SLIGHTLY METAPHYSICAL
A little over a year ago the Select Committee on Estimates scourged the Home Office for the incompetence, muddle, and lack of leadership it had displayed over Civil Defence prepara- tions. Yet the position today is no less lamentable, except for the change in Home Secretaries. Major Lloyd George's lips have been settled; at least his silence is preferable to the distribution of bromides favoured by his predecessor, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe. But the present Home Secretary's discretion has enabled Mr. Aneurin Bevan to give a South Norfolk audience what was ostensibly a sneak preview of the forthcoming White Paper. The White Paper will reveal (according to Mr. Bevan) that all possibility of effective Civil Defence may be abandoned. It will do nothing of the, kind. What it will do—we trust—is to insist upon the abandonment of current CD methods, which certainly are ineffective. Recent policy—if 'policy' it can be called—has been to fumble on with CD methods appropriate to 1940; and to shirk all the really difficult problems: shelters, evacuation, mobile defence. The prevailing attitude to CD was summed up by the Deputy Under-Secretary of State when he called the proposal to give it Crown Service status `glighfly metaphysical.' So long as that attitude continued, the prospects for CD were as bleak as Mr. Bevan paints them. But if, as has been suggested, the recently disbanded anti-aircraft regiments are diverted to form a mobile and efficient CD force, a decisive step will have been taken to convert metaphysics into reality
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