Toward the New Society

The oldest, sanest order in the Western world was changing. Britons who had voted for the change realized that it was upon them when last week they pondered a pub-shaking fact: they had a Five-Year Plan.

In the new House of Commons, the new Labor Government proposed a five-year extension of the tight wartime controls on labor, prices, transport, building. Tories Gad-sirred that such stuff would leave Parliament "nothing more than a Reichstag." At home recovering from a sore throat, Winston Churchill croaked of "drastic departures from our . . . way of life. . . ." The bright beacon on Big Ben's tower burned late that night, telling home-going Britons that their Parliament was still at work. Members stoked themselves with snacks and drinks. After midnight came the inevitable Labor victory: 306 votes to 183.

Payment Deferred. Health Minister Aneurin Bevan, turbulent rebel of coalition days, briskly unveiled his plans to rehouse Britain. His country had lost half a million homes in the war and must have five million new ones in the next decade. He is requisitioning land for building, said Bevan, and will worry about payments to landowners later. Other points: it will be low-cost housing; local authorities will erect it; materials will be scheduled just like bomber parts; the homeless will be billeted in other people's spare rooms as long as necessary. And by 1950 the problem should be licked. Britons hoped that Bevan would get along with it faster than he has to date.

Sir Stafford Cripps blueprinted another phase of Labor's plan. Tripartite committees, with management, labor and public members, will shape the policies by which British industries will live in home and world markets. Already, the Board of Trade president crowed, such groups are getting to work in the boot and shoe, hosiery, furniture, pottery and cotton industries.

Britons seemed willing to accept the regimentation that introduced their planned future. But if they were to keep their freedom out on loan, they would want results, and before 1950. In a speech at Musselburgh, Scotland, Clement Attlee summed up his Party's aims: "To build a new society ... of peace, freedom and social justice." If it built all that, Labor might well catapult old, tired Britain into a new and thrilling place in the sun. If it failed, Britain would catapult Labor.

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