THE TABLET February 16lb, 1957. VOL. 209. No. 6091

Published as a Newspaper

T H E TAB L ET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840 FEBRUARY 16th, 1957

NINEPENCE

Warning to Dulles: The British Precedent

The Portuguese Tradition: Scene of the Royal Visit. By Denis Brass Solution for Cyprus : A Base for NATO. By Eugene Hinterhoif

Currents in Syria : Communism and Anti-Zionism. A Report from Damascus

Relies of St. Cuthbert: The Riddle of their Resting Place. By David Knowles

Enthronement at Westminster: Archbishop Godfrey’s Address

Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess

I

NENNI IN

r PH E attraction of the candle for the moth is not more constant than the attraction that Signor Nenni has for the British Labour Party. Ever since 1945 they have looked after him with longing, sighing for him to break with Togliatti and lead a fine Socialist and secularist movement against the Christian Democrats. In this last week, two of the Labour Party’s leading secularists, Mr. Bevan and Mr. Crossman, have been back on the old beat. Signor Nenni is a power-hungry politician, who has backed the Communist horse steadily all through the post-war period, but who now realises that if he wants to rule Italy he is unlikely to do so with such accomplices. The events in Hungary have greatly impressed the Italian proletariat, for whom hitherto there had only been the one capitalist enemy inside Italy. Now they have seen something else, and it has upset them. So there have been people to tell Pietro Nenni that at last his real chance has come, to lead the Italian working class, who are Marxist and anti-clerical but do not like the harsh totalitarianism of Moscow which the Italian Communists are committed to white-washing. Let Nenni break away, it is argued, and many who voted for the Communists will vote for him and his Socialists when the election comes next year. The Christian Democrats will have been in power for ten years, and the country will want a change. To the representatives of the British Labour Party, no calves could be too fat to be laid before such a welcome prodigal; but Signor Saragat seems to have felt more like the elder brother in the parable, for he has been a good democratic Socialist all this time, and yet, because his party was smaller and he has sat in Christian Democrat Coalitions, there is to be no question of Nenni accepting his leadership.

At the Socialist Congress at Venice there was a large vote in favour of breaking with the Communists. But since then Signor Nenni has had a big reverse, emerging very much in the minority from the elections to the Central Committee of the party, where the pro-Communists have not been dislodged. Of 81 seals, the Nenni followers only obtained

REVERSE 27. The followers of the late Signor Morandi and of Signor Pattini are men who do not at all relish becoming, as they would, the chief targets of Communist propaganda, for deserting and misleading the working class and being untrue to their Marxian creed in the hope of reaching power with bourgeois support.

It must never be forgotten that Signor Nenni has always been a Menshevik or minority party man inside Italian Socialism. When the Third International was founded in 1919 the bulk of the Italian Socialist Party joined it, and thereby become overnight the Italian Communist Party. Italy is not a country where the Communists have had to start from small beginnings and build themselves up. They are the Socialist Party, a force in Italy for thirty years before 1919—the party in which Mussolini, among others, was nurtured. They are thus one of the most indigenous of Communist Parties, with a history very different from that of their French comrades. It is very doubtful whether Nenni with a change of costume and language will draw away many of the six millions who voted Communist in the last election. It is doubtful how many he will take of the two million who voted for him, or whether there really are the makings of a democratic Socialist Party, ready to learn from British Labour, whose natural affinity, if its members were not too confused by what anti-clerical continentals tell them to understand it, is with the left wing of the Christian Democrats. France and the United States

Important as will be the meeting between President Eisenhower and Mr. Macmillan, the same basic issues will come up in a sharper and more urgent form when M. Mollet goes to Washington. The Americans want to keep Britain as a leading and active member of NATO, to encourage a more united, and therefore a stronger, Europe; to get the British to understand and acquiesce in American Middle Eastern policy and appreciate the necessity for its being conducted in rather ostentatious detachment from