— Portrait of the Week— AT VEREENIGING ('place of reconciliation')
Afri- cans demonstrated against the pass laws and were mown down by South African police armed with sub-machine guns, sten guns and rifles. London undergraduates demonstrated in Trafal- gar Square outside South Africa House which is not, fortunately for the students, equipped with sub-machine guns, sten guns or rifles. The United States Government officially regretted the loss of life and deplored the violence: the British Gov- ernment did not. What the Times deplored was the smugness, thick as the fat on a turtle,' and the excessively narrow view' of Her Majesty's Opposition, which had tried to persuade the Gov- ernment to speak out against the massacre.
SOVIET DELEGATES at Geneva went some way towarck meeting the Western plan for the suspen- sion of nuclear tests, thus embarrassing the Ameri- can delegates. Mr. Herter said that he doubted Whether the Berlin problem would be solved at the summit, and the Soviet Ambassador in Bonn said that the problem wasn't urgent. Talks on the law of the sea at Geneva were becalmed. President de Gaulle rejected a demand by French deputies for an extraordinary session of the Assembly, and welcomed Mr. Khrushchev to Paris in the spring. A Chinese court sentenced an elderly American Roman Catholic bishop to gaol for twenty years, and in Yugoslavia priests were popped into the cooler for technical smuggling offences, though a bishop was let off lightly. In Ceylon's general election the Right and the Left totalitarian parties did badly, most votes going to moderates in the middle. The British Army and Air Force went through elaborate exercises in Libya, where we have treaty bases that we were not permitted by the Libyans to use during the Suez campaign.
THE CONSERVATIVES held Harrow and took Brig- house oft Labour. Conservative back-benchers re- belled against the Government over the control of public money and over lending it to the steel industry. The Central Council of the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations called for more flogging; the News Chronicle's Gallup Poll made it look at first sight as though humaner people also demanded it; Mr. Butler Promised reforms in the treatment of young delin- quents, and it was discovered that a fourteen- year-old girl truant was incarcerated in Holloway With adult prostitutes and murderers, and that eleven boys of sixteen and under were in Worm- wood Scrubs. Three more babies died in an oil- heater fire : the coroner described the outcry against this type of stove as 'a witch hunt: The Electrical Trades Union were told by the TUC to take legal action against their detractors, or accept an independent inquiry.
THE GOVERNMENT WELCOMED the Crowther report Ott education, and the Opposition asked them to get on with implementing it. Mr. Cousins and his Transport and General Workers' Union looked askance at Mr. Gaitskell's compromise on Clause 4. Fifty-one unofficial strikers at a BMC factory PIA more than 6,000 fellow-workers out of a job. The Cunard line of ships bought the Eagle line of aeroplanes. Thousands of motorists put their cars on the road for the first time this year in the spring sunshine, and hundreds of cars put their motorists on the road. Photographs of the Queen's baby, the news that it is to be called Andrew; revelations as to the colour of its hair and eyes; the announcement that a Mr. Fry is to be Mr. Armstrong-Jones's best man and that no less a dignitary than Mr. Dimbleby (assisted, no doubt, U)' assorted clerics) is to solemnise Princess Mar- garet's marriage—all kept the loyal fervour of us Peasants at boiling point.
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