The Appeasement Game
1" HUE are two ways by which we in this I country can support apartheid. One is to argue that apartheid is justified—though outside the ranks of the Mosleyites there are few who would care publicly to take this line, much as they might like to. The other is to concede that 'no parties and few individuals among us regard apartheid as anything less than an unjust and, in the long run, a distastrous attempt to deal with race relations': but then promptly to go on to assert that 'reckless and ill-thought-out attempts to mobilise public opinion outside the Union can only prove a disservice to a good cause.' The quotations are taken (need it he said?) from The Times.
The Times in such matters has shown an enviable consistency. Its editor, Geoffrey Dawson, before the war condemned anti-Semitism and militarism and other ugly symptoms of Fascism in Germany, while at the same time arguing that reckless and ill-thought-out attempts by Winston Churchill and others to mobilise public opinion against Hitler could only prove a disservice to a good cause. By rejecting or distorting the reports it received from Germany, by persisting in the belief that we could do business with Hitler if only the rest of the irresponsible press here would not give offence to him, The Times managed not only to deceive its own readers, but to bolster up Ministers in their placid belief that appeasement was a workable policy. And from this error, this moral cowardice, stemmed Munich and the SeCond World War.
The Times should have learned that lesson. It has not done so. On AfriCan affairs it is back at the old appeasement game, denouncing the Spectator, the Evening Standard and the Guardian for the vulgarity of our recent attacks on apar- theid. Anybody might think, reading The Times, that Mr. Verwoerd needs only to be taken by the arm, and told 'enough is enough,' for apartheid to disappear. The truth is that for the past decade
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—With apologies to Stanley Holloway. we in this country have watched the South African Government quietly establishing a Fascist State. We have seen the imposition of new rigid forms of segregation : we have seen the Treason Trials; we have seen the persecution of those who have spoken out courageously against what is being done. There may have been a time when the pained but oleaginous criticisms that are The Times stock-in-trade on African affairs carried a little weight in South Africa. Clearly they do not today. The need now is for something rather more forcible.
Half a century ago the editor of the Spectator. St. Loe Strachey (The Times used to complain about his forthrightness, too), argued that the first duty of the press was to be a watchdog for the public: and a watchdog, he pointed out, does not refrain from barking when he senses danger simply because some of the neighbours might object to the noise. What we have written about apartheid, and other related subjects, has indeed been vulgar; and will continue to be, if there is any prospect of its arousing the sleepers at Westminster and around Printing House Square. Vulgarity is in an old tradition of the press in Britain : the tradi- tion of Defoe and Swift, of Wilkes and Junius, of Thomas Barnes (the greatest of Times editors) and the Spectator's founder, Rintoul. There are occasions when events make it almost obligatory: and this is one of them.
In fairness to The Times, though, its African leader writer must be congratulated on his delightful choice of phrase to describe the Monckton Commission. The Commission's mem- bers, he wrote, 'have obviously been chosen with care.' They have indeed! In one of the best pieces Pendennis has done for a long time the Observer last Sunday exploded the Welensky-fostered myth that the Commission contains a balanced assort- ment of independent-minded liberals. In fact it appears to be as subtly packed a jury as ever delighted the heart of an Ellenhorough. It has one or two worthy members, but not one who could reasonably be called representatiVe of the anti- Federation cause.
The belief that this does not matter—that. the Labour Party ought to nominate three tame representatives to go out to Africa and come back to sign a minority report saying that they ought to have been allowed to examine the arguments against Federation, but weren't—is shared by the Sunday Times. The agreed and announced terms of reference, the Sunday Times argues, 'cannot he chopped and changed to suit the vagaries of British politics.' What is more to the point, surely, is that, no British Government ought to have made an under-the-counter bargain with Sir Roy Welensky to let him decide what the terms of reference should exclude. The Sunday Times assertion that 'the people most concerned, after all, are in Africa' is more sensible: but as the great majority of Africans are unable, owing to the nature of the terms of reference, to make their concern felt, it is hardly an argument in favour of supporting the Monckton Commission.
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