AT WESTMINSTER T HE Conservatives might have contrived a better motion
for the raw materials debate, but that could not excuse the antics of the Government and the Labour Party toward it. Making the wonderful discovery that it was designed to split the Government's forces, Labour speakers. from Mr.
Strauss onwards, shuddered at the impious aim. The Minister of Supply was as one who could not bring himself to believe that any Opposition could sink so low as to wish to injure a Labour Government. The effect on Mr. Bevan was more remarkable still. The Conservative motion had stultified the debate, had demeaned it. It was no longer an affair to which a statesman of his calibre could seriously devote himself. He would vouchsafe the House a couple of minutes of his wisdom and reserve the abundance of his pearls for a future occasion when the matter w4s treated seriously. Mr. Shinwell could not be as lofty as this, but he tried to work up some indignation on the theme. Candour, however, nearly wrecked him, and one liked him for it. In an impulsive moment he confessed there had been times when Labour had been guilty of trying to split the Conservatives. Of course, Mr. Bevan, Mr. Strauss and the rest had been talking moonshine and they knew it. Imagine Mr. Bevan leading the Opposition against the Conservatives. Would he be " all conscience and a tender heart " ; so benevolent that the Opposition as we have known it would pass out of the Constitution and history ? Not quite.
* * * * The moonshine had its uses. The fiction enabled both the Government and the rebels to rush into an embrace as men uniting against one of the most heinous plots ever devised against a Government. compared with which differences of opinion were trifles. Mr. Eden had set the debate on a wide course, to the discomfiture of the Labour party. He wisely made little of the Conservative motion. He preferred to call attention to some of the serious implications of Mr. Bevan's resignation speech not only for rearmament but for foreign policy. In that speech Mr. Bevan seemed to be turning away from the Government's foreign policy as well as its rearmament programme. He appeared to be reverting to the old " Keep Left" idea of a " third force," Mr. Eden wanted this cleared up and he wanted to know if the Government still stood firm by the Atlantic Pact.
Mr. Bevan could not have addressed the House long without stating his position. He did well to keep out of it. Nobody answered Mr. Eden's demands. Mr. Strauss had not come prepared for this sort of debate and Mt. Shinwell concentrated on defence. Still, all credit to the Minister of Defence for one thing. Without naming Mr. Bevan, he told him that any man who tried to persuade the people that we could rearm without some fall in the standard of living was deceiving them.
* * * * Governments are never bands of brothers, but they do usually manage to present the outward spectacle of amity to the world. Even this Government in the last Parliament did pretty well in concealing the incompatibilities and feuds between Ministers that most people at Westminster knew to exist. The present crisis has drawn the veil from them with a vengeance. The public will have discovered from some speeches from the Bevanite clan what a Satanic figure Mr. Herbert Morrison is. Mr. McGovern's scurrilous sketch of Mr. Morrison's character exceeds anything permissible in a nominal follower of the Foreign Secretary. Mr. Eden amusingly found in it the portrait of a Borgia. Mr. Morrison, the Grand Consolidator of Shanklin, has long been -anathema to the Left ; indeed, long before Shanklin ; but now the stout defender of guns before butter, if ever the choice has to be made, excites their malice more than ever. Mr. Attlee, whose responsibility for the present policy is every bit as great as Mr. Morrison's, escapes their vicious barbs. A divinity doth hedge the party's greatest asset. H. B.
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