TEE TABLET, January 27fA, 1951

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 197, No. 5775

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, JANUARY 27th, 1951

SIXPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

THE OTHER ASIATICS The Mobilisation of Non-Communist Asia INQUEST ON GROUNDNUTS A Plan to “ Transform Nature.” By Jorian Jenks A ROME LETTER A MADRID LETTER The South African Hierarchy Frustrated Recovery

FORMOSA BETWEEN THE POWERS Red China’s Price for Peace. By Wilfred Ryder

PARISIAN HURLY-BURLY LAST OF THE ESSAYISTS

By Peter Watts

By J . B . Morton

THE DUTY OF PARLIAMENT T HERE is a saying that the Englishman stands more firmly in his shoes than any other man, and there is a national pride in phlegmatic imperturbability reflected in a distaste for gestures and shouting, and a love o f understatement. These can be good things, but over and over again in our history we have paid very heavily for taking things too lightly, assuming too readily that all will tu rn out well, and that we need not put ourselves out. For every war we have been habitually and as a matter o f course grossly underprepared, even for small wars like the Crimean and Boer Wars, as well as for the big struggles, first with French and then with German Imperialism. Living on an island bred a habit o f self-confidence, and the island provided a protection which is today very much lessened.

movement. He cannot evolve, as French Socialists like Briand and Millerand did so easily when they reached national and international statesmanship. This is partly due to a greater sincerity ; but it is a crippling handicap to a man charged with national leadership that he has the soul of the party man. It is particularly serious at a time when on the mainland of Europe so many eyes have been turned, and have been turned in vain, to London since 1945. General Eisenhower has made his tour holding out his bowl like Belisarius, and receiving pitiful contributions and promises. He goes back to America having been told, in effect, in capital after capital, that the general attitude of European electorates is that first they will protect their standard of living and then they will protect their lives. What is Soviet Strategy

This week Parliament has reassembled with a trivial enough opening agenda, but with an overriding duty to make good some o f the international inadequacy with which His Majesty’s present Ministers are so plentifully endowed. Mr. Attlee meets Parliament after a very slight rearrangement of his Ministry. One more of the key ministries for defence and rearmament, the Ministry o f Labour, is transferred, like the Ministry of Defence, to a representative of the miners. The Ministers of Defence, War and Labour are an incongruous group to be wielding these powers at this juncture, and if they are viewed in terms o f their own past histories and political enthusiasms they are not happy or reassuring choices. But looked at, as Mr. Attlee no doubt does look at them, as potential dissidents and rebels capable of opposing on platforms and in Left-Wing publications the whole foreign policy of the Government, it has been an adroit move to give them big offices and harness them to the policy. Mr. Shinwell and Mr. Bevan both have advantages, precisely because they have been on the Left o f the Party, when they have to meet the subversive and corrosive tactics o f the Communists who, open or concealed, still infect the Trade Union movement as a legacy from the ’thirties and early ’forties, which were so propitious for them.

Even if their tenure of these offices is short, because the country is increasingly ripe for a change of Government, it will be much that they will have accepted responsibility for the rearmament policy. I t could even be open to Mr. Bevan, as it was to Mr. Lloyd George thirty-five years ago, to re-orientate himself, and to supply the full-blooded and resolute declarations o f policy which the Prime Minister and his senior colleagues seem inhibited from even trying to supply. The truth about Mr. Attlee is that he only really warms up and kindles any sort of fire when it is a question of Socialism among his own people at an East End Party reunion. Then he recovers for a moment the enthusiasm which carried him along while Socialism was still a minor

But other meetings have been going on in Eastern Europe. The Figaro, which is not at all an irresponsible paper and has often had very good intelligence from the East, published on Monday what it announced as a report of a recent Cominform conference to brief the leaders of the Communist parties on the strategic plans of the Soviet Union, with which they have to co-operate. According to this report, France and Italy are to be left alone at first, for the clear and cogent reason that if Britain and Spain are reduced and rendered impossible as bases for the Americans, France and Italy will make no resistance on their own. The Soviet strategists have long considered and taken to heart that it was Hitler’s capital error to neglect the British Isles, and it proved his undoing. The Soviet Union will not make that mistake, and possesses much more formidable aerial weapons to employ against this island, to devastate the ports and the industrial cities. Yet so far, only the lonely voice o f Lord Vansittart has asked the Government if it takes into its calculations the possibilities not merely o f aerial attack but of airborne and parachute landings. According to the Figaro report, the rearmament of Western Germany is to be prevented at all costs and by any temporary alliances and manœuvres, because a rearmed Germany would interpose a barrier to the swift occupation of the North Sea coast, as the base from which the campaign against Great Britain would be launched. This view, that Britain would be attacked first, is shared by General Student, o f the war-time Luftwaffe. To the Soviet strategists, with their large maps of the great land mass on which the whole of Europe looks no more than the Balkan Peninsula, the distance is-not a big one either to the island o f Britain or to the peninsula o f Spain. But the whole operation becomes a most hazardous gamble in proportion as Great Britain or Spain are alert and equipped to meet invaders.

From France the latest reports are that M. Pleven has