Westminster Commentary
IF there isn't going to be a spring election, how are we going to fill in the time between now and then? Or rather—for I take it that you and I will hardly be at a loss when it comes to thinking of something to do in the short summer evenings (I am thinking of taking up tennis, for instance; I just had to have a pair of trousers let out two and a half inches at the waist)—how are they going to fill in the time? The question is not entirely an idle one, either; already there are signs, not all attributable to the early arrival of the hay fever season, that they are going to be pretty hard-pressed before Der Tag dawns. As is usual in this situation, the Labour Party's nerve has snapped first; for evidence we need look no farther than their behaviour over The Road to Brighton Pier. This is, in any remotely objective analysis, a thunderingly dull piece of second-rate stuff, containing such astonishing revelations as the fact that Attlee didn't care very much for Morrison, and that Bevan has on occasion found himself at odds with his party colleagues. Yet instead of letting it die a quiet and respectable death on the shelves of the good Mr. Gaston, Mr. Morgan Phillips (presumably on the grounds that he is making such a merry old matzo-pudding of his own political future he might as well go the whole ox and do the same for that of his party) chooses to point a quavering finger at Heaven and cry 'Who's been eating my porridge?' So the names of reputable solicitors are bandied lightly about, and Counsel's opinion is sought frantically here and there, and the Editor of the Evening Standard tells the Circulation Department to put its cribbage-board down and watch out for shell-splinters.
Of course, if you have been keeping the engine racing for months only to be told that the race is cancelled, you can be forgiven a touch of acerbity, especially if you were never very sure that you were going to win the race anyway, and are getting less sure every minute. But the time has come for somebody in the Labour Party (and it is a task 1 should have thought Mr. Gaitskell pre-eminently fitted for) to take a long, hard look at the party's tendency to have a collective attack of the jim-jams on every possible occasion.
The sticky labels, Mr. Hurry's nonsensical steel- quiz, Mr. Butler's TV broadcast on the eve of the Norfolk by-election, The Road to Brighton Pier, now even Sir David Eccles (I will not, I think, be accused of being an instinctive defender of Sir David, but has anybody yet bothered to point out that although his remarks about the British press were obviously meant as a joke they were, broadly speaking, true?)—the list stretches right back to their grave mutterings about the Con- stitution (they're fine ones to talk about the Con- stitution, when their own Constitution to this day commits them to the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange!) at the time of. Mr. Macmillan's appointment. It is partly, of course, a lack of anything sufficiently dramatic (or indeed interesting) in their own policy that causes them to leap on to these spavined horses and ride off in all directions, but the impression it generates is one of a party lacking self- confidence, balance and judgment. And in these days, when the impression—true or false—which a party generates may be of crucial electoral im- portance, this is a rather more serious matter than it may once have been. This is not the time to empty my heart on the subject of the Labour Party's relations with the press (a little nearer conference time, I think), but I cannot be the only penciller who heard with a clammy feeling of dismay that the news editor of the Daily Herald, temporarily seconded to Transport House for the purpose of reconciling the faithful to the new- fangled method of disseminating information by printing it in newspapers and selling them all over the country for 21d. or so a time, was going home, ostensibly because the urgency had receded with the election, but in fact, I should think, because it is quite impossible to reconcile the faithful to any such thing.
Still, Transport House can stew in its own juice; on the other side of Abingdon Street our representatives stew in ours: The foreign affairs debate opened in the thinnest House I have seen for a long time. It was a Monday, of course, with no division at the end of it, and such circumstances invariably generate a large number of vital appointments in constituencies and elsewhere; moreover, the sun was shining, and Mr. Selwyn Lloyd was to open. Even so, the Labour Party had asked for the debate; it might have had the energy to turn up for it, and thus put to shame the Tories, who hadn't and didn't. There were huge stretches of green leather wherever one looked (they grew still huger before Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Bevan had finished); and although there was a good turn-out on the Opposition Front Bench this hardly excused the thin attendance on the back ones.
It is not, after all, as if I could believe that they had stayed away as a silent comment on the quality of the discussion. I am beginning to des- pair of whomever it is that writes the Foreign Secretary's speeches. Apart from the fact that he has now taken to saying 'seismological incident' when he means 'loud bang,' there were so many clichés in this one that he would have been a bold Whip who dared to reprimand the Tory Member for a constituency not a thousand miles from Salisbury Plain, who was not merely asleep but as far as I could judge from his demeanour actually snoring. (If it comes to that, he would be a bold Speaker who rebuked the Labour Member for a seat not a hundred miles from Sadler's Wells for whiling away the duller hours of the debate by chewing gum.) The real mystery is why the Labour Party asked for this debate. There is no area of dis- agreement between the Government and Opposi- tion in foreign policy sufficiently wide for any- thing useful to be generated in a debate on the subject, and when Mr. Bevan began by saying that he could not complain at the Foreign Secre- tary's failure to give the details of the Govern- ment's disarmament proposals, and added that he hoped that the Government and its supporters would not in their turn complain that the Opposi- tion had asked for the debate, I had half a mind to add a bit of green leather upstairs to the acres downstairs. The Labour Party will stop hydrogen- bomb tests if it gets into office, whether or not other countries do so; the present Government will not stop hydrogen-bomb tests unless other countries do so; Viscount Hinchingbrooke would regard it as a disaster if any Government stopped hydrogen-bomb tests with or without agreement by other countries. But there needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us that, let alone seven and a half hours of debate. It did not even need Mr. Grimond to point out that the Labour Party's policy of stopping tests is a typical product of defective judgment and political cowardice, for it is the bomb, not the 'tests, that will destroy the world, and if you are not willing to go naked into the conference chamber it cuts very little ice with the electorate, let alone the world at large, to go about boasting that you have loosened your tie and taken your cuff-links off.
So the debate achieved the logically difficult feat of petering out before it began (incidentally, those who have expressed surprise at the Foreign Secretary's golfing metaphor about 'taking a bisque'—some of whom, indeed, have been so naïve as to imagine that he must have said 'taking a risk'—have clearly forgotten that Hoylake con- tains one of the most famous golf courses in the .country; those long, weary, smoke-filled hours with the Urban District Council were not entirely wasted, you know), and never really recovered. And if it is like this in April, how are they going to get through the months till October? And suppose the election isn't until next spring? Would it be out of order for Members to bring their knitting into the House?
Only on Friday, of all unlikely days, was any- thing achieved, when Obscenity Bill finally crossed the last of the hurdles erected with so much misplaced ingenuity before him in the Commons, and saw his long-overdue measure on its way to the House of Lords. In view of the last-minute compromise Mr. Jenkins made with the Government (in which he dropped his insis- tence on the DPP's approval for any prosecution in return for the Government's dropping some of their objections to expert evidence) it now seems likely that such hurdles as may spring mushroom- like from the ground upstairs will not prove in- surmountable. It is not, I think, out of place to congratulate Mr. Jenkins on the tenacity and cunning with which he has hammered away over the long months, and indeed on the serious and important contribution he has made (Butlero volente) to sanity and decency. The area in which the private Member may make his influence felt shrinks yearly; all the more credit, then, to Mr. Jenkins for his prolonged and gallant refusal to be obscene but not heard.
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