the party to set up a subcommittee to re-examine Labor's position on foreign policy. Bevan and two of his left-wing followers were named to it; Herbert Morrison was pointedly not.

Nye Bevan may often have the streets with him, but inside the Labor Party he runs smack into the powerful antipathy of the conservative Trades Union Congress and Cooperative Union. Right now the trades unions are deeply concerned by Communist attempts to exploit workers' unrest over the sacrifices of rearmament. Last week coal miners in Tonypandy, in Nye Bevan's bailiwick of South Wales, called a mass demonstration against the government and appealed to Bevan to take part. Bevan saw his chance to ingratiate himself with conservatives in his own party. "I refuse," said he, "to partake in a campaign that is Communist-inspired and that threatens to disrupt the unity of the trade union movement."

All in all, it was quite a week for Nye Bevan. He was much too shrewd to try now to wrest party control from Attlee, Morrison & Co.: why split the party when things are going his way? "One wave may shudder the cliff," explained a Bevan strategist, "but it's the steady tide that wears it away."

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