CON. OR LAB.?
SIR,—You would perhaps be entitled to claim that your recent unveiled hostility to the Conservative Party has been' well earned by its leaders. More- over, your readers might rejoice that there was at least one publication with enough courage and independence to launch an attack from a position that was commonly regarded as within ranks, not generally sympathetic with Socialism.
Anyone who does not want another outburst of Socialism in this country, whatever he may think about 'the old familiar squalid faces,' as you call them, must have read your recent leading articles with extreme disquiet. For however just your castigation of this Government may have been, one cannot escape the fact that the most considerable practical result that could arise out of this sort of attack at the present time would be the substitution of a Socialist government at the coming general election. Many people like myself, even if you dis- posed them to believe that this would amount to a just retribution for our present leaders, feel that there is no reason why they and the country as a whole should also share in the five-year sentence. Your recent article- does..not give any confidence that a Socialist government would pursue colonial administration with any greater success than the Conservatives have had or that its leaders are par- ticularly fit to intervene at the present juncture in world affairs. But even if one could be convinced that our foreign policy would be safer in the hands of the Sooialist Party, one is still- fated with the question whether any advantage of this sort that might be expected could possibly be worth the price this country would have to pay in terms of taxation and loss of our gold and dollar balance, not to mention the whole programme of legislation to which we should be committed. If the Socialists win the next general election, any emotion Taper may detect in Mrs. Castle's voice will have a good deal more behind it than joy at the chance to improve our colonial administration.—Yours faithfully, ' [The object of the leading article was to express discontent with both sides of the House: for 'faces' it would perhaps have been better to substitute 'face' —the image of Parliament as a whole, not just of the party in power. For if Mr. Bevan's description is a just one, the Opposition must take its share of the blame; nor is there any reason to believe that it would have been much less blameworthy had it been in office-,—As we said in the editorial, Labour in power might not have made the same mistakes, but they might have made just as many.—Editor, Spectator.]
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