Mr. Shinwell's Private War
There is one grain of sense in the campaign which Mr. Emanuel Shinwell is-conducting for the reduction of the period ' of conscription. Mr. Shinwell is right in saying that, since production accounts for only one-third of the rearmament programme, while two-thirds go tcr pay, house,.feed and trans- port the forces, the Bevanites are mistaken to concentrate only on reductions on the production side. The point is academic, since no heavy reduction is sought either by the Government or (according to the Morecambe resolution) by the Labour Party as a whole. • But within the limited and unreal field which he has chosen for his battle-ground Mr. Shinwell is right. Nobody knows just what sort of satisfaction he gets out of that. For the one thing that is quite certain is that, we must keep faith with N.A.T.O. by providing our require41 quota of troops. The Minister of Defence has said, that there is not the slightest chance, that -the period of military service could or should be reduced in the foreseeable future. Mr. Shinwell stands no chance whatever of getting the independent and non-military enquiry into conscription which he is now asking–for. Even if he were to succeed in converting the Bevanites to his point of view, it is most unlikely that they would swallow Mr. Shinwell—their old enemy—as well as his policy. And in any case Mr. Bevan, in his mysterious way, is saying very little about his anti-rearmament policy since that policy was rejected at Morecambe. Perhaps it is simply that Mr. Shinwell loves a fight. He always did. It is a pity. For he never did better than in the fleeting period when, as Minister of Defence, he seemed to have grasped at last that statesmanship and a love of fighting are not the same thing.
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