Collision at Coventry
The Coventry affair has now tumbled headlong into the deep end of farce. There was a time when the councillors of that city could be given the benefit of the doubt; when their action in disbanding the civil defence committee as, a waste of time and money could be interpreted as a telling, if melodramatic, protest against the inadequacies of the Government's plans for the protection of the population against atomic and hydrogen attack. But their aim was even more ambitious : they fancied that their action would strengthen the hands of ' international statesmen ' in their efforts to ' outlaw the bomb '; they naively supposed that it would somehow be a good thing if Stalingrad did likewise. All this has helped the Home Office to obscure the real issue—the Government's reluctance to accept the weighty and detailed criticism offered by the select committee some months ago. Adequate shelters in the built-up areas and a far greater emphasis upon the mobile columns : it is these alone which can guarantee the public a reasonable measure of Protection against the Worst horrors of modern war. From his written reply to a Parliamentary question last week it looks as if Sir David Maxwell Fyfe is slowly but surely coming round to this point of view himself. If he had jumped to it sooner those unedifying exchanges between his department and Coventry might have been avoided. The farce reached its Most farcical on Sunday when a coat-trailing Civil Defence exercise in Coventry came into collision with the councillors. Both demonstration and counter-demonstration were quite fatuous, and it will be a thousand pities if this childish exhibi- Lion is made the cause of party controversy at Westminster. There is only one thing that matters—to get more sense into civil defence.
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