THE TABLET December 8th, 1956. VOL, 208. No. 6081.

THE TABLET

Published as a Newspaper

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

DECEMBER 8th. 1956

NINEPENCE

What is Wrong with the Conservative Party?: The Concentration of Power

Hungarian Opinion. : An Amateur Poll in Austria. By Stella Musulin

Irish Rural Life: The Work of Muintir na tire. By Colin Clark

Beati Mundo Corde : Meditations in Advent: II. By the Bishop of Aberdeen

CHRISTMAS BOOK SUPPLEMENT Reviews by D.W., J. J. Dwyer, Ruth Bethell, Sir John McEwen, A. O. J. Cockshut, Mgr. J. M. T. Barton, Michael Derrick, Rosemary Hughes, M. Bellasis, Anthony Bertram, B. C. L. Keelan and Renée Haynes,

with a selection of children’s books reviewed by Maryvonne Butcher and Janet Bruce

THE DEFENCE

rp H E Government now finds itself compelled to give a sharp upward twist to the cost of living. Although the present strain on sterling is due to the world’s diminished confidence both in our prospects and in the way our affairs are being managed at the top, this might be overcome, for the fall in the gold and dollar reserves by a twelfth is due to withdrawals, and not to a falling off in our exports. But what the Government is doing must gravely injure our ability to compete abroad when further burdens are placed on our industry. Transport costs enter into everything, and so does income tax.

How pressed the Government are, at the very outset of the crisis, is revealed in the Chancellor’s decision to ask the United States to waive a matter of £ 15 million due in interest —to- waive altogether, not to postpone. If this is the shape of the British economy, what is to be said of Ministers who six weeks ago judged that they could “ go it alone,” regardless of what the United States might think? And that is, in the final result, the great condemnation of Sir Anthony Eden and his Cabinet, that they should never have embarked on an independent policy against Russia if they were not satisfied that they could carry it through in the face of United States opposition. They had no possible grounds for thinking they could carry it through single-handed, and accordingly they should never have set out on a course which has proclaimed our weakness to all the world.

With the withdrawals we are back inside the only setting inside which Russian penetration of the Middle East can be opposed with some reasonable prospect of suscess; with and not without the United States, and through the United Nations, which means with Arab and Asian goodwill instead of Arab and Asian ill-will.

One of the main effects of Sir Anthony Eden’s policy has been greatly to enhance American prestige all over Asia. The new American internationalism, resting on deep foundations of the old anti-colonialism, has come into its own. Time magazine writes triumphantly of the Arabs cheering the Stars and Stripes :

“ The sense of the prestige of the U.S. rose as that of

OF STERLING

its rivals fell. The myth of the Moscow mass-man and Marxist benevolence lay buried in the rubble of Budapest which Pope Pius XII called the bloodstained proof of the ends to which Marxist atheism leads. The British and French who had sought to make policy by reviving nineteenth-century gunboat diplomacy had temporarily lost their credentials for world statesmanship. But in another sense the U.S. had earned the new regard by its own conduct . . . its insistence on justice, its desire for friendship, its hatred of aggression and brutality.” The United States has a great chance in Asia, where Formosa and Chiang Kai-shek are eclipsed by the Middle Eastern scene. When Mr. Nehru meets President Eisenhower, next week, there will be revived the warm feelings which Mr. Nehru used to know as he lectured up and down the States twenty and thirty years ago, as the Indian Washington. We should welcome everything that can broaden Mr. Nehru's Asian vision of the world.

Mr. Bandaranaike, of Ceylon, who has not got beyond George Washington's advice to keep out of “ entangling alliances,” is now revising the arrangement of a few months ago by which it was understood that if we gave up the naval bases we could hope to enjoy the facilities all the same. Now, alike in Ceylon and Libya, these military or naval treaty arrangements with Britain are not things the local Governments see themselves successfully justifying to the local opinion, against the propaganda that they are serving as the jackals of a failing white imperialism. The Americans now have the best chance of any white people of inducing a more adult state of mind in these countries, where what we have done has only put back the clock.

Mr. Dulles, having returned from his convalescence, has no more urgent question before him than to animate the United Nations, to strengthen the hands of its Secretary, to use the whole Middle Eastern crisis to enhance the executive efficiency, and groom it for the day when it can confront the Soviet Union with three-quarters of the world demanding under threat of real sanctions that certain particularly gross 'policies shall be abandoned.