T H E T A B L E T , November 3rd, 1951

THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 198, No. 5815

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, NOVEMBER 3rd, 1951

NINEPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

MR. EDEN’S OPPORTUNITY The Need for Anglo-American Solidarity in Asia

ISLAM IN FERMENT The Religious Background to Political Excesses

TOO OLD AT SIXTY-FIVE? THE ELECTION IN SCOTLAND

By Geoffrey Lesson

By Frank Macmillan

THE CISTERCIAN REVIVAL THE MEMORY OF MORE

By Bruno S . James

By A . C. Southern

THE FAITH OF A CONTINENT

By Edward Sarmiento

Government is dependent on the electorate’s understanding, and the whole election campaign discourages much optimism about what can. be done with the knowledge that it will be understood and approved. In Office Rather than in Power

THE CONSERVATIVE DILEMMA T HE nature of the Conservative dilemma is this, that what is good politics is bad economics, and what is good economics is bad politics. Mr. Attlee and his colleagues never had any hesitation ; they sacrificed economics to politics, and hoped for the best. The great memorial and legacy of their six and a half years is the unclosed and widening trade gap of six to seven hundred million pounds. This, after six years for recovery in good conditions and with help from America worth almost a year’s free imports, is its own condemnation of a profligate regime. It is a vain mockery to tell the artisan population that the Government, through social service, is now giving each household some 33s. a week to help the family budget, if the trading position is unsound, and so much more unsound than it would have been but for this ambitious attempt to enable everyone to live better than their exertions warrant. The Labour Government leave their successors in the ugly predicament that the national account with the world can only be balanced by reducing consumption in this country : to achieve this will be good economics, but bad politics, enabling the Labour opposition to shout at once : “What did we tell you ? You let the Tories in, and already you are beginning to pay for it.”

Of the Conservative victory, it must be said that it has put the Conservative Party in office rather than in power. It is much that the Conservatives are in office ; that through the vast machine of the modern State the impetus from the top will be a different one, that those civil servants—and there are happily very many of them—who have no desire to extend the State at the expense of the nation, will feel that their outlook is understood and shared by their political chiefs. In a hundred ways the public can reasonably expect that many Ministries, notably that of Town and Country Planning, will be less rigid and bureaucratic, more tolerant and easygoing. These will not be inconsiderable benefits, and it is a great thing the Conservatives do by merely occupying high offices which would otherwise be held by men like Dr. Dalton, who can only see one part of the nation. The shadow of Socialism will continue to recede as the managers of the Labour Party plan how to persuade the marginal supporters they have lost.

The Labour Party has retired in good order, not routed or demoralized, leaving a great intractable problem, like a man enjoying himself and running up hotel bills abroad and then disappearing from the scene. But for Mr. Morgan Phillips’ obvious ill-temper on the day after the poll, the whole manœuvre might be judged the cleverest thing Mr. Attlee has done, leaving the other party to meet his bills.

The electorate is treated like Pavlov’s famous dogs, who learnt to associate simultaneous occurrences, the ringing of bells and the appearance of food. The electorate which associated bad experiences in the ’thirties with Conservative rule, and good times after the war with Labour rule, will easily associate any less good time with the return of Conservative rule again. The truth is that good and bad times in this country depend almost wholly on what is happening in the larger world, and the readiness of the world to buy what we can make and sell ; and that the chief things Governments here can do are to try to maintain conditions under which our goods are not too dear for the world to buy them, and to develop our own and our colonial agriculture, and to pursue a foreign policy that will, as far as our power and influence extend, maintain conditions of security for trade and investment. To prevent British goods costing too much, taxation, weighing today so heavily on all industry, entering into costs over and over again, ought to be diminished, and over a wide field more physical work ought to be done for the same money, not the same for more money. But here the

There was no Socialism of the old authentic kind in Mr. Attlee’s closing broadcast. Young people, or people with bad memories, would never guess from it what Mr. Attlee was professing and preaching before 1940, in close association with authentic Socialists like George Lansbury, looking for the complete supersession of private by public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. In a few days’ time there will be published, very opportunely, the life of George Lansbury by his son-in-law, Raymond Postgate, to refresh the public mind about what Socialism was, and is. Either Mr. Attlee has greatly changed, or he was being very disingenuous, concealing much that he believes in and intends, in order not to scare away the middle-class voter. He made no claim, such as he makes to his own followers, to have laid the foundation of a Socialist Commonwealth : he claimed merely by the judicious use of taxation, subsidies and controls, so to have modified the natural working of economic forces as to achieve a measure of greater equality. This is so generally acceptable that the Conservatives do not question it as a broad aim : and their election criticism was not that the Welfare State was wrong but that it was being erected wastefully and over-ambitiously, jerry-built on dangerous and insecure foundations.

The shadow of the trade deficit lies heavily across the path which otherwise Mr. Churchill could set out to follow, of