TORIES IN CONFERENCE
HE Conservative Party opened its pre-election conferenw in the Empress Hall, Earl's Court, on Wednesday, and the proceedings of the first day must surely have set the tone for the second and third. The excitement was over as soon as the conference opened. The party authorities had, quite properly, made the most in advance of the attendance—some 4,500 delegates, the largest total in the history of this party or any other in this country. The public knew that the party had been obliged to take the Empress Hall so that everyone could be accommodated under one roof. The ternis of an emergency resolution on the economic situation were drafted and published just before the conference opened, and the public knew, too, that all the motions sent in to party headquarters on economic affairs, and printed in the agenda, were to be abandoned in favour of the official emergency resolution. But, all this having been done, the delegates met the platform on Wednesday morning in full recognition that the future was both uncertain and grim. This, of course, is common knowledge among all political parties. Final conferences before an election to be held in conditions now prevailing must be sobering. It is too late to change the course mapped out for the party during the past four years. It is too late to talk of any subject free of the discipline of possible office.
The Conservatives, on their first day, were full of spirit to meet the challenging time. They were eager, almost, to do heroic deeds, to impose the most severe economies upon the country, including themselves. Most of the speakers on the emergency resolution seemed to want (and one delegate said bluntly what he wanted) a list of the economies that would be necessary to restore "confidence in the pound "—that was the general way of defining the task ahead. Mr. Anthony Eden, who had the duty of making the official reply to the debate, would not give such a list. Perhaps no politician could have done so in the circumstances. It would have given too much away to the other side and have limited the field of manoeuvre. But Mr. Eden pleased the conference by his damaging attack on the failure of the Government to take any effective action in the economic field since devaluation was announced ; "the negation of statesmanship," he called it.
It is of course most dangerous to form any hard opinion about the strength or health of a party from observation of one day of the conference, but those who have attended successive Con- servative Party conferences since 1945 cannot have failed to note the growing assertion of what might be called the new proletarian element in the party. Sir David Maxwell Fyfe claims there are three million Conservative trade unionists ; the number of speakers at successive conferences who must represent modest homes and ordinary incomes is increasing, and these people take the party's declarations at their face value. Cynics insist that the Conservative Party is still ruled, and will always be ruled, by blood and wealth, and that the constant socialising of Conservative policy means nothing. There may be some Conservatives who hope that this may be so, but the party leaders, who have encouraged the recruit- ment of the party from below, must know—the evidence is before them year by year—that they must either keep faith with their simple, trusting followers, or weaken the party as a political force.
This sense of the solemnity of contracts is always conveyed by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe when he speaks, and it was particularly evident on Wednesday when he replied to a debate on the trade unions and industrial relations. His integrity is beyond question. His grasp of the facts of a situation is sure, and he does not shy away from awkward problems. His theme was the relation of the trade union movement to a Conservative Government. He noted that the principle of free combination as originally understood is disappearing under nationalisation. He promised that the Con-. servatives would seek a round-table conference with the unions to examine all problems, and he repudiated the idea that any adult- minded trade unionist would sabotage a Conservative Government. J. F. B.
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