AT WESTMINSTER
THE House of Commons reassembled on Tuesday after a remarkably quiet recess. A sudden political peace descended with the adjournment at Whitsuntide—which was hardly what was to he expected after the way the two sides had been scalping each other in the House. Recesses are usually occasions for transferring controversy from Westminster to the platform, and Labour has been rather more accustomed than the Conservatives to devoting Whitsuntide to drubbing the enemy. Labour's restraint is involuntary. It is the measure of the confusion in which the party stands at the moment. It does not know where it is going and is afflicted with that sinking feeling that comes to a party that, believes itself to be out of favour with the electors. Now the urgent cry is for " new thinking." and that irresistibly conjures up visions of Fabian researchers with betowelled heads thinking up a new doctrine to practise on society, nationalisation having been a disappoint- ment.
* * * * Some hardy Left-Wingers, not waiting for the results of these cerebrations, are quite settled in their own minds that what is needed is more Socialism. A few are for the Syndicalist road. Mr. Morrison and his consolidators will need to be on their toes if they are to hold the ground won at Dorkidg. However, now they have got one of the acknowledged thinkers of the party to throw his shield over them. He happens, too, to be a Minister, Mr. Gordon-Walker, Secretary for Commonwealth Relations and a former Oxford don. He has written a philoso- phical work on Liberty and he finds in social democracy as now finally fulfilled in Great Britain in this year of grace the perfect middle term between anarchic individualism and tyrannical collectivism. At least, that is how the Socialist intelleCtuals of the Left are interpreting his treatise and they shrug him off as lost to the consolidators. Consolidation is being given a philosophic sanction.
* * * * Watching Mr. Attlee diligently doodling on his Order Paper on Tuesday one could not help wondering where the Leader of the Labour Party is expecting to be led as the result of the " new thinking." For the moment Mr. Bevan merely hovers on the skirts of Parliament. He is seen intermittently at the Bar, but only for a short space. He figured there on Tuesday for just so long as it took Mr. Morrison to make his statement on Persia and then he was off. Mr. Harold Wilson has adopted this " let's pop in and sec how the old firm is getting on " habit. He, too, had a brief appearance at the Bar on Tuesday. He gives the impression of being isolated. His resignation is more unaccountable than ever today.
* * * * Mr. Morrison's statement on Persia, with its renewed under- taking to negotiate a settlement embracing nationalisation, other things being satisfactory. had to be left where it was. There was no missing the sudden warmth with which Mr. Churchill responded to the show of firmness when Mr. Morrison assured Mr. Somerset de Chair that the Government would protect British lives. In the upper House Lord Salisbury missed this touch of firmness in the Government's attitude, but Lord Henderson, the Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, could not move outside the four corners of the identical statement. Lord Salisbury dreads even giving the appearance of weakness, but if he had heard Mr. Morrison he might have been reassured.
* * * * Mr. Morrison, as you might say, has not yet run himself in as Foreign Secretary. He has not acquired that firm control of the tongue so essential in a Foreign Secretary. Ernest Bevin might not always be master of his syntax, but he was invariably master of his tongue, and neither Salisbury nor Grey nor Curzon could have had a deeper sense of the importance of a Foreign
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