Labor's Bad Week

The smell of an election year was in the air, and in the House of Commons frisky politicians responded to the scent. Debates became more edged, remarks more personal. In a week of such infighting, the Labor Opposition had a bad time of it.

Back Talk. First, Labor's Hugh Gaitskell tried to turn Britain's recent financial settlement with Nasser into a formal censure of the 1956 Suez invasion, which he described as a "disastrous act of folly almost without parallel in our history." Nor was ailing Tory Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden alone to blame, he went on: "There were others involved, and they were not ill." Jabbing his finger at Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, Gaitskell cried: "I believe that the guilty men are sitting there on those benches. It is time that they were brought to trial."

Macmillan, about to leave for his talks with Eisenhower, was in a confident, combative mood. Previously he had been guardedly correct about Suez; now, to thundering Tory backbench cheers, he declared: "I was one of Sir Anthony Eden's main supporters in his Suez policy. I am proud of it." He was "surprised" that Gaitskell should bring up the subject: "If everybody were to see again those hysterical broadcasts of his, they would have a shock." Sarcastically he taunted: "The Opposition's chief idea in a difficulty is to run away from it. The ostrich and not the eagle should be their crest."

Then Macmillan turned on Nye Bevan, who, in becoming Labor's shadow Foreign Secretary, has left behind his old left-wing Bevanite crowd. As Bevan sat with face flaming, hands clenched, Macmillan pressed home the final scathing remark: "I feel sorry for him as he gropes about, abandoned by his old friends and colleagues--a shorn Samson surrounded by a bevy of prim and aging Delilahs." Labor's censure motion was defeated by a surprisingly large 70-vote margin.

Boomerang. Two days later Labor moved a vote of censure against the government's failure to "prevent the recent substantial and widespread rise in unemployment." With 600,000 jobless in Britain, this seemed a good issue. But Tory Labor Minister Iain Macleod was able to announce a drop in unemployment of 58,-ooo--the biggest decrease in any one month in twelve years. Said he: "The first seven years in opposition are always the most difficult. I cannot help it if every time the Opposition are asked to name their weapons, they pick boomerangs."

Still undaunted, the Socialists moved another censure, this time regretting the Tory government's failure to reach an earlier settlement of the Cyprus dispute. Nye Bevan twitted the Tories for dealing with Archbishop Makarios as they had done previously with the Indians and the Irish. "We said we could not 'shake hands with murder,' and then we did shake hands," said Bevan. "We did the same with Nkrumah. Honorable members opposite put him in jail." Came a cry from the Tory benches opposite: "You did!"

Bevan turned to his own bench, got whispered word from someone better informed that Labor indeed, and not the Tories, had jailed Ghana's Premier Nkrumah in 1950. Amid mocking laughter in which even Laborites joined, Bevan backed down: "All right, then, we shoved him in jail." Labor lost its motion by 47 votes.

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