"Shame the Devlin"

Only a week remained before Parlia-rrfent would adjourn for the summer, and according to the rules Her Majesty's loyal Opposition had the right to choose the issues to be debated. The decision was an easy one: nowhere was the government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in deeper trouble than in its Africa policy.

On top of the scandal over Kenya's Hola camps, where eleven African prisoners had been beaten to death by guards, had come the Devlin report (TIME, Aug. 3) calling the British protectorate of Nyasaland a "police state" and challenging the Colonial Office's need to avert an African "massacre" of white settlers that never took place. There were editorial outcries that Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd should resign; his office had been discredited by the very commission it had appointed, headed by a British high-court justice and including on its staff Lord Montgomery's wartime Chief of Intelligence. The commission had been hailed last March by Lennox-Boyd as "expert impartial people with judicial experience, administrative experience, and African experience."

"Subhuman Individuals." Arms folded and feet on table, Lennox-Boyd stared stonily ahead in the House of Commons, as the Opposition charged the government with condoning lynch law in Africa by refusing to accept responsibility for the Hola murders. He was not helped much by a volunteered defense from a Tory backbencher that the African victims were "desperate and subhuman individuals." Next day came the Devlin debate.

True enough, said Attorney General Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, leading off for the government, the Devlin commission had found no reliable evidence that a "massacre" was about to take place. But then, said the Attorney General, the Colonial Secretary, in explaining to the House what had gone on in Nyasaland, had used the word "massacre" only once. "Apparently," snorted Labor's Colonial Expert James Callaghan, "if the Right Honorable Gentleman says it once, we are not to take him seriously."

"The Squalid One." Winding up for the Opposition, Aneurin Bevan lashed out at the whole idea of forcing Nyasaland into a permanent federation with apartheid-minded Southern Rhodesia, and quoted some 1957 rhetoric by the Federation's Prime Minister Sir Roy Welen-sky to show what would happen if Britain tried to stand in Rhodesia's way. Sir Roy had said "I personally would never be prepared to accept that Rhodesians have less guts than the American colonists." Since the government had jailed Nyasa-land's African leader, Dr. Hastings Banda, Bevan challenged Lennox-Boyd "to mention anything that Dr. Banda has said which is more provocative than that." More solemnly, Bevan continued: "We are really trying to decide how to solve a problem which, if it is not solved, will continue to bleed us for generations." And then, in a peroration that was only a sad echo of the old Nye, Bevan concluded: "This is the worst Parliament I have been in. Some Parliaments have been called 'Long Parliaments.' Some have been called 'Rump Parliaments.' But this will be known by history as the squalid one."

Unwinding his long legs, lanky (6 ft. 6 in.) Lennox-Boyd seemed even more self-assured than usual. "I do not believe that this will go down as a squalid Parliament," he said, and proceeded to tick off as Colonial Office accomplishments the -independence of Ghana and the Malayan Federation, the coming independence of Nigeria and the West Indies. Coolly eyeing Bevan, Lennox-Boyd said he was prepared to match this against any record Parliament might make in the future, "if ever, which is most unlikely, the desiccated calculating machine on his right [Opposition Leader Hugh Gaitskell] formed an administration."

On this low level of debate, a vote was taken. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had his automatic Tory majority and won by a vote of 317 to 254. It was an election year, and Macmillan was going to neither scuttle Lennox-Boyd nor admit to any failure.

There was no sign that this attitude would cost the Tories many votes. The polls show them out front, and Labor will probably gain no mileage in Britain by standing up for the Africans against the white settlers in Africa.

Unfortunately for the British government, a House of Commons vote would not be the final determination of the Tightness of the Tory course. Negro and Asian delegates, anxiously following the debate from the galleries, were dismayed by the government's bland rejection of an impartial judicial commission: Was this the noble British justice they had been taught to respect? The Devlin commission had cleared Dr. Banda of inciting violence; regardless, said Lennox-Boyd, Dr. Banda and some 500 others would still be held in jail.

Even London's Conservative and independent press had misgivings about so rigid a course. Said the Economist in one of its sharpest attacks on the government to date: the Devlin report "was testimony to British justice and fair play. It could even have been regarded as a feather in the cap of the government that set [it] up. Instead, the government's response has been roughly, 'Tell the truth and shame the Devlin.' Politics has overridden the appearance of detached justice. Mr. Macmillan has involved the whole credit of himself and his government."

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