British Guiana on Paper
Wherever his sympathies lay, there were three things a conscientious MP might want to learn from Mr. Lyttelton. Was it necessary to suspend the constitution of British Guiana ? Was it necessary to send troops ? How is the new situation going to be better than the old ? But if he had any doubts on the last two of these matters, he may have them 'still. The Secretary of State, with everything on his side including the knowledge that he was right and a tolerably muted Opposition, has left the precise answers wrapped in white paper. He makes the indisputable case that something had to be done; the People's Progressive Party were under- mining the economy of British Guiana and were perverting a democratic constitution for totalitarian ends. It is, and must be, a binding obligation on an Imperial Power not merely- to balk Russia but to protect the interests of its subject peoples. This much was already clear, in generalities. What Mr. Lyttelton has failed, or declined,-to establish is the precise nature of the threat and the precise reason for the remedy employed. Though Dr. Jagan emerges as beyond all doubt a potential Guy Fawkes, his gunpowder and his plot are still missing. It is one thing to encourage a strike and incite a mob; but it may still be another to plan a Communist coup. On the last page of the White Paper there appears the statement that " Her Majesty's Government were reluctantly driven to the conclusion that the only course . . . " was the one they had taken. But the process of elimination and compulsion which drove HMG, and would help to drive the House of Commons and public opinion, down the last stage of that road to the despatch of the Superb, is still left to the imagina- tion. So also is the future of the decapitated colony; yet it is the future which must atone for the past. The removal of democratic rights is not a matter which can, or should, be left to the imagination and the Colonial Office should be the last to overrate this particular faculty.
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