Up Labor!

The Battle of Britain has taught British politicians that total war, waged against the people, their homes and children, provides political opportunities beyond the scope of the best party machine, creates issues more appealing than the most colorful personality.

This truth was uppermost in the minds of 650 representatives of 5,000,000 British organized workers when they gathered last week in Southport's hoary Town Hall for the annual conference of the Trades Union Congress (T. U. C.). Keynote speaker was horny-handed, dynamic Ernest Bevin, who since 1910 has slugged and plugged for organized labor, is now Minister of Labor. "The British labor movement came to the rescue of this nation and the Commonwealth at the blackest hour of its history," he shouted, assailing Toryism with fighting words born of confidence in the growing power of Labor. The reconstruction of the world, he declared, must come about "through harnessing the rising masses of Labor, to whom the future really belongs." "Pink-tea diplomats" and "court-circular society" he dismissed as adjuncts of an already defunct age, while stridently demanding equality of opportunity in tomorrow's Britain. "If a boy from a secondary school can save us in a Spitfire," he declared, "the same brain can be turned to produce a new world."

These ideas, unthinkable in the Baldwin-Chamberlain era, sounded reasonable and good to most Britons last week. Irritation in Conservative circles over what was termed Labor's exploitation of the national crisis to revive social issues was submerged under a wave of popular endorsement. Never before had a T. U. C. conference attracted such wide attention, achieved such prominence in the newspapers. Wrote London's Times: "Here again was the recognition of relations of cooperation for great and common ends." Editorialized London's Express: "All skeins of diplomacy, all military feats, panics, rumors, sorties and full assaults recede into their proper perspective behind the one dominant figure of this war. This figure is the British workingman, his arms bared, his muscles flexed, and the sweat upon his brow."

In the words of Bevin, Britons of all ranks and classes found sentiments expressed which, perhaps to their own surprise, they shared. A year of war hardship, in which rich and poor were sardined in the same shelters, dodged the same bombs, had acted as a strong leveling influence. Through his dive bombers and Messerschmitts Adolf Hitler had unintentionally brought about the same Gleichschaltung in Britain that years of repression and persecution had achieved in Germany. The British masses, plus a very large and rapidly increasing proportion of the middle and upper classes, were convinced that they did not want the Britain of the future to be governed by the big-business-aristocratic school of politicians. They were turning with growing confidence to people like Ernest Bevin, mentioned as "the Joshua who will take over if and when better times come."

Advancing steadily in power, Labor could also point to a growing record of achievement. Old-age pensions had been increased from ten shillings to one pound weekly. The weekly allowance to wives and families of men in the armed forces had been raised one shilling for wives, one shilling sixpence for the first two children. The dole had been increased from 26 to 30 shillings for man & wife, from 35 to 41 shillings threepence for a family of five. A new wage scale and more liberal workmen's compensation rates had been obtained. Labor also took credit for the Emergency Powers Bill granting the Government power to conscript property.

Chief concern of Labor was that thus far its achievements were patchwork, that except for Bevin, its leaders were not strong enough to deal with the firmly entrenched Conservative Party. With parliamentary representation frozen for the duration at 165 Laborites to 370 Conservatives, Laborites feared that the Tories were up to their centuries-old tactics of absorbing the Opposition with the end in view of crushing it.

No longer looking upon social revolution as an unspeakable calamity, Britons of all classes earnestly desired to see Labor get on with its task, were becoming impatient over its tardiness in getting started. "If we cannot hope to defeat Fascism with bulldog negations," warned the New Statesman and Nation, "we cannot hope either to maintain the will to do so among the ordinary people of this country by a vague social policy that does not disguise an inability to see beyond the status quo. . . . Labor in office has strengthened the war effort and pledged itself with Mr. Churchill to let no vested interest hamper efficiency. But there, in general, it has stopped. What is meant by 'equality of sacrifice?' If the people of England are to believe in a new social order after the war, the beginning must be made here and now while the war necessitates change. . . . No one at home or abroad will believe . . . talk about a 'New Social Order' . . . unless even in the heat and opportunity of this battle [there are] tangible social changes. . . ."

Arriving in the U. S. last week, Novelist Somerset Maugham predicted a vastly different post-war Britain. "I have a feeling," he said, "that in the England of the future evening dress will be less important than it has been in the past. I think it will be a more democratic England. I think there will be no more rich people and I hope there will be no more poor people."

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