Political Commentary
BY CHARL1S CURRAN SIR ANTHONY EDEN'S tumbril has turned into a band- This is not by any means the whole story; for while the Suez storm is ,subsiding the bills have yet to come in. But in political terms there is no doubt that the Government has won a victory. The News Chronicle Gallup Poll, published on Wednesday and taken last weekend, shows that for the first time in twelve months the Tory Party now holds the lead in Britain, and that the big shift in public opinion has occurred since the beginning of the month. The poll figures confirm the verdicts of politicians. They support the provisional estimate I reported la'St week—that mass opinion, in sharp contrast to the articulate critics, was in favour of a strong line with Egypt.
But now the bills are about to come in; and when they do public opinion may shift again. They are not complete by a long way, but they will be unpleasantly heavy. For one thing• petrol rationing by Christmas is regarded as certain.. For another, the Government will almost certainly need to seek relief from the dollar loan payments—£60 million or so—that fall due to Canada and the United States on December 31. The need for this application underlines the lasting moral of Suez : that it is stark necessity, in economics as well as diplomacy, for Britain to re-forge her links with the United States as fast as possible. The job will not be easy. Our decision to strike in Egypt without telling the United States was one of the gravest that any British Cabinet has made in a decade.
Neither the liabilities nor the questionings end here. The fact that Egypt has been able to block the Canal is an unexpected shock. Many critics fasten on this rather than our failure to occupy the whole Canal Zone before the cease-fire. Why was it that we moved so slowly? It is insisted that the reasons were military, not political; that the commanders were determined to incur as few casualties as possible. All the same, our position would be a good deal better than it is if we had reached the Canal before it was blocked. Clearance may take some months, with all the economic consequences of re-routing our oil.
Politically speaking, the answer to the question 'What have we got out of our intervention?' is : we have brought the United Nations into the Canal Zone; and we shall now discover whether those toothless gums are capable of producing canines —or whether Mr. Hammerskjiild's polyglot policemen are anything more than a stage army of the good. The bargainings now going on are far too complex for me to attempt any Conjecture. But they will be reinforced, so far as America is concerned, by the Soviet moves in the Middle East and by the growing anxiety about the Kremlin's intentions. (General Gruenther's warning about reprisals is the key utterance of this week, as Bulganin's rocket declaration was of last.) While Sir Anthony Eden has not conquered all the ques- tioners, he has clearly quelled most of them. He may have some trouble from the Suez wing of the Tory Party; but his authority now is greater by far than it has ever been before. If the party did not split under the pressures of the past fortnight, nothing is likely to rupture it now. The Government was unwilling to give the dignity of denials to last week's reports of a break in the Cabinet; but it is insisted now, as firmly as it was then, that they were baseless. The most that will be conceded about them is that there were differences of temperament, not of purpose. The attempts to isolate the Prime Minister seem to have been nothing more than one of Mr. Gaitskell's miscalculations. The belief that there was any substance in them disappeared last Tuesday night, when Mr. Butler made it plain that he was neither a challenger nor a rival to the Prime Minister. His speech deserves the careful attention that it is receiving in the Tory Party; for he was at pains to repudiate every one of the suggested possibilities.
In assessing the Prime Minister's position now, it is neces- sary to record the personal impression he has made by his behaviour under strain. There is real admiration for him. He has revealed a most impressive capacity to stand up under battering.
The crisis that is convulsing the British Communist Party has now reached fever-point. For it has spread, during the last few days, from the middle-class intellectuals into the trade union level—and thus becomes important. On this level the resignations are impressive, since they include Mr. John Horner, of the Fire Brigade Union, Mr. Leslie Cannon, of the Electrical Trades Union, and Mr. Alex Moffat, brother of the President of the Scottish miners. Next to go is expected to be Mr. Will Paynter, the South Wales miners' leader. The departure of Mr. Cannon is indeed significant: as the head of the ETU's lavishly-financed educational department, he has mass-produced the militants who have made that union the party's principal industrial bastion.
It was the Stalin post-mortem that started the rot among the residue of Communist intellectuals, but it is Hungary that looks like breaking the party on the factory level. Working- class embtion over Hungary has risen to the pitch where it is clearly dangerous for any trade union militant to withstand it.
There is no need to waste any words in characterising the attempt of the British Communist leaders to palliate Hungary. They have run true to form. Ever since it was founded in 1920 the party in this country—unlike Communist parties elsewhere —has been led by substantially the same group of men. Their pliant servility to the Moscow line has been unique in the world. Everywhere else, when the line has changed, the leaders have changed too. But the British Communist' leaders have accepted everything, swallowed everything, justified every- thing, from the Nazi Pact to the Budapest massacres. Now they are faced not so much by revolt from below as by a mass exodus. The study in scarlet presented by the correspondence columns of the Daily Worker during the last few weeks is evidence enough of that. On the intellectual level, the party is hopelessly discredited.•' But it is only now that its industrial grip has started to weaken. The process of disintegration may soon bring British Com- munism to the point where only two groups will remain : the salaried professionals for whom the party is a livelihood, and the psychopaths for whom it is a means of resolving their personal conflicts and expressing their resentments in a socially acceptable form. The two overlap.
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