The Guillotine

Seventy years ago, Lord Randolph Churchill delivered a stinging attack on the use of cloture to cut short debate in Britain's Parliament. "The cloture is," said he as quoted in a biography written by his son, "absolutely foreign to all our principles." Last week in the House of Commons, Lord Randolph's son imposed cloture's twin brother, a rarely used debate-halting procedure called "the guillotine."

So windy and long were Labor's objections to the Tory proposal to charge modest fees for Labor's pet socialized medicine that in three days only nine lines of the bill had been dealt with by the House.

"Brutal Motion." Prime Minister Churchill (decked out in a new white hearing aid after years of stubbornly defying electronic progress), reluctantly but firmly gave the signal. Out rolled the guillotine, which sets a time limit on debate of each stage of a bill. "We accepted office from his Late Majesty with the firm intention of governing," announced House Leader Harry Crookshank.

Through the night, for 12 1/2 hours, the debate on the guillotine motion went on, with M.P.s catching catnaps in the library. "A brutal motion," cried Labor Strategist Herbert Morrison. "What a reputation the Conservative Party are giving Great Britain abroad," stormed Rebel Aneurin Bevan, "when they say that . . . England can only be held together by making charges on abdominal belts!"

To Crookshank's rescue came Foreign

Secretary Anthony Eden, back in his old parliamentary form after what seemed a long slump. Crisp yet relaxed, Eden mimicked Labor's Herbert Morrison with a skill that Eden's country-house friends sometimes see, but fellow M.P.s rarely do. By the time he had finished his rollicking imitation of Morrison, in 1948, demanding and getting the guillotine to push through the nationalization of steel, the fight was over. At 5:45 a.m., the guillotine motion was adopted.

After Two Years? Thus, with smoky partisan hostility, the House of Commons last week marked a calendar occasion: it was just six months since the Conservatives' return to power in Britain. Winston Churchill had said on taking office that his regime could not be fairly judged for at least three years, but Britons in local elections were making their provisional judgments earlier--and adversely. Many Tories now concede that if an election were held tomorrow, Labor would probably win. The notion that captured some Tories in the first flush of election victory, that they could make things better in a hurry merely by being better administrators, is now generally discredited.

The first six months have made 49-year-old Chancellor of the Exchequer Richard Austen ("Rab") Butler, the "young Turk of Toryism," the fastest-growing man in the Conservative Party. His budget, a brave one, shapes up already as the outstanding success of the half-year. The drain on Britain's lifeblood, the dollar reserves, was slowed and the gap between dollars spent and dollars earned was closed last month to $71 million, chiefly as a result of Butler measures.

As Butler's star rises, that of Eden's, the party dauphin, falls. Should Churchill step aside soon, the betting is that Eden would succeed him--but if Churchill stays on for two years, Rab Butler might well be his heir. Churchill is muttering that he might retire after Queen Elizabeth's coronation, which this week was set for June 2, 1953. Churchill himself has had some downs as well as ups. Some Tories grumble that he has been too arbitrary and too heedless of getting the public behind him. Yet he is still capable of rising to occasions; no one exceeds his best.

Erratically led, beset by punishing opposition in the House (they have weathered 105 divisions), the Tories after six months in office are battered but not beaten. "I am convinced this government cannot last for very long," said Labor Leader Clement Attlee last week. But Labor itself, riven by Bevanite irresponsibles, is far less fit to govern. Tories counted on time, and the workings of Butler's economic policies, to pull them through.

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