AT WESTMINSTER .
* * * * The new policy is designed to force the Socialist pace and confound the consolidators. It is worth noting that there has always been as much disputation in the Labour Party about the place of the Socialist revolution as about its content. Ramsay MacDonald was more than willing to leave it to the inevitability of gradualness. The Left Wing thereupon launched a counter- movement for "Socialism in our Time." To Baldwin's mellow humour it sounded more like a campaign for " Socialism in no Time." Today Mr. Morrison champions " Socialism by Stages," alternating with pauses for consolidation or, as he put it at the week-end for a food-obsessed age, for digestion. Mr. Bevan who, with his followers, repeats today the role of the " Socialism in No Time " rebels of the 'twenties, dismisses this as "stopping to pick flowers " on the road to the new Jerusalem when what is called for is forced marches.
* * * * While the political world awaits the new revelation, Mr. Bevan has given it something to talk about in his Cumnock speech. A cold shiver must have gone through some Ministers on hearing his decree that Labour Governments must become more pro- letarian in personnel ; that the movement must dispense with leaders from the " top drawer of society." They must have been urgently asking themselves and each other where you pass from the middle to the top drawer. Mr. Attlee is solid middle-class, though as a child he had (so his biographer relates) a governess who had been employed by Lord Randolph Churchill to " governess " Master Winston and had survived it. " Heaven's above: Mr. Attlee may have speculated. " surely that doesn't carry me into the top drawer ? " Mr. Dalton would naturally feel confident that he was not a topper. He can point to an infancy spent amid the squalors of Windsor Castle and to a struggle which has lifted him from Eton and King's to the Treasury bench. " There is nothing of your top-drawer chap about that," he must comfort himself. But some ministerial heads would clearly roll. Charity forbids us to particularise. * * * * Mr. Gaitskell, even if he could escape by the social test, would be condemned under the alternative indictment as an expert, an economist, a "one-dimensional figure." They, too, are for the dark. But when Mr. Bevan inveighs against experts it is just this one expert, Mr. Gaitskell, he has in mind. He laid his impious hands on false teeth and spectacles and has incurred the inveterate hostility of Mr. Bevan. Mr. Bevan may protest his respect for his late colleagues, but Mr. Morrison and Mr. Gaitskell know they can expect no quarter from him. There will be a pretty war in the autumn unless they capitulate to him entirely or go a long way to meet him. * * • * * The Commons have had a lot on their plate what with the committee stage of the Finance Bill completed (it ought to have been to a roll of drums) at 4 on Wednesday morning and ministerial statements on a variety of matters from Persia to resale
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