TEST OF POLICY AND PRACTICE

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 31, 6 August 1945, Page 4

TEST OF POLICY AND PRACTICE

Of the three so-called khaki General Elections which the twentieth-century House of Commons has known, the latest one is by far the most challenging, because of its tremendous swing to the Left. Joseph Chamberlain used the South African War, and David Lloyd George used World War I, to make election appeals in which the Leftward parties (Liberals in the first case, Labour and Liberals in the second) were pushed on one side. But this last wartime General Election has gone overwhelmingly against the Right and against the Governnient-in-posses-sion. Not only have the electors cleaned the slate in the matter of personnel. They have also produced a House of" Commons which (as a special correspondent of the "Observer" points out in this issue) has a personnel notably different in character from its predecessors, in so far as the House contains a great body of men who are almost as far from being the trade union secretary type as they are from being the company director or fat man type. Labour, in fact, largely reflects, in this House, liberal professions. Many of the Labour members look, so little like being drilled followers of a party whip that the "Observer" writer regards "the Labour majority" as being "a striking innovation," and he uses the word striking in its best sense. This utterance is hopeful. Appearances are good. Time will tell.' At no/time in history has it been more ■ important that the House of Commons majority should act not merely as party men but as individuals using individual judgment. The economic-social whirlpool produced (in Europe by two World Wars in rapid succession presents Britain with a new, in some ways terrifying, problem of how to live. If the question of how to live takes precedence—as surely it must—over the question of whether the Acts of this new Parliament are to be plain white, or to be coloured red, or to be coloured pink for betwixt and between, then the members of the Labour majority may have to do a great deal of original thinking, because no mere election platform programme can cover all that is needed to navigate the post-war whirlpool. First of all, is it conceded that Britain, in the next five years cannot live except by exports? If that is conceded, then in the reconstruction of the British steel industry the deciding factor must be not socialisation, but the ability of Britain to export. Socialisation of the coal-and-steel basis of Britain's industry, and of Britain's trade abroad and at home, would be warranted only by its certainty of economic success in the immediate future. Compared with such certainty of success—implying the necessary export capacity—mere doctrinaire arguments for socialisation would be of no avail. It is therefore to be expected of an intelligent Labour majority that the doctrinaire arguments for socialisation would have no immediate appeal, should it become plain that socialisation would not give Britain the assumed prerequisite of Britain's very existence—a sufficient and'sufficiently profitable export trade. If the will to live is stronger than the will to be red, or to be white, or to be pink, then the House of Commons majority, will be governed by an enlightened pragmatism more than by canned principles. Professor Laski must not merely prescribe nationalisation of the Bank of England in an extra-Parliamentary broadcast to America, but must justify that measure as a necessary step in providing bread and butter for Britain. Before the General Election landslide, the British steel industry, in self-reform spirit, propounded a scheme for reconstruction at a cost of £120,000,000 (selfraised) for the purpose of securing British exports in the market of Europe, where various countries are claiming German plant by way of reparations, and where an industrial readjustment on a Continental scale is pending, with a realignment of national interests in the great Ruhr and Saar industrial resources. If European countries were to secure all the industrial advantages of a new era, and if Britain were left with nothing but socialisation, even the Socialists would have secured a doubtful kind of victory; and that is one of the aspects of socialisation which political Labour will have to consider in its attitude to the steel industry's £120,000,000 plan of domestic reconstruction. Because Britain emerges from World War II with more serious problems of domestic and oversea trade than beset either Russia or America, the Labour majority created by a wartime General Election —unique of its kind —carries a tremendous responsibility that goes far beyond party political text-book doctrines. The feeding of forty-odd million people, in circumstances that appear to be unprecedented, is not an occasion for careless vivisectionist experimentation. In a very real sense, Britain has to discover her essential economic needs, and this may have to be done without deference to Labour philosophies either in Britain, in Australia, or in New Zealand. If the new House of Commons were composed of old privileged party hacks or of union officials trained on party machine lines, one might well have doubts concerning Britain's position in the new Europe. But the "Observer's" impression of the character of . the Labour majority at least raises the hope that peace-winning, like war-winning, will be attacked, in a practical way, not by ideologists, but by men of experience and common sense.