THE TABLET October 20th. 1956 VOL. 208. No 6074

: t:\bi r;r A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

OCTOBER 20th, 195 6

NINEPENCE

Next Steps Over Suez : The Larger Middle Eastern Issue

Change in Czechoslovakia : Impressions of a Recent Visit. By Wilfred Ryder

Belloc Goes to Westminster : The Salford Election Campaign. By Robert Speaight

AUTUMN BOOK SUPPLEMENT With reviews by D.W., J. J. Dwyer, Hugh Montgomery, Hubert Wellington, A. J. Brooker, llltud Evans, O.P., L. Johnston, A. H. N. Green-Armytage, A. Gregory Murray, O.S.B., Tudor Edwards,

Julian Holroyd, M. Bellasis, Gillian Blathwayt, George Forbes, O.S.B., Letitia Fairfield, Aubrey Noakes, W. J. Igoe, Robert Cardigan, Janet Bruce, B. C. L. Keelan and Frank Littler.

GRASPING AN OLD NETTLE

'T 'H E Conservative Government struck a bad patch this summer, but the political sky can change very quickly, and the obvious conclusion was drawn that there is after all plenty of time before there need be another election.

Mr. Duncan Sandys has shown a most commendable courage, as has the Cabinet which supports him, in tackling what successive generations of politicians have shied away from, the long continued and heavy injustice which legal rent restriction has brought with it. It has been a discrimination against a kind of property which ought not to be discriminated against but encouraged. For young people getting married it ought never to be a question of their having to commit themselves to buying a house because there are none to be rented and that is the only way they can get into one. A little later in life, when a man is settled in his occupation, very likely with growing children at school nearby, there is a great deal to be said for embarking on house purchase, acquiring a permanent home, and becoming the settled resident of a particular place. This is not so in the earlier years of a working life. It is quite markedly at variance with the often stressed need for this country to keep itself adaptable in the competitive modern world. When Ministers talk so rightly of the vast promise of the common European market, they are assuming that some towns and industries will expand and others contract: a progressive but uneven development, which will involve a great deal of moving house for individuals. It must be so if there is not to be a disastrous rigidity.

Decontrol will have to be gradual if it is to be equitable. It will be strongly attacked on the ground that in general landlords are richer than tenants, though under modern conditions this is often the opposite of the fact. Houses into which several wage-earners bring a large total sum pay a derisory rent to an impoverished landlord. Each increase in building and repairing costs has made the anomaly greater. Labour Party members will have plenty of scope for the kind of party rhetoric in which they are most at home; and they will need it, for it is quite certain that the public generally is instinctively and rightly alarmed at Labour’s own solution, that all rented houses should be council houses. The advantage is thought to be that a public authority need not charge an economic rent, and can afford repairs which can be paid for on the rates. But the great objection is that the landlord-tenant relationship can easily become a controversial one; and if there is only one set of landlords in the town, they will be in too strong a position to win all the disputes and make the tenants do just as the landlord fancies. As with the removal of the food subsidies, claims for increased wages to meet increased rents must be expected. But in proportion as experience brings it home to people that, in the end, wages are paid by the ultimate consumer, and that so much of what is made in this country is and must be consumed abroad, it will be realised that there is no solution simply by continually depreciating the value of money in this country, as measured by goods and services. Then the truth will be faced, and it is not a very painful truth if it is faced, that broadly speaking there must be a little less consumption (perhaps 5 per cent would do) and a little more production.

We hope the Conservative Party leaders have not leftLlandudno feeling too well pleased with themselves. The Conference was skilfully managed to be a demonstration of party unity, at the cost of party vitality, and the record of the proceedings made reading that was at once tame and incongruous when it was contrasted with the many critical constituency resolutions which only got as far as being printed. Far too high a proportion of those who go to the trouble and expense of travelling as far as Llandudno have political ambitions of their own which would not be furthered by drawing attention to oneself as a troublesome critic. The tendency is rather too much in the other direction, to hope to please by flattery of the leaders. Certainly there will be many constituencies who will be left with the feeling that the party leadership has much too thorough and efficient a control of the annual party congress, and that the party ought to make a bigger place in its arrangements for voting, both for individuals and for policies.

Only on the side issue of capital punishment was the Cabinet left in no sort of doubt how completely it has misjudged the feeling of its supporters, and not only of its supporters. One of the abolitionist Members of Parliament, Mr. Nigel Nicolson, who sits for Bournemouth, a constituency with an exceptionally high proportion of elderly ladies who are continuously alone from lighting up time, through