THE PREMIER'S CRITICS
THE return of a Liberal to Parliament—for a seat that was Liberal before, but by an increased majority—is an event sufficiently rare to provoke certain reflections. No one can justly attribute a decisive significance to the verdict of the electors of North-East Cornwall, but they might, as many prophets were convinced that they would, have chosen to in- crease the already inflated Government majority in the House of Commons and reduce still further the exig- uous band of Opposition Liberals in the Chamber. That would have been profoundly unfortunate, for what is needed for the welfare of Parliament today is not an overwhelming and subservient majority behind the Government, but the growth of a competent, instructed and responsible Opposition—the adjectives are impor- tant and must be further considered—capable in case of necessity of forming an alternative Government. Those conditions are patently non-existent today. There is not the smallest reason to believe that the Labour Party could come near winning a General Election, or that if it did it could form an administration in which the country would have confidence. And respectable though the general average of ability of the score of Opposition Liberals is, few of them could be rated at normal Cabinet standard. In other words, the material for an effective Opposition is lacking, and Parliament is the worse for it.
This judgement may no doubt be contested. These, it will be said justly, are not normal times; the country is being organised on a war-basis ; consideration for national unity must far transcend consideration for party advantage ; nothing could be more fatal than to suggest that the Cabinet by which foreign policy is being conducted is denied the confidence of a large part of the nation ; there must, in fact, in an emergency, be some self-imposed restraint on polemics which, in other circumstances, would be right and salutary. There is clearly much to be said for that contention. Mr. J. A. Spender expressed it temperately and cogently last week in a letter to The Times, to which that journal's singular handling of the correspondence arising from it has given a certain notoriety. Sir Archibald Sinclair, speaking in the course of the North- East Cornwall election campaign, had delivered an attack of some violence on the Prime Minister, declar- ing that Munich had weakened the forces of law and order in Europe, strengthened those of aggression and undermined belief in the firmness of British purpose, and adding that the greatest single obstacle to national unity at the present time was the personality of Mr. Chamberlain and the distrust his policy had inspired. That pronouncement Mr. Spender, the quality of whose Liberalism should be beyond challenge or ques- tion if any living man's is, felt constrained to condemn. " All parties," he wrote, " have declared their agree- ment on the next steps in foreign policy and their desire to co-operate in any measures that may be necessary to convince the world that we are unanimous and that our Government is in earnest. Sir Archibald's contri- bution to this end is apparently to assail the Prime Minister in unmeasured terms and hold him up to odium as an incompetent man of infirm purpose."
Into the merits of this particular controversy it is unnecessary to enter here. But its initiation at least serves the purpose of raising an issue of capital importance—the limits to be observed by critics of the Government in a time of emergency. What those limits are is a question that can only be answered in terms of general principles, not of clear-cut rules. That criti- cism of the Government should be suppressed, in Press or Parliament, as it has long been suppressed in Ger- many, would be an unmitigated evil in its effect not only on democracy but also on efficiency. No one but an inconvertible authoritarian could dream of advocating anything of the kind. What can and must be asked of critics of the Government at such a time as this is that their criticisms should be scrupulously fair, uninfluenced by any thought of party advantage, constructive in purpose and governed if need be by some consideration of the use or misuse likely to be made of them abroad. If those criteria are observed the Government can make no complaint of attacks on it. But it is well to appre- ciate what they mean in existing circumstances. Let it be conceded that in its handling of the Manchurian affair the late Government, and in its handling of the Abyssinian affair the present Government, sowed seeds from which a disastrous harvest must spring in both Europe and Asia. Let it be agreed that if the Govern- ment were blindly pursuing the Manchurian and Abyssinian policy today there would be no alternative to opposing, and if possible replacing, it. What is neither tolerable nor just is that when the Government has changed its policy in precisely the direction the critics desired they should maintain their attacks on it unabated.
That Government policy has changed is incontestable. The present phase in international affairs dates from the Munich meeting. The attitude the Prime Minister was compelled—largely through the defencelessness of this country and France—to adopt at Munich was deplor- able, but four men out of every five in this country admitted that it was inevitable. It does not lie with those who acquiesced, with whatever bitterness and humiliation, in the Munich policy then to attack the Prime Minister in respect of it now. The Munich policy itself, moreover, belongs to the past. The turning-point was the seizure of what was left of Czecho-Slovakia by Herr Hitler last March. No one who listened to the speech Mr. Chamberlain delivered in Birmingham immediately after that crime had been committed could doubt that his disillusion was complete and his resolve to adopt other methods in his relations with Germany final. There have followed the successful intensification of rearmament in this country, the guarantees to Poland, Greece and Rumania, unequivocal declarations on Danzig, and the negotiations with Russia, the protraction of which cannot, so far as the published facts justify any conclusion on the subject, be laid at the door of Whitehall. A return has, in fact, been made, under the compulsion of circumstance, to a system of collective security which ought never to have been abandoned. But while the destructive critic will harp on its abandonment, the constructive critic will devote himself, much more usefully, to insisting that the return to it be genuine and permanent. So far as the Govern- ment is pursuing the course its critics have always advocated, it is entitled to their general support, subject to full freedom of criticism on detail. That, it is to be observed, is the attitude both Mr. Churchill and Mr. Eden have consistently adopted since March.
There are many questions on which opinion may legitimately differ—whether Mr. Chamberlain is the only conceivable Prime Minister, what the possible alternatives are, whether it would be to the national advantage to broaden the basis of the Cabinet. There are a dozen points in the fields of national and inter- national policy regarding which criticism is both proper and salutary—A.R.P., the restriction of armaments profits, food-storage, the Ministry of Supply, a Ministry of Information—but none of these call for a concentra- tion of personal attack on the Premier or any other individual Minister. This is a peculiarly critical moment, at which the maintenance of national unity and national resolve in this country may be the decisive factor in Europe. Never was it more dangerous to encourage a belief in the Dictators' minds that the head of the Government in Great Britain is " an incompetent man of infirm purpose," whom they can always bend to their desires. Legitimate criticism need not be pressed to that point.
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