The New British Ruling Class

BRITISH LABOUR'S RISE TO POWER-- Carl F. Brand-- Stanford ($3.50). BEVIN AND Co.--Patricia Strauss--Putnam ($2.50).

Most Americans have heard that British labor, if it is not running Britain now, soon may do so again. Yet Americans have only a foggy idea about the Labor members of Britain's war Government or the British Labor Party of which they are the leaders. Last week these two books helped disperse the fog.

Carl Brand's book (the 17th publication of the Hoover Library on War, Revolution, and Peace) answers an important question: Why did British labor stand solidly behind its Government while French labor was riddled with disloyalty? His answer: British labor held firmly for reform and against revolution in a 20-year struggle with the Communists, which Author Brand documents in great detail.

Lenin early urged British Communists to affiliate with and disrupt the Labor Party. He wrote: "I want to support [Arthur] Henderson with my vote in the same way that a rope supports a hanged man." But all efforts of the Communists were beaten off by Labor's leadership, with the support of the rank & file. Last Communist effort came in 1937 when Laborite Sir Stafford Cripps (whose long-standing friendliness to Moscow was last week honored by Hitler himself as a casus belli} and a handful of followers tried to force the Labor Party into a Popular Front. In 1939 Cripps & Co. were expelled. Brand ends his book with this expulsion which, he believes, gave the Labor Party the unity and firmness to face the war effort.

One of Cripps's followers was Patricia Strauss. Her husband, G. R. Strauss, Labor M.P. for London's Cockney slum, North Lambeth, was expelled with Cripps.

On Labor's present Cabinet ministers--Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison, Clement Attlee, Arthur Greenwood, Hugh Daiton, who did the expelling --Wife Strauss wastes little comradely affection. Bevin and Co. has the refreshing frankness, some of the stylistic verve of a good family fight.

Authoress Strauss specializes in the cultivated titter, the swift verbal snickersnee.

Hers is one of the liveliest books yet written on labor. Result is a picture of the trampling herd as seen by a talented family black sheep--and two ironies that Authoress Strauss did not foresee. Irony No. 1: Her leftist criticisms will do much to reassure U.S. readers not dedicated to perpetuating social chaos that Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison, et al. are responsible leaders. Irony No. 2: From Author Strauss's book emerges an unusually crisp self-portrait of the radical intellectual mind--its arid cleverness, doctrinaire arrogance, urban provincialism, intolerant insistence on substituting ideas for life.

Penny-a-Week. Because she loves the proletariat sincerely, Mrs. Strauss writes excitingly about it. She gives an intimate picture of how the British Labor Party works at its roots--the local Party--among the people who pay a penny a week to belong.

"Each new member," says Authoress Strauss thriftily, "means another penny a week to be collected on Sunday mornings." But the canvassing is "arduous and disappointing work." When one "innocent canvasser" asked "a pregnant Cockney woman," "Are you for Labor?" she turned on him "scornfully," said: "This ain't no bloody mosquito bite!"

The real backbone of the Labor Party is the anonymous heroine who says to her neighbor: "Can't come to the pictures--I'm going to a meeting," or the hero who tells "his pals in the pub": "Shan't be seeing you for a week or so--we've got a membership drive on."

Joys and Glooms. Despite their willingness to forego cinema and saloon, "the members of the local Party are not angels. They are ordinary human beings who get tired and cross and irritable. Even working together for a common cause does not make people love one another." Mrs. Strauss's sketches of British Labor's leaders make this fact clear.

There is great mutual distrust between the Labor Party's middle-class politicians and official leaders, like Attlee and Greenwood, and Proletarians Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison. Another irritation is the distrust of both these factions for the leftists. Mrs. Strauss sees them all as so many Joys and Glooms. Among the Joys: Ellen Wilkinson, Sir Stafford Cripps ("affectionately" called "Christ and Carrots" Cripps because he is a vegetarian and "a deeply convinced Christian, although not a churchman"), Welsh Coal Miner M.P. Aneurin Bevan, John Strachey ("a big sleek black cat, with perfect manners and a feline ability to keep his object firmly in view"), Victor Gollancz (cofounder of Britain's Left Book Club), Professor Harold Laski.

As in life the Glooms outweigh the Joys. Among the Glooms:

Herbert Morrison, Minister of Home Security and Home Secretary. "Herbert is a Cockney." He was born in Lambeth, "son of a policeman and a housemaid." There he studied "Marx, Engels, Darwin and Vandervelde."

As leader of the London County Council he tore down "undoubtedly beautiful" but shaky Waterloo Bridge amid loud outcries, built a bridge that could be crossed. He also tore down slums, ran up housing projects, created a Green Belt around London. Morrison, says Author Strauss, would "cheerfully die at the barricades to defend the sewage system of London." Mrs. Strauss admits that Herbert's "dictatorial methods" are justified by results, but she cannot forgive him the remarks he made during the Popular Front fight:

The Communists make no secret of their purpose, and I really wish Sir Stafford, Mr. Strauss, and Professor Laski would be as clear about these things as the Communists are themselves."

Arthur Greenwood, Minister of Post-War Reconstruction, has "a disconcerting ability to make impassioned speeches of which it is afterwards difficult to remember the content." "He gesticulates a great deal with loose wrists, so that one watches his hands fascinated, certain they will fly off his arms. . . ." Says Authoress Strauss: "Of his claim to near-greatness there is no question. . . . But indulging his passion for speaking at public meetings has debauched his mind."

Clement Attlee, the Lord Privy Seal, is to Mrs. Strauss a "little man with inconspicuous features and a toothbrush moustache," who, to make matters worse, has "a suburban background . . . smokes a pipe, loves to potter in his garden and do odd jobs of carpentry." "At a recent Labor Conference he was taken ill on the first day, and for the rest of the week was absent--and no one missed him." Mrs. Strauss is somewhat shocked that while "Attlee appears to have a deep humility, it is not quite deep enough" to make him "resign from the leadership."

Dr. Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare. Once at a children's party, Queen Victoria, who was "tottering" around, patting children on the head, reached "the infant Dalton" and asked: "And whose little darling are you?" Lisped Hugh: "I'm Queen Victoria's little darling." He is not Author Strauss's little darling.

Although he is the author of the Labor Party's standard propaganda work, Practical Socialism for Britain, Author Strauss feels that labor does not trust him. She quotes a Labor M.P. who said of Dalton's "unusually pale eyes": "they have a habit of looking at you intently and conveying unfathomable depths of insincerity." Dalton is also "the most prominent smasher of independent movements in the Party. ... If he suppresses leaks in the blockade as rigorously as he has tried to exterminate all ... expression of minority opinion in the Labor movement, the blockade will be positive indeed."

Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labor and National Service. "For twenty years this bulky, gross-featured man has been trade union 'boss' of Britain. . . . He has a great record of trade union administration behind him, but it is of a peculiarly unrepresentative kind. . . . His tone is often dictatorial, revealing that he considers himself the master of his union rather than the servant of his union. ... He forgets he is perched on a pile of pennies.

... He has been called a power miser. He likes to gather all the power into his grasp, but then refuses to use it." He will "go to any length to avoid strikes. ... He has always preferred consultation to coercion." He has "unending patience in negotiations." Yet "he was one of the first among the leaders to recognize the threat of Fascism." Ernest Bevin does not like radical intellectuals. Neither, Author Strauss makes it clear, do radical intellectuals like Bevin. The fundamental difference between their doctrinaire attitude and that of "this fearsome-looking man, with the brusque voice and genius for brutal direct statement" is summed up in one incident.

In Parliament, Conservatives charged: "There has been undue tenderness to the employer. . . . The Minister of Labor has not been strong enough to use the powers he has received."

Answered Bevin: "There seems to be an assumption in the House that . . . my functions were not to get willing service but to make a nation of industrial slaves. Every decent manager knows that if ordering is overdone there is a reaction and I decided to interpret these orders in a reasonable manner."

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