Onward II

Britain's Labor Government was stepping up the pace. While the crusty Bank of England was still on its way toward nationalization, Labor ministers quietly announced that:

P:The Government is going to nationalize all British cable and radio transmission.

P:The Government is going to nationalize British civil aviation.

Tory Lennox Boyd leaped up to protest in the House of Commons. But, at a sign from Winston Churchill, he sat down again. Churchill demanded, and received, the promise of a later debate on both proposals.

The cable and radio scheme, which involves absorption of the vast, monopolistic system of Cable & Wireless Ltd., should have surprised no one. The Dominions, which favor state-owned systems, had repeatedly urged Britain to adopt such a plan. But the proposal to nationalize civil aviation was new, and it was Labor's own baby.

Sabotage and Damns. In Churchill's coalition Cabinet, Labor had acquiesced in the "chosen-instrument" policy of Tory Lord Swinton, then Civil Aviation Minister. He had recommended that three privately owned, State-backed companies operate 1) North American, British Commonwealth and Far Eastern services, 2) domestic and European routes, 3) routes to and from South America. Now, in junking this scheme, Swinton's successor, Lord Winster, apparently acted against his own better judgment, bowed to the party's Civil Aviation Committee. Last week, in the House of Lords, outraged Lord Swinton said that the new scheme was "most disappointing and damning" to the future of British civil aviation, charged that his own practical scheme had been "sabotaged."

Many a Briton who had voted Labor wondered and worried. But Labor was undeterred. Buttressed by the people's renewed mandate in municipal elections (see above), it proceeded inflexibly on its course to state ownership. The Bank of England had lost its battle, the coal owners were reconciled to coming defeat. Labor was widening its socialist grip, tightening its socialist squeeze.

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