Rab the Reformer

"I see now," said Britain's Home Secretary and Lord Privy Seal, "that my destiny lies in the field of social reform--and I am happy in it." To those who know the cool and acid-tongued Richard Austen Butler well, the philosophic tone of the first part of that remark must have seemed odd; Rab Butler has shown not the slightest sign that he has given up hope of one day living at 10 Downing Street. But no one could have taken issue with the straightness of the second part. Probably not since Wilberforce has Britain had a more dedicated reformer, and last week, from the leftist New Statesman ("Here it is at last--and no anticlimax either") to the conservative Economist ("The Home Office deserves unstinting congratulations"), the press was singing his praises. Reason: Rab Butler's long-awaited White Paper on the condition of Britain's major prisons.

Blow Them Up. Britain's prisons have for years made humanitarians blush, but somehow Parliament has never got around to doing much about them. What Herbert Morrison said of Dartmoor--"The only thing to do with Dartmoor is to blow it up"--could be said about Pentonville, Wandsworth, Brixton, Wormwood Scrubs and just about all the others. Many are more than a century old, built for treadmill labor and solitary confinement. Bleak Dartmoor itself was. built in 1808 for French prisoners of war, has changed little since the War of 1812 when it held 2,000 captive American seamen.

There is a shortage of just about everything--guards, doctors, books, toilets. Morning visitors can see the basins of slimy water in which the prisoners wash first themselves and then their forks, knives and plates. The floors of their cells are often of the original chill flagstone; their mattresses are made of coarse coconut fiber; more often than not, their daylight filters in through heavily barred fortress windows eight feet up. Aside from chapel, most prisons have no assembly halls, and today more than 6,000 men sleep three to a room in cells originally intended for solitary confinement. What Rab Butler is after is nothing less than a head-to-toe overhaul of the whole penal system.

A Formidable Quartet. Though he comes from a long line of reformers (his father was a top British civil servant in India), Butler fell in with the family tradition quite unintentionally. His rise to power in the Conservative Party was dogged by the memory of 1939, when, at the age of 36, it was his duty to defend the Munich disaster in the House of Commons (the Foreign Secretary, Halifax, was in the House of Lords). The formidable quartet of Tories who opposed Munich--Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Lord Salisbury--never really made common cause with him. Prime Minister Churchill tucked him away in what was to become the Ministry of Education. There he hammered through the Education Act of 1944 with the slogan, "Education is the spearhead of social reform," giving all British children for the first time the assurance of education up to the age of 16.

Though no friend of the welfare state ("Socialism has so battened down the hatches that the passengers have forgotten how to breathe"), he was the philosopher of more enlightened conservatism, which he developed in a series of able party pamphlets. He threw his support behind social security, gave needed protection to individuals facing tribunals, fought for aliens' right to live permanently in Britain, has been the champion of an up-to-date censorship law. After Suez, when Harold Macmillan was chosen instead of him to succeed Eden at 10 Downing Street, Butler remarked: "Well, it is something to have been almost Prime Minister." In the long run, Rab Butler seems destined to be remembered for a good deal more than that.

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