New Vienna

New Vienna London last week became the world's No. 1 Socialist city when it stepped into the shoes out of which Socialist Vienna was knocked last month by force of Fascist arms. The Labor Party swept up a comfortable majority of the seats in London's County Council, Conservative stronghold for the past 27 years, and took over the job of spending $600,000,000 in the next three years on education, firefighting, housing and poor relief for 4,500,000 people.

Little known is the County Council, elected by London householders to sit obscurely in the colonnaded pile of the County Hall across the Thames from the Embankment. Much better known is the Lord Mayor, but he lords it over only the half square mile known as The City. Snug in the knowledge that Labor had never yet won a city election, the Conservatives dozed through the Councilmen's campaign. They stirred uneasily last week when a Labor crowd in Camberwell Baths howled Conservative Newspaper Publisher Lord Beaverbrook off the platform and sang "The Red Flag." Next morning his Daily Express screamed: SHALL THE HOOLIGANS GOVERN LONDON? Meanwhile the leader of the London Labor Party, Herbert Morrison, was fighting the campaign of his life. When the votes were counted, Labor had swept whole boroughs from under the Tories, defeated such Tory front men as the Earl of Haddo and old Sir Cyril Cobb.

Astonished by their own victory, Labor leaders last week promised to match Vienna's shell-scarred apartment houses with 100,000 small houses, promised to clear London's slums, overhaul its hospitals and schools, "build a worthier and nobler city."

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