ALLIANCE IN ASIA

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27340, 4 May 1954, Page 11

ALLIANCE IN ASIA

OPPOSITION BY BEVANITES

(Rec. 7 pjn.) LONDON, May 2. “Britain should tell the United States that we are not prepared to send one soldier to Indo-China to support French imperialism,” Mr Aneurin Bevan told a May Day rally in Leeds. “It would have been much better if that had been said to the United States much earlier,” Mr Bevan said. “Many lives would have been saved, and the Geneva conference would have been much easier if America had not been allowed to believe that whatever she said, Britain would back.” Mr Bevan said that, unless the richer governments of the West were prepared to spend more on raising the living standards of backward peoples, “nothing will stop the revolutionists from spending more or stopping xis from reaching the edge of a third world war.” Mr Harold Wilson, a Bevanite supporter who took over Mr Bevan’s vacancy in the Labour “shadow” Cabinet, told a Manchester rally that Britain must not join or encourage the formation of an anti-Communist alliance in Asia. “I believe that at the moment the danger to a negotiated settlement in Asia is provided by a lunatic fringe in the American Senate —those who want to destroy Communist China, those who want to embark on a holy crusade against communism, and those who think that the interests of the people of Asia will be served by putting all the resources of modern warfare behind French imperialism in Indo-China.”